Seeing black

The original plan for today was to go over to Crosby to see if the black terns were still on Seaforth Nature Reserve. Then I noticed that a dozen were reported from Pennington Flash this morning. As this is £16.50 cheaper, the weather looked dodgy and the journey doesn't involve Northern trains I decided to go there instead. (There are excellent birdwatching reasons for visiting Crosby when the weather's not lousy.)

I arrived at lunchtime just in time for the heavens to open. The good thing about the hissing rain is that it persuaded the black terns not to fly off. I counted thirteen, another guy reckoned twenty and I gave up when the light got so bad I wasn't sure if I was watching swifts or swallows hawking over the flash.

Distant black terns in lousy light

As a consolation prize a nice common sandpiper landed and sheltered in front of the Horrocks Hide.

Common sandpiper

Later on in the afternoon the weather cleared up and lucky tea time visitors could see thirteen black terns in bright sunshine.

The North Wirral: Leasowe to Meols

Sketch map: Meols, Moreton and Leasowe
(click to enlarge)

This stretch of the Wirral coast is well-served by public transport: the trains are every quarter of an hour and there are plenty of buses from elsewhere in Merseyside. It's well worth the visit for the walks just by themselves. From a birding perspective the mixture of grassy coastline, horse paddocks, little bits of thin woodland and a reed-fringed pond provides a variety of habitats to explore, particularly during Spring and Autumn when this area can be very busy with passage migrants.

Depending on what else I've got planned for the day I'll usually start from Leasowe Station or Moreton Station. From Leasowe Station you can join the Wirral Circular Trail about fifty yards down the road, just after the Premier Foods factory. From Moreton Station you join it about a hundred yards down the road at the entrance to Kerr's Field. (If you prefer you can walk down to the end of the road to get yourself a cup of tea and a chip butty). In Spring and Summer you'll usually see whitethroat as you walk along the stream (The Birket).

Kerr's Field is a paddock area by the stream that's often good for passage migrants. It's possible to see good numbers of wheatears, yellow wagtails and pied wagtails (a possible Iberian wagtail was reported from here recently).

Yellow wagtail, Kerr's Field

Wheatear, Kerr's Field

Juvenile stonechat, Kerr's Field

Of course, timing is everything when it comes to passage migration: a couple of weeks after seeing dozens of wagtails and wheatears here I came back and found just the one wheatear. Any disappointment I may have had soon evaporated when I noticed the resident stonechats had a few new mouths to feed.

In Spring a walk along the path past the lighthouse will be accompanied by the songs of warblers — mostly blackcaps and chiffchaffs, with one or two sedge warblers — and skylarks with the occasional "cronk" from a passing raven.

Leasowe Lighthouse

At the lighthouse you have the choice of going up for a walk along the sea wall for a bit of seawatching, directly following the path through Leasowe Common that eventually gets to Meols, or taking a diversion to the left and following the path into the reeds and trees and round the other side of the pond to add reed and willow warblers to the tally (this path rejoins the path a few hundred yards further along).

Leasowe Common

This spit of rocks is about halfway between Leasowe Lighthouse and Meols.
Most of the waders taking refuge here will usually be oystercatchers, redshanks and dunlin but you never know your luck.

Coming into Meols

Coming into Meols you can walk through the caravan park to join Park Lane and walk down to the station from there or you can carry on along the sea front then turn down Dovepoint Road and down to the station.

First-Winter pied wheatear, Meols sea wall, November 2018

If you've the energy you can carry on walking along the sea front down to Hoylake and thence to West Kirby.

My local patch

I spent an hour this afternoon pottering round my local patch dodging rain showers. This is one of those bits of "waste ground" you find in odd corners that aren't viable for development. In this case it's roughly ten acres of land which was on the wrong side of a freight line when most of what we used to call "cornfields" were built over for warehouses and metal bashing. Although it's ten acres it wouldn't be worth the expense of putting in the usual services: at it's widest it's about twenty yards wide, at its narrowest less than three and it has a public footpath running down the middle of it.

Back in the sixties when we first moved here the fields supported hares, lapwings and grey partridge but what's left of it these days is a patch of scrub: bramble patches and swathes of rosebay willowherb, golden rod and Michaelmas daisies punctuated by hawthorns, sycamores and hazels.

Barton Clough.
The Lombardy poplars line the public footpath alongside Lostock Park

Barton Clough
The dog walkers' rough path through the willowherbs

The animal life is unspectacular but the importance of patches like this isn't the number or variety, they're oases dotted about the urban development. Having said that, I've seen 55 species of bird here so far including flyovers (these are listed at the end).

In Summer this area supports a few pairs of warblers — whitethroat, blackcap and chiffchaff — together with finches, tits, robins and wrens. There are good numbers of wood pigeons and blackbirds. For some reason chaffinches are only a Winter visitor round here. In Autumn large flocks of goldfinches descend on the thistles and golden rod. Dozens of blackbirds and redwings spend the Winter here and this is the best time to be able to see great spotted woodpeckers in the copse by the school. Once in a while there'll be a nice surprise like a whinchat stopping by to refuel on migration or an overflying yellow-legged gull.

For the past couple of years there's been a resident buzzard, though it's been seen a lot less frequently this year, perhaps because of competition from the pair that have territory over near the Trafford Centre. Or it could be that the workings for the new tram line to the Trafford Centre are providing rich pickings in disturbed small wildlife, which might explain why the local kestrels aren't around so often either. This is also part of the hunting territory for a pair of sparrowhawks which seems to stretch from here down to the River Mersey.

Buzzard, Barton Clough

I'd been worrying about the lack of whitethroats but today there were two pairs and a third singing male. Two pairs bred last year. This very obliging chap is the male of the pair that seem to have taken over the elderberry bushes by the old rail line.

Common whitethroat, Barton Clough

Just the one each of chiffchaff and blackcap singing, which is half the usual strength, but they've been around a while so the others could be busy. A nice surprise was the appearance of a male lesser whitethroat which disappeared into the brambles as soon as it noticed my camera then promptly yelled out a burst of song just to reassure me I hadn't imagined it. No sign of the buzzard or the kestrel today; haven't seen the kestrel for a few weeks but the buzzard drifted high over the other day.

Site List

Black-headed Gull *
Blackbird
Blackcap
Blue Tit
Bullfinch
Buzzard
Carrion Crow
Chaffinch
Chiffchaff
Coal Tit
Collared Dove
Common Gull *
Cormorant *
Dunnock
Feral Pigeon
Fieldfare
Goldcrest
Goldfinch
Great Spotted Woodpecker
Great Tit
Greenfinch
Grey Heron *
Grey Wagtail *
Herring Gull *
House Sparrow
Jackdaw
Jay
Kestrel
Lesser Black-backed Gull *
Lesser Whitethroat
Long-tailed Tit
Magpie
Mediterranean Gull *
Mistle Thrush
Nuthatch
Pied Wagtail
Pink-footed Goose *
Redwing
Robin
Rook
Skylark *
Snipe *
Song Thrush
Sparrowhawk
Starling
Stock Dove *
Swallow *
Swift *
Treecreeper
Whinchat
Whitethroat
Willow Warbler
Woodpigeon
Wren
Yellow-legged Gull *

* Flyover sighting

Serendipity

I haven't paid enough attention to the seaward side of Southport Marine Lake. 

As you walk up Marine Drive from the pier and past the retail park there's a car park on the landward side of the road. From here there's a lane marked "No through road" down to the sailing club. At the end of this lane, by the club car park, it becomes a path across the dunes to Fairway (the road that forms the southern boundary to Southport Golf Links).

I've spent all Winter trying to find twite on the shore around here or else on the grass around the Guelder Rose pub, both places I've found them in the past, to no avail. Late yesterday afternoon I happened to glance over towards the car park and saw a small flock of finches rise up and drop behind the car park. So I followed the lane down and found a flock of thirty four twites perching on the sailing club fence.

Twite, Southport Sailing Club car park

Twite, Southport Sailing Club car park

And there were a nice couple of male wheatears on the grass by the dune path as an added bonus.

Walking over to the bus stop at Hesketh Park I thought I'd pop over to Marshside to see what was about seeing as it was only ten minutes' walk away. There had been a pair of garganey earlier in the week but I had no luck. Still, it was a good walk and it's always nice to see ruff starting to get their breeding finery. 

It was getting a bit late but I had a long wait for the next bus from Marshside Road so I talked myself into walking up to Crossens to see if I could have any luck with the four barnacle geese on the Outer Marsh I hadn't been able to find on my last two visits. The sensible part of me reminded myself that I'd spent most of the day looking for migrants on the Wirrral and had only come up to Southport late on on a whim to max out the value of the daily Saveaway ticket. Anyway, I somehow found myself walking to Crossens.

I found the geese quite easily despite the light being not so good, plus a rather neat male white wagtail by the road. I was comparing notes with a chap who was hoping for a sighting of the grey-bellied brent goose that's been hanging round for a couple of weeks when a short-eared owl floated along and started hunting across the marsh.

Barnacle geese in the twilight, Crossens

Unplanned diversions are often productive.

Trees and birds

I associate some birds with particular trees or plants.

In some cases the connection's obvious: reed warblers, bearded tits and bitterns are birds of the reedbed, for instance.

Willow tits, Sale Water Park
(In a hawthorn bush)

In other cases the connection's subtler, a coincidence of environmental preferences perhaps, or just a geographical coincidence: the places where I've seen the birds most often happen to have a particular vegetation. These include:

• Blackcap — Sycamore
• Cetti's warbler — Brambles with reeds
• Lesser redpoll — Alder
• Lesser whitetroat — Field bindweed
• Marsh tit — Willow
• Pied flycatcher — Oak
• Redstart — Oak
• Whitethroat — Bramble
• Willow tit — Alder and birch
• Wood warbler — Oak
• Yellowhammer — Hawthorn

It would be a mistake to treat these relationships as hard and fast rules — birds fly where they please without our say so and it would be a mistake to think that any marsh tit that alighted on a branch of alder automatically became a willow tit — but I think it's something I should bear in mind more often, if only to test the idea to destruction.

Carrington Moss

Sketch map of Carrington Moss

Carrington Moss is an unremarkable piece of farmland, which makes it remarkable within Trafford where every piece of green space bigger than a beach towel is marked as prime development space for executive housing. Now you'll never guess what… Which is why I should write it up while it's still there.

Carrington Moss

The northern boundary of the moss is an industrial estate, the petrochemical works being the most obvious landmark.

From Carrington:

The bus stop is near the corner of Manchester Road and Isherwood Road. The buses go through Flixton, turn a sharp left after the garden centre then go down the dead straight Flixton Road then do an over-complicated right turn at the crossroads onto Manchester Road.

• The 247 bus from the Trafford Centre to Altrincham
• The 255 from Manchester via Urmston
• You can catch either of these from Flixton train station (turn left as you leave the station and it's less than a minutes' walk to the bus stop). If you choose to walk down to Carrington, turn right and follow the road down; cross the road before you get to the garden centre (you don't want to be trying to cross at the top of Flixton Road: the motorists are too busy remembering to slow down to look for pedestrians). 

Walk down Isherwood Road to get to Carrington Moss.

From Altrincham

• The 247 bus from Altrincham to the Trafford Centre meanders its way through Broadheath. You want the first stop when it turns onto Sinderland Road. (There's allegedly a bus stop further along Sinderland Road just after Altrincham Sewage Works but I've never found it or seen it from the bus). Cross the road, walk down Heathermount and you'll get to a gap that lets you get onto the dead straight though sometimes overgrown path that's the remains of the old railway line from Irlam to Timperley. Turn left and follow it past the sewage works and on towards Birch Road and the southern end of the moss.

I'm always coming here from north of the Mersey so that's how I'll describe the site.

Walking down Isherwood Road there's farmland on the left and houses then an industrial estate on the right. Towards the end of the road the farmland's replaced by a big electricity station and the industrial estate's hidden by trees. Around this point Isherwood Road becomes Birch Road but you'd never know it. Keep an eye on the skies: you've a good chance of seeing buzzard, kestrel or sparrowhawk and a raven may pass once in a while.

When you get to the security barrier (yes really, it's to stop unauthorised people driving to a well-known football team's training ground) you have a choice. 

• Carry on down Birch Road then turn right at the first opportunity. In Winter this stretch hosts good-sized finch flocks with a good chance of a few bramblings in there.

• Turn left onto the path that follows the fenced-off area. Behind the fence is the Shell Pool nature reserve which is accessible by permit only. The bits of wet woodland surrounding the pool is always worth a look: finches in Winter, warblers in Summer. I keep hoping to find willow tits here but haven't for twenty-odd years. You can get tantalising glimpses of the pool through the trees. Mallard, Canada goose, coot and black-headed gulls are the usual regulars with tufted duck, gadwall and dabchicks as frequent supporting cast. From this perspective you'll usually hear more than you'll see.

Juvenile treecreeper, Carrington Moss

Further on, by the remains of the old Shell plant, the path turns round into a small copse which has its fair share of mixed tit flocks in Winter and warblers in Summer. As you go down the path the trees thin out until they become tree-deep borders to the fields.

The leafy lane going due south from the petrochemical works.

At the first crossing point you should turn left and go back towards Birch Road and on towards the riding school. (I couldn't possibly tell you to continue down past the "No entry" signs and continue on down to the end to meet the path that's the remains of the railway line.) As you turn left the path margins change: on the North side there's a high hawthorn hedge with a few big gaps, to the south there's an open field. You'll usually find yellowhammers and chaffinches in the hedge, in Winter the occasional brambling. In Summer you might strike lucky with lesser whitethroat in the field margins. In late Summer you've a good chance of seeing yellow wagtails feeding in the fields.

Yellowhammer, Carrington Moss

Carrington Moss

Yellow wagtail, Carrington Moss

The Joy Of Gulls

Gulls are fascinating, frustrating and frequently baffling. When you first start looking at gulls in bird guides they're quite straightforward: they're all in pristine adult plumage with flat lighting and it's a doddle. Then you go out on a blustery Winter's day when the light's anything but flat and you're faced with a bewildering array of young plumages and changing tones of grey as birds fly around and you wonder what you're looking at. So you go online and soon you're even more overwhelmed by the wealth of detail involved in identification. And then you discover that as well as the variations with age, the subtle differences between some very closely-related species and subspecies, and the almost casual way that vagrant gulls may turn up anywhere, there's always the chance you're looking at a bird of mixed parentage. It can become intimidating, so many people get put off and give up, which is a shame.

I'm not in any way a gull expert — every year by Easter I've become confident that I can identify a yellow-legged or a Caspian gull 70% of the time when I see one and then come September I'm starting the learning curve all over again.— but I enjoy doing a bit of gull-watching. I thought it might be worth putting together some very general notes from my own experience for people like me who are baffled but still game. They probably won't be enough to clinch an ID but they may be enough to provide a starting point when you see something "not quite right."

• If you've found a gull that looks a bit unusual concentrate on making notes on what you're seeing rather than trying to make an ID.

• Some birds you're never going to identify. This is OK.

General identification tips

• At all ages concentrate on:
• The size, general impression and jizz of the bird
• Shape of head
• Shape and colour of bill
• Colour of legs and feet
• Colour of eye and eye ring
• In adults note:
• Colour of upperparts
• Colour of primary feathers
• Any mirrors on primaries
• In younger birds:
• The colour(s) of the back and wings
• Tail banding, if any

Some of these details are outside the scope of these notes, you'll be using them to confirm or deny a possible identification.

Benchmark species

These are the species that used to be "all the gulls of Britain" in the books when I first started birdwatching.

Little gull

• Tiny, delicate-looking and with a tern-like flight
• Immatures pale with a black W on their wing
• The contrast between the pale upperwing and black underwing of an adult is striking even at a distance

Black-headed gull

• Small, silvery gull, pointed wings have very prominent white leading edge and thin black trailing edge
• Thin, pointed bill
• Depending on the age, time of year and lighting the bill and legs can be anything between watery orange and dark crimson
• Breeding adult unmistakable with its brown hood

Black-headed gull, Pennington Flash

Common gull

• Medium-sized gull, dark grey back, wings slightly rounded at the tips, rounded head, pointed yellow bill, legs grey to yellow
• Adults in breeding plumage have an open facial expression and beady eyes 
• Adults in Winter often have a smudgy dark ring on the bill

Common gull, Stretford

Mediterranean gull

• General impression from a distance is of a ghostly pale common gull with a dark, blunted bill
• Breeding adult unmistakable in its black hood

Mediterranean gulls, Martin Mere

Kittiwake

• Medium-sized gull, dark grey back, more pigeon-like proportions than other gulls with quite a lot of chest, pointed yellow bill, legs black
• Immatures pale with a black W on their wing

Herring gull

• The archetypal big grey-backed gull
• Females tend to be slightly smaller and have more rounded heads than males
• Adult: pale eye (very rarely dark), silvery upperparts, yellow bill with striking red gonydal spot (where the bill bulges about two-thirds along the base) and pink legs (though some may have yellow legs)
• Scandinavian herring gulls are bigger and slightly darker

Lesser black-backed gull

• More elegant looking than herring gull, at all ages
• Immature plumages always darker and colder than herring gull

Iceland gull

• Smaller-headed and slightly more delicate looking than a herring gull
• Very pale with no black to the plumage

Great black-backed gull

• Huge
• Ponderous, powerful flight

Great black-backed gull, Leighton Moss

Glaucous gull

• A ghostly edition of a great black-backed gull with no black in the plumage
• Salmon-pink bill of immature birds very striking

Glaucous gull, Hollingworth Lake

Birds that used to be "herring gulls"

Yellow-legged gull

• Like a big, hefty herring gull with a long, blunt bill like an old fashioned butter knife
• Adult upperparts common gull grey, not much white in the primaries
• Immature plumage more like a paler, warmer version of lesser black-backed gull than darker version of herring gull

Caspian gull

• A big gull but elegantly-proportioned: as a lesser black-backed gull looks more elegant than a herring gull a Caspian gull looks more elegant than a lesser black-backed gull
• Long winged, rounded head, long neck, long legs, long bill
• Immature plumages seem to get a whiter head at a younger age than do herring gulls and yellow-legged gulls

Probable (possible?) Caspian gull, West Kirby
I puzzled over this for ages and I'm still not wholly convinced

American herring gull

• I've only seen these in the States; I'm not convinced I could tell an adult American herring from a Scandinavian European herring gull;  both are big and husky
• First Winter American herring gulls are peculiar: from a distance they're almost uniformly brown

Visitors

Bonaparte's gull

• Like a small edition of a black-headed gull with a small black bill and short bubblegum-pink or puce legs

Ring-billed gull

• Intermediate in size between common gull and herring gull
• Square-headed like a herring gull but wings like a common gull
• The black ring on the bill is more distinct than the smudgy effort on a Winter common gull

Laughing gull

• Everything about a laughing gull looks stretched out: a very long bill. a low flat head, long wings and a long rear end after the legs

Like I say, not expert notes but I hope they're helpful.