Leighton Moss Again!

Having spent the afternoon and evening in the library, perhaps now is a good opportunity to recount my latest trip to the wonderful woodland and wetland reserve at Leighton Moss on Tuesday. It was a lovely afternoon and not to be wasted on writing up notes, so the window in my schedule was put to use, and I headed back up to the Silverdale AONB and onto the reserve. Passerine activity around the feeders seemed a little quiet compared to last time but there were still plenty of great, blue and coal tits around.  I didn’t hang around too much and headed down to Lillian’s hide where I was greeted by a display of Swan behaviour.

Beautiful Whooper Swan.

A small party of seven or so Whooper Swans had arrived, presumably from Iceland, and looked perfectly at home on the lake. They do not usually winter here but I was advised they sometimes pass through. They were all beautiful, white adults with strong yellow markings on their bills, their smoothly sloping foreheads and straight necks setting them apart from the mute swans even from a distance. However, the resident pair of Mute Swans, the familiar orange-beaked swan of your local park lake, did not seem to be in thrall to the Nordic beauties, instead, they looked distinctly displeased. At first they kept their distance, but raised their wings and drew in their necks, in a threat posture, one that looked almost exaggerated. The aggression was palpable, but initially they seemed to be keeping their distance. They were heavily outnumbered, although individually distinctly larger than the ‘interlopers.’ The Whoopers, for their part, were largely unperturbed, ignoring the angry locals, but sticking close together. One of the mute swans drew closer, and the Whoopers edged slowly away. They may have only arrived that morning after the 18 hour, near transatlantic flight, and had every interest in conserving their energy, with an onward journey, perhaps to Martin Mere, but maybe considerably further afield, still ahead of them.  The mute swans herded the Whoopers into a corner, but one bird seemed determined not to be so restricted, and swam out past the Mute swans, separate from its party. The mute swan which seemed to be displaying the most aggression swam forward towards it, with his head down and his wings raised. The Whooper swam away slowly, nervously, but evidently it was not enough for the Mute swan, who proceeded to raise his wings and run across the water, flapping, toward the whooper, beak poised to grab at the back of the other bird. The Whooper took to the air and flew back to join its co specifics.

Aggressive mute swan.

Having  watched this display of behaviour I decided to persevere to the Greisdale hide, which had been off-limits due to rain on my previous visit. The view from here was gorgeous, with the autumn light shining off the glass-calm water, the leaves in the woodland opposite beginning to assume orange and brown shades, while other species remained green. A heron posed on a narrow spit of land while Teal and Widgeon rested peacefully among the reeds and sedges. The Widgeon seemed to be newly arrived seasonal visitors to me, as none were present last time. Mostly they seemed to be russet brown females and males still bearing some of their eclipse feathers.  There were a few Gadwall too, the females resembling smarter mallards, the males more monochrome ones. I sat for a while. Nothing happened except the place looked beautiful.

The view from the Tim Jackson hide.

I could have enjoyed this scene for some time but instead I headed around to the Tim Jackson hide, in the hope of perhaps seeing some more stuff. Deer were bellowing in the surrounding hills, and myself and the other people in the hide couldn’t help hoping that we might see, even photograph, one of the stags.  A Sparrowhawk flew through and put up some of the smaller birds, which had barely returned when a gorgeous female Marsh Harrier passed by and sent them all skyward again.   A small group of swans flew in, and these, it turned out, were the whoopers again. They sat in the water in front of us, someone in the hide describing these beautiful and fairly uncommon passage migrants as the “bird of the day.” They didn’t stay long, the marauding Mute Swans following them, and eventually persuading them skyward and they flew out toward Morecambe Bay.

Handsome Grey Heron at Leighton Moss.

The light was beginning to fade and I was wondering about getting back toward home before I’d have to drive in the dark. I decided to give these deer a couple more minutes, as the bellowing continued and sounded, although I have little experience, like it was coming closer. I had been sitting there a while, talking about swans and deer with the other stragglers still in the hide, enjoying the gentle chatter of birdy people and the distant bellows, watching one of the keepers in the wooded estate opposite feeding the pheasants, and sitting around, when a few of the birds to my right took to the air. They quickly settled as they reached the far bank; when put to flight by an avian predator, ducks usually stay airborne until the predator is out of sight, but these ones did not stay up long. Whatever had scared them was clearly terrestrial. I looked out in the direction from which the panicked ducks, the bulk of them teal, until recently sleeping soundly, and was rewarded with my first glimpse of a wild, English otter in fresh water!   It wasn’t as big as the beast I saw off the coast of Skye a couple of years ago, so I can only assume it was a juvenile, but it was a sleek, dark, wet creature, long and low to the ground. It seemed to be aware of the commotion it caused in the hide, probably on account of the noises we made, and plunged into the water and away before I could get a photo,  but what a beautiful beast! And what a first!

Scruffy, moulting Teal at Leighton Moss.

I waited a little while for the deer. I managed to confirm how close they were when I realised some of the reeds I could see were not reeds, but the points of the antlers of one of the noisy stags, and several of us waited, with bated breath, it seemed, for the beast to appear and pose for a photo. Inevitably he never did, but by the antlers, which must have had ten points, and rose up above the Phragmites which stood as tall as a man, he was huge.  I contented myself with enjoying the strange noises he was making, watching the birds making their way toward roosting sites against the backdrop of the autumnal woods. Cormorants gathered in a tree in front of me, and a couple of little egrets and a lapwing were among those flying through the sunset. 



It is that time of year, the time the season is changing. I saw no hirundines at Leighton Moss but I did see a small crowd of swallows flying over Freeman’s Pools in Lancaster on Saturday, even as the place was beginning to fill with Teal and other wintering ducks. The previous day I’d watched my first pair of fieldfares of the season, flying, making their “tseeptseep” contact calls as they flew overhead.  With the Whooper Swans at Leighton Moss, it is the time of year when birds are on the move and anything can still turn up anywhere.

Wild Lands And Wet Fowls

Saturday 29^th September took me to the rather stunning Wild lands and Wet fowls Trust reserve on the road to Liverpool at Martin Mere, in the company of some lovely and hung-over Mancunians. We braved the entrance fee, which always feels a little more than one might expect at WWT reserves, although I was sufficiently impressed by the reserve to claim it back off my membership,  and made our way initially to the captive waterfowl collection.  We allowed ourselves to be charmed by the two small and two very small Asian Short-Clawed otters while they were fed by the keeper,  a small compensation for the Eurasian Otter no-show at Leighton Moss a couple of days ago. These diminutive otters are incredibly cute, and seem to be the most popular species as zoo animal, perhaps on account of their social nature and relatively minimal space requirements. The keeper reminded us that the largest otter in the world is the Amazon river otter, which feeds on Piranhas in the South American river basin, and suggested keeping one close for safety. Most commentators seem to be of the view that the Amazon River Otter is a six-foot long predator every bit as powerful as a jaguar and more than happy to defend its territory against crocodiles. 

Asian Short Clawed Otter. Also capable of defending itself against crocodiles, through cooperation and strength in numbers.

Pair of handsome red-crested Pochards.

The otter feeding was charming and so were the lovely red-crested Pochards and Eider which occupied the next pool, sharing it with some wilder coots and moorhens. The captive wildfowl collections at the WWT centres, they have more in Barnes, have a clear conservation value and are no doubt an educational resource also. The WWT have also bred birds in captivity for release into the wild as part of invaluable reintroduction schemes, and maintain populations of birds which are threatened by habitat destruction. This doesn’t leave me unconcerned about the practice of pinioning wildfowl. The captive birds here (as opposed to the wild ones, separated by predator-proof fencing and largely in another part of the site) have had part of their wings removed to render them flightless. This practice is illegal in ducks kept on farms, but the WWT do it to prevent their wildfowl escaping. It does not sit easy that birds can be rendered permanently flightless, and how it impacts on their experience to be so damaged is unclear. I suppose pinioning is preferable to a repeat of the sorry tale of the Ruddy Duck, which was exterminated in recent years for expanding the gene pool available to an isolated population of the closely related White Headed Ducks in Spain, having initially escaped from, according to anecdotal evidence, another Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust exhibit in the 1980s.   The practice is carried out when the birds are chicks and supposedly do not suffer long term consequences aside from the intended, indeed, they appear to live normal lives, breeding well,  and the Trust has maintained these exhibits for the public for decades.


As we walked around the “Duck Zoo,” even while watching the Otter show, my eyes were being drawn skyward, and looking over the large Wetlands Centre, my anticipation for a look at the wild birds was growing. There were, occasionally, arrivals and departures, and sometimes just nervous flocks taking to the sky, of huge numbers of noisy, honking geese.  

To my surprise, there were still a few butterflies about, we saw Comma and Red Admirals feeding, and sunning themselves, on and around a buddleia beside the very quiet Beaver enclosure inside the captive waterfowl area. These beautiful nymphalids spend the winter as adults, often tucked up in the corners of outhouses and other cold buildings, and presumably in caves and hollow trees, to re-emerge when the weather becomes warmer, not reproducing until they emerge from this hibernation the following spring. These two were clearly feeding up before their long sleep.

Comma butterfly with autumnal hawthorne berries.

We made our way out of the “Duck Zoo” and onto the Martin Mere reserve “proper.” Martin Mere is a lake, situated in an unusually flat part of West Lancashire, which is fringed by wetland habitats, some reclaimed from farmland in more recent years, and some artificial scrapes used for the dual purposes of habitat creation and cleaning the water as it flows of farmland and into the Mere itself. Immediately outside the hide were the usual suspects, plus elegant pintails, somewhere out in the water a male almost in his full breeding plumage, with a chocolate brown head, while a pair, the male still in eclipse, dabbled closer to us.  The pintail is one of the most attractive of the wintering wild ducks, with the females and eclipse males having an unusual grace about them, elegant, more slightly built than some of their relatives, with longer necks and prominent tails.   A pair of teal flew low across the water and several more were around.

We walked up the muddy track toward the Harrier Hide, a wooden hide built in the shape of a bird of prey, or perhaps some Native American totem, which looks out over some marshland recently reclaimed from arable use.  A drake Shoveller sat contentedly on one of the grassy islands rising from the shallow water, as did a single Pink footed Goose and a smart Lesser Black Backed Gull.  There were relatively few birds to see despite the promising expanse of marshland we had in front of us. I’d hoped to catch sight of one of the promised Harriers or perhaps some other raptor hunting over the grass.  A shelduck grazed, while black headed gulls squabbled. It was at this hide that my camera battery gave out, finally, and I must thank Kel and Jack for the loan of their camera to take a couple of shots, including those which feature in this blog post.

Teal, Shelduck and Black Headed Gulls

We walked back along a muddy path to the visitors centre. Signs promised Tree Sparrows, the reserve being host to a colony, but we only saw a few blue and great tits on the feeding station, which was surprising given the diversity of birds around those at Leighton Moss.   I also elected to return to the visitors centre and become a member of the WWT, partly to gain free entry to some of the trusts’ other reserves, like Barnes in London, and Welney in Norfolk, and also to support their work preserving threatened wetland wildlife the world over. The WWT, alongside the RSPB and others is among the leading organisations working to establish a captive breeding population of Spoonbilled Sandpipers, an endangered species from Pacific Asia.

We walked around the corner past the gates to the car park and made our way to the final hide we’d visit that day and found it a spectacle. Pink footed Geese fly in from Iceland in October to spend the winter in the relative warmth of the British winter, and at Martin Mere, among other sites, they gather in their thousands. Estimates put the numbers there that day at around 12000. Skeins of the noisy, honking geese were returning from grazing on nearby farmers fields, where they are sometimes chased away when they threaten to eat the new shoots of Autumn-sown crops.   On the ground they were joined by a dozen or so Whooper Swans. From time to time, some of the Geese would take to the air, and others would return from feeding grounds further away. Greylag Geese also grazed outside the hide, although some of the islands had been reduced to mud by the action of so many feeding waterfowl.  Sometimes the teal would go up, perhaps responding to some terrestrial, or low flying predator outside of our view, and at times thousands of birds filled the evening sky, teal, pintail and goose.   But it was the V formations of Pink Footed Geese which provided the greatest spectacle. These migrants from the arctic, returning to their winter roost by the hundred.  These spectacular flocks seem to be the main features of reserves managed by the WWT.  They certainly maintain some special places.

Pink Footed Geese. Many.

Carelessly I also managed to leave my binoculars in one of the hides-fortunately, the typical honesty one associates from such places had prevailed and they had been returned to the visitors centre, giving me an excuse to make a repeat visit the following day.  On my return visit I managed to get a bit closer to the beautiful Whooper swans, taking in a hide to distant from the centre for us to reach on the first visit. Sadly I was without camera, but I must return when more of these birds are present. I also saw a Marsh Harrier and a couple of Widgeon,  the grazing duck which frequents wet meadows through the winter. A warden explained how local arable farmers bring some if their rejected potatoes to the reserve to feed the birds, distracting them from feeding on potentially more valuable crops.  

The work of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust is excellent and worthwhile, and, though I can take or leave their “duck zoos” of artificially flightless birds, they maintain some of the most stunning wetland habitats around on their reserves, and their conservation work is impeccable, so I was pleased to add another window sticker to the small collection in my car.

Some thoughts on the Badger Cull.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Badger cull. It is not supported by scientific evidence, and even if it were, it would only be in support of a little cost cutting for the dairy industry, which produces unnecessary luxury products for mass consumption. Farmers and their allies claim that the wholesale slaughter with rifles of one of our best loved wild animals will reduce the incidence of TB in cattle by a mere 16%, and will not reduce the incidence of infertility, mastitis, exhaustion, foot problems, being male, or any of the other factors which cause vast numbers of Dairy cows to be slaughtered and discarded on a daily basis. Indeed, the incidence of mastitis, a crippling disease of cows’ udders caused by industrial milking practices, and preventable simply by milking the cows slightly less often, makes any claim that dairy farmers feel some form of concern for their animals welfare  seem rather absurd.

The Tories do a good line in cutting their support for industry, and if the subsidies paid to dairy farmers were indeed of any concern to them, I have no doubt our ruling party would treat the farmers in an even handed way, in accordance with the way they have treated industries in the past which have cost them too much. They would simply cut the subsidies and abandon the industry, and its employees to their fate, like the miners, the steel workers or the railway conductors.  Even the cost of Bovine TB to central government and the taxpayer does not add up to a coherent, pro-cull argument, especially as they receive compensation when their cows come down with any number of diseases, and 16% of those with bovine TB is a miniscule fraction of the current dead cow kitty.  No, expense makes no argument for the culling of badgers.

Scientific evidence on the subject has been somewhat dubious, but the Krebs trial revealed culling badgers as a strategy to reduce the incidence of bovine TB is likely to be extremely problematic and may indeed lead to an increase in bTB as the badgers flee their home ranges, taking the disease with them.   Science makes no argument for the culling of badgers.

The only conceivable reason I can think of that one might support the badger cull is straightforward, but strikes me as a little daft. It is the will of the dairy farmers and dairy farmers are cute.  We see them on adverts, with their cloth caps and gruff, rural accents, their purported love of good beer, their charming cloth caps and cheque shirts, their eye smiles and grass chewing. They are in our children’s books, helping deliver baby lambs and growing turnips, standing over a spade with a charming smile and a piece of grass hanging out of their mouths. Their supposed heroism defined in wartime “dig for victory” posters, again with the spade, bright eyes turned to the sky. Farming is part of our history and our culture, and townies have formed quite a sentimental attachment to their image of the “poor beleaguered British farmer.”  Walking through his field in the dawn light, he cuts a romantic figure, lonely, badly dressed, out there in the elements.  He is, townies like to image, a pleasant character, who cares for his animals and frequents the local pub, where he sits with his dog by the fireplace, keeping the real ale industry alive.   Ignorant of the countryside, the townies want to do what he says for sentimental reasons.  His care for his livestock is embodied by mastitis and bovine TB and cramped conditions, in which malformed cows drag their udders along the concrete floor of their sheds.  He has sprayed our wild flower meadows and replanted them with imported rye grass for no reason other than rye grass can be turned into milk quicker, and because the government gave him taxpayers money to do so.  Farming rakes in public money from central government and the EU, and the ‘beleaguered’ farmer is laughing all the way to the bank with his dead badger, cloth cap and massive subsidy, even as the injured coal miner has to reapply for his disability living allowance.  

The cuteness of the dairy farmer is the only explanation of why we would consider doing something like this for him. Imagine if the oil industry asked us to cull Puffins because they give them a bad image when they end up covered in oil?  Or whales because there is a theoretical risk of ship collision? They would be ridiculed, and rightly so, although our society is far more dependent on oil than it is on milk.  Imagine if the glass making industry called for a cull on Birds of Prey because they sometimes damage windows on collision with them? Or the forestry industry culled blue tits because of some hitherto unknown side effect of their tree-nesting habits? That’d be ridiculous, because none of these industries have as cute a figurehead as the dairy industry does.

Townies need to wake up to the reality of the countryside and abandon their preconceptions, our wildlife is at stake!

Introducing Lancaster

On Friday afternoon I took the opportunity to do a bit of exploring along the Canal and beside the River Lune in Lancaster, to see what was about. Although the walk did not turn up anything especially unusual, it was an excellent opportunity to explore my new ‘Local Patch.’ The canal is a green corridor not just for wildlife but also for students travelling between the Universities and the City Centre.  It flows through sheep-infested hills into the heart of the city, and onward into the Lune.  Mallards graze on its banks and Jackdaws squawk in the ancient oaks which dot its pastured banks.    While I was cycling along it I saw a Sparrowhawk,  pursuing small birds unidentified at hedgerow height and over the water.  A pair of Ravens, unfamiliar birds I tend to associate with places far more remote and weather beaten than this, could also be seen in the distance. Ravens! A ten minute ride from my new home!

The River Lune runs through Lancaster, and separates it from its seaside neighbour Morecambe.  Negotiating the awkward Lancaster one way system on my bike, I eventually made it to the Lune near the large metal supports of the pedestrian Millenium Bridge, and turned left, following the riverside path past construction sites, and some of Lancaster’s decaying industrial heritage, the river front lined for the first half mile or so with derelict factories. As I pass under an arched railway bridge, the city passed behind me and I was in the wild. A fence separated me from fields in which cows and horses grazed.  The sky was grey and drizzle fell intermittently, which negated any possibility of seeing any butterflies or dragonflies about, but there were plenty of gulls on the bank of the Lune, as well as the occasional handsome Cormorant drying his wings, or a fishing Grey Heron.

I followed the path beside the muddy tidal river to Freemans’ Pools, a patch of land managed by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust for the benefit of wildlife, and took the opportunity to sit by the river for a while.  There were cormorants fishing, curlews probing in the mud, and Black-headed and Lesser Black Backed Gulls, fishing actively in the water or roosting beside it. A couple of noisy skeins of geese flew over my head, presumably transiting between some farmers field in which they graze, or mudflats lost under rising tide, and their roosting site. Their harsh calls suggested they were probably Greylags. They flew in loose V formations at height and circled about above me before flying on in the direction of Lancaster and the Universities.   At the time it was being used apparently by no more than a few gulls and a pair of Mute Swans. Access directly onto the reserve was not possible but I was able to get a good view from the fence. With winter approaching it seemed likely that these ponds would soon be well used by wintering wildfowl.  The footpath continued toward Aldcliffe and I followed it, passing a few arable fields, before entering a patch of farmland, which the path crossed. Many of the fields had been flooded and the sheep stood on islands they shared with Lapwings, Curlew and Black Headed Gulls, while Mallards swam about between them.  The floodwaters had also taken over the main bridleway, but fortunately a raised path on top of a muddy bank ran parallel to it, and I did not have to face the awkward choice between turning back and riding my bike through deep water.

I saw a couple of swallows, surely among the last of the year here, and a charm of Goldfinch flew over, chirping. Eventually I reached the main road at the Village of Aldcliffe, up a steep slope. I looked around at the tree-lined hills. The sun was beginning to set and had found a gap between the clouds, the evening light illuminating the hillsides, and the leaves which, around here, are already beginning to turn gold, brown and red, and I thought that I could get into local birding here.

The same evening I headed down to Bolton to listen to a couple of Punk bands in a bar down there, before going on to Manchester and visiting Martin Mere- more on that to follow- but on the way I had another moment. Driving in the near-darkness along one of the small B-roads, I was lucky enough to see a handsome, attractively mottled and downy-looking Tawny Owl fly through my view.

Yes. This place will be good for birding.