Nov 30 2011
November saw a range of weather from the very mild and sunny to the misty, cold and autumnal. The month started mild and then by the end of the first week there was a little rain and a considerable amount of mist, overcast skies and, of course, the evenings are dark with dusk being around 5pm. Towards the middle of the month there were a number of bright, dry and crisp days. The second half of the month remained mild – the mildest for years.
Nov 29 2011
I hadn’t been to Sandbach Flashes before so I looked it up in “Where to Watch Birds : North West England & the Isle of Man” by A. Conlin et al. This describes Sandbach Flashes as “a series of 15 or so shallow pools formed during the last century as a result of salt mining. The flashes lie in a triangle between Sandbach, Middlewich and Crewe. The main flashes are in an area designated as an SSSI.”(More Details) In fact we only went to one of these flashes, Elton Hall Flash and we would not have had time to visit any of the others anyway because there was so much to see at Elton Hall Flash.
Nov 22 2011
The birding group were a little bit concerned that the visit to Neumann’s Flash and Haydyn’s Pool wouldn’t be very fruitful because of the lack of rain recently but, as it happened, the pools were quite full. In truth there wasn’t that much around but there were a couple of good sighting nonetheless. Above Neumann’s Flash a large flock of Lapwings were flying to and fro but they wouldn’t settle down and kept wheeling around over the water. We couldn’t see any birds of prey around so we couldn’t quite figure out why they were so skittish. At the edges of the the flock was a smaller flock of smaller birds but at that point we could not determine exactly what they were. One of the group thought that they had heard a Golden Plover call but we couldn’t be sure.
Nov 20 2011
On the water at Chorlton Water Park we saw the usual Canada Geese, Black-headed Gulls, Mallards, Coots and Mute Swans but there were also about a dozen Tufted Ducks, an adult Great Crested Grebe with two juveniles and a pair of Pochard. We met a young boy who was fishing and he said that he had seen a Kingfisher earlier in the day (probably fishing from the island at the visitor centre side of the lake) but we did not manage to see it.
