Etherow Country Park

Sketch map of Etherow Country Park

Etherow Country Park is a piece of wooded valley just outside Marple. A wide range of woodland species can be found here, including a good population of mandarin ducks.

River Etherow, Etherow Country Park

There is a 384 bus stop just by the entrance to the Country Park on Compstall Road and a 383 bus stop a little way further down across the road. The 384 runs from Stockport bus station via Romiley train station, the 383 runs from the bus station via Marple train station. During the day they're roughly every 15 minutes. Be careful crossing the road: traffic comes at speed down the steep hill!

If you're starting or ending your visit with a walk through Ernocroft Wood the bus stops for the 394 are just south of the entrance to the Country Park on Glossop Road. This bus goes from Glossop to Stepping Hill, and vice versa, once every two hours.

From Compstall Road, once you've negotiated your way through the car park and decided whether or not to have a cup of tea in the café it's a nice gentle stroll along the banks of the little canal that feeds the boating lake. You won't get very far before the first mandarin ducks show themselves.

Mandarin duck, Etherow Country Park

I cross the canal at the first bridge I come to, as much to avoid cars as to have a good look down to the River Etherow to see if I can spot any grey wagtails or dippers (the best place to see them is near the end of the walk as you approach the wooden bridge to the picnic area).

Dipper, Etherow Country Park

This path joins the road at the point where the river goes over a stepped weir. At this point you can either turn right for a walk through Ernoroft Wood or left for a walk around Keg Wood.

Weir, Etherow Country Park

Keg Wood

Keg Wood is a piece of ancient woodland that used to be managed for shooting. In Spring it's carpeted in bluebells and ramsons. You'll find all the usual woodland suspects. The Goyt Valley, a local stronghold for pied flycatchers, isn't far away so there's a chance you might strike lucky and find one here.

Bluebells, Keg Wood

A metalled track into Keg Wood starts by the house on the corner (please respect that this is somebody's home). As the track curves round behind the house you go through a gate into the wood and then meanders and undulates its way around to bring you back where you started. In this early stretch you can see the river through the trees on your right. 

Just after the first rollercoaster dip the track forks. The path to your right takes you down to Keg Pool and then, eventually, back here. I have a dodgy knee and find the slope here easier to walk up than down so I carry on along the main path. The pool is a decent-sized pond that usually hosts a few ducks, coots and dabchicks and good numbers of dragonflies and damselflies. The Egyptian goose that lived here for a dozen years was frightened by fireworks last year and taken into care. It turned out to be perfectly hale an hearty but can't be released because the people taking care of it don't have a licence for its release.

Keg Wood

There's a house within the wood (again, please respect that it's somebody's home), once you get past that the track gets a bit rougher. Every so often there are benches and there are a couple of wooden bus shelter affairs for when the weather turns temporarily nasty. The second one of these is by a picnic area in a glade called Sunny Corner. Once you pass this you do a big loop round and then down to Keg Pool.

Ernocroft Wood

Ernocroft Wood is a younger piece of woodland covering the east side of the river valley up to Glossop Road. It includes a lot more conifers, including a small, thickly-planted telegraph pole plantation.

Ernocroft Wood

A rough but serviceable track snakes its way up the slope without indulging in the insane undulations of Keg Wood. This leads to the entrance to the country park on Glossop Road. The bus stops are a few minutes' walk down the hill. Walking down the side with the pavement you get some good views across the valley and beyond. Mind how you go crossing the road, it can be quite busy.

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