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.

The Wirral: West Kirby and Hoylake

Sketch map of West Kirby, Red Rocks and Hoylake

The North Wirral Coast is very productive for birdwatching, has some excellent walking and is easily accessible by bus and train (the trains run every quarter of an hour). There are a few waders on the estuary all year round, the numbers increase enormously on passage and in Winter. At this time of year it's always useful to take a turn around the marine lake at West Kirby for sea ducks or even divers. The Red Rocks area is a good place to check out passage migration and do a bit of seawatching. Hoylake offers a big sandy beach popular with gulls, ringed plovers and white wagtails.

Hoylake beach looking towards the Dee Estuary

You can walk to Hilbre Bird Observatory from Red Rocks or West Kirby. Being an overly-cautious sort with one eye on the train timetables home I've never got any further than Middle Eye, the island before Hilbre so I don't cover it here.

West Kirby on the Dee Estuary is at the end of one of the Merseyrail lines. Cross the road from the station and go straight down Dee Lane and you'll get to the marine lake. There are generally a few gulls and a wader or two loafing round on the slipway if it's not in use by the sailing centre. The South Parade makes up one side of the lake and a retaining walkway takes you around the outside. Towards the southern end check out the rocks by the small concrete platform, this is a favoured roosting spot for redshanks and turnstones. Any sea ducks will tend to be at this end of the lake.

Scaup, West Kirby Marine Lake

Redshanks, West Kirby Marine Lake

Walking round the perimeter of the lake gives you a chance to check out both the lake and the Dee Estuary. Most of the waders near the lake will be dunlins and redshanks, black-tailed godwits and curlew will be further out. And there's always the chance of something else being out there if your luck's in. Brent geese winter off Hilbre, sometimes a few will come in to graze on the edge of the lake.

Light-bellied brent geese, West Kirby Marine Lake

Walking north from West Kirby to Red Rocks the paths run through a thin strip of sandy marsh. A high path runs alongside the golf course, if you're doing this walk in Summer look out for lizards basking on the boardwalk. There are a couple of lower-level paths running parallel to this that work better if you're not steady on your pins. Most of the passerines will be skylarks and meadow pipits, as you approach the reedbeds around the small pond you'll bump into a few reed buntings, in Summer you'll find reed and sedge warblers.

Walking from West Kirby to Red Rocks

In Spring and Autumn the trees and bushes along this stretch are always worth checking out for passage migrants.

Red Rocks

Red Rocks is a small outcrop of the local red sandstone. It's a good vantage point for a bit of seawatching on the turn of the tide.

From Red Rocks you can walk down to Hoylake's North Parade either along the beach or, if the tide's in, along Stanley Road then turning left and down King's Gap. This is the beginning of a long stretch of roads and paths that would eventually take you over to New Brighton. Look out for wagtails on the beach and by the golf course: pied wagtails are around all year round, in Spring they're joined by white wagtails on passage.

Ringed plovers, Hoylake.

Quickest way to Hoylake Station from the beach is to go down from King's Gap: the road takes you straight there.

Useful links:

• Hilbre Bird Observatory blog
• Dee Estuary Birding latest sightings

Hope Carr teaser

I've only recently started visiting Hope Carr Nature Reserve just outside Leigh. It's quite compact but also quite productive. Birds seen on today's visit included buzzard, peregrine and sparrowhawk, quite a few shovelers and bullfinches and a couple of willow tits. And, on the second attempt, I managed to see the Blyth's reed warbler that's been hanging round the brambles for the past week or so.

Blyth's reed warbler, Hope Carr NR

Blyth's reed warbler, Hope Carr NR

Blyth's reed warbler, Hope Carr NR

I'll provide a map and directions in a future post.

Hollingworth Lake

Sketch map of Hollingworth Lake

Hollingworth Lake is a small Pennine reservoir just outside Rochdale. It's popular both for walking and watersports and can be very busy on a sunny holiday afternoon. It can provide a couple of hours' decent birdwatching in the course of a pleasant stroll. There are enough pubs, cafés and chippies for you not to need to take a packed lunch with you.

Hollingworth Lake

The lake itself attracts good numbers of wildfowl — mostly mallards, mute swans and Canada geese — and gulls, mostly black-headed. They're joined by common terns in Summer. There's usually a few tufted ducks, every so often they'll be joined by goosander and once in a while a goldeneye or a common scoter may visit. And whenever there's a large number of ducks and gulls there's always the chance of something special.

Male common scoter

Getting to Hollingworth Lake is very straightforward so long as the trains are behaving themselves. 

• From Smithybridge Station walk south up Smithybridge Road over the canal and after about half a mile you'll reach the lake. This is much the quickest and most direct route.
• From Littleborough Station go under the subway and turn right down Canal Street, walk about a mile along Hollingworth Roaad and you reach the lake.
• The 458 bus goes from Littleborough Station to Hollingworth Lake. It then carries on to Rochdale via Wardle (if you have the time and energy you can stop off at Wardle for a walk round Watergrove Reservoir).

Common tern

Most of the gulls and ducks congregate around the car park. There are usually a few common gulls and lesser black-backs around. Last year a glaucous gull hung around for a couple of weeks enjoying more than its fair share of chips.

Glaucous gull

There's a path around the lake from the car park, eventually turning round to join Rakewood Road. A little further along there's a small road on the left going to the visitor centre. The little bit of woodland around the car park is worth checking out for the usual suspects. In Winter you'll probably find siskins amongst the finch flocks and you might find lesser redpolls. From here there are a couple of paths through open pasture land that will eventually take you into Littleborough.

Looking North from Rakewood Road

Returning back to the lake, a little bit further up Rakewood Road there's a small lane on the right. Go down here, passing the play area, this skirts the south bank of the lake. The lake is pretty much hidden by wet woodland for the first hundred yards or so. The path then loops round, keep an eye out on your right hand side here for the short path to the hide. This overlooks a shallow pool separated from the larger part of the lake by a thin spit. This can be a good area for waders.

A common sandpiper.
The unusually thick base to its bill was the result of its struggling with the hard, thick mud of the 2018 drought.

Grey wagtail

The trees thin out as you carry on down the lane to the café, giving you another chance to check out any waterbirds on the lake. Following round the lake margin the next landmark is the outdoor activity centre. It's worth checking the pontoons here to see if the usual lapwings have any company. The rest of your journey is a meander round the edge of the lake, taking you back to the bottom of Smithybridge Road and Lake Bank.

Hollingworth Lake