Bill Neil

We had a full house of around 13 people for our morning  visit to  Macclesfield Forest. It was a nice, sunny day but with a bit of a wind. We started out looking for Garden Warblers in the lower part of the uphill track but I don’t think anone actually saw one. As we continued up the track we had more luck with other birds.

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There were only two cars of people for the birding group visit to Pennington Flash. We had to park on the main road as the car park was closed for electrical work that was being done at the bridge on the way down to the car park. We imagined it might be to connect the electric car charging stations in the car park, though it wasn’t obvious what the reason was and their web site gave no reason. Nevertheless we walked from the main road down to the hides. The whole place was incredibly quiet with the usual number of dog walkers absent. It seemed much better and made the extra walk worthwhile. As it happened, we managed to get nine new species for the year -mainly spring migrants.

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We had missed a few birding group sessions through illness and holiday and we only managed to get back in synch for the very last morning of the “term” which was a trek around Marbury Park followed by a planning lnch at the Spinner and Bergemot pub. It was a pretty routine visit with the only hgihlights being Common Gull, Goldeneye and Nuthatch.

We managed to get to Parkgate for a high tide on the 13th February 2024. It was due to be 10.1 metres at 1:33pm and reports from the previous day were remarkable. The tide came all the way in and Jack Snipe and Water Rail were both flushed from the marsh. A Water Rail was found wandering around the pavement outside Nicholl’s Ice Cream Shop and an RSPB person rescued it from danger and returned it to the marsh later. Our expectations were quite high but we were disappointed when the tide really didn’t come in that far. However, we still managed to get some good sightings.