Visit to Moore Nature Reserve : 1st August 2013

Visit to Moore Nature Reserve : 1st August 2013

With the weather set to be a little uncertain for a few days we took the opportunity of a good forecast for the first of August to go out to Moore Nature Reserve. In particular I wanted to take a walk out to the farms at the far side of the reserve to see if we could find any of the birds that can often be found there, though admittedly earlier in the year. In particular I wanted to see if we could find any Yellowhammers. In fact by far the most plentiful wildlife on the reserve were the mosquitoes and, despite wearing repellent,  they certainly made a meal of us !

We started off from the car park and walked up the little incline to the Sedge Hide where we found Little Grebes and Great Crested Grebes and some Tufted Ducks. As we sat there we could hear contact calls of a warbler and eventually one of them emerged just a couple of feet from the hide window and we got very nice views of a Sedge Warbler in dialogue with another off to the other side of the hide.

We walked down to the junction of the long track and we turned left. This was where most of the mosquito action was. We walked through this as quick as we could and there wasn’t that much there anyway. In fact, it is often a bit disappointing on that track. After a bit we emerged onto the lane that leads past the farms and the change from the swampy atmosphere of the woods was refreshing.

As we walked along the lane we could see a couple of Buzzards wheeling around in the sky and Swallows were all over the fields and in the air and perching on the telephone wires. In the trees there were Greenfinch, Goldfinch and Chaffinches. I heard a couple of Song Thrushes and as we walked along we could hear a few Yellowhammers calling – rather weakly but still unmistakable. We spent quite some time trying to see them but without any luck.

We continued down the land and a Jay flew in front of us. We started to hear a rather strange strangulated kind of a muted call that was being met with a reply and as we turned off a lane leading to a barn on the left we saw the source of this noise. An adult Buzzard was perched atop a telephone poll calling to a youngster who was close by flying in short bursts from bush to tree but always keeping in contact by calling to the parent bird. We had good long views of the parent in particular but eventually we walked on.

We dropped back down into the woods where we stopped off at the feeding station but there had obviously not been any food there for a while and the water of the small pond had evaporated completely leaving what looked more like a field. Again the only wildlife to be seen – or rather felt – were mosquitoes.

We walked down to where we sometimes see the Lesser Spotted Woodpecker but the whole area was so overgrown that it was hard to see anything although small birds did flit around in the tops of the trees. We reversed our route and thought we would walk down the track that leads to the meadow and the Grebe Hide. As we got to the bench that is opposite a gate into a field where we have often seen Bullfinches, Anne got a glimpse of a very red bird – in fact too red to be a Bullfinch !

We soon got better views of it and it kept flying across the path from tree to tree each time flying very close to us. At first I thought we had a rare bird – perhaps even a Parrot Crossbill. In fact it soon became clear when it landed on my head and perched there for a few minutes that this was an escaped cage bird – possibly a Scarlet Tanager – or something like that anyway. It kept returning to us and perched on my shoulder for a while where we got some photos of it. We amused ourselves for a while with this friendly bird and in the end we were surprised that it did not end up talking !! (In fact I later emailed the Cheshire County Recorder, Hugh Pulsford, including a photo of the bird and after some consultation with cage bird experts they concluded that it was in fact an escaped “Red factor Canary”)

We dropped in at the Grebe Hide and, sure enough, there were several Little Grebes with their chicks. There were also family groups of Coots but, apart from a pair of Oystercatchers on the island it was all Lesser Black-backed and Black Headed Gulls.

By now we were pretty overheated and a quick lunch at Grappenhall was called for. We had managed to at least hear one of our target birds, the Yellowhammer, and we had also had an amusing encounter with an escaped bird. Unfortunately the likely lingering memory is going to be the mosquitoes.

Bird Sightings : Moore Nature Reserve