The Naturalists' Notebook

As we waited in Lime Street for the rail replacement bus there was a spatter of rain with strong northerly gusts, but from the bus (which was a plush, warm coach) it seemed like a lovely spring day in the sunshine. It was officially the first day of spring a few days ago, and there was a faint haze of green over all the wayside trees. In the gardens the ornamental trees and shrubs were flowering – Magnolia, Forsythia, Camellia and Cherry, some with very thick blossom indeed.  But at St Helens bus station we noticed small drifts of congealed hailstones at the bases of the shelters.

Around Carr Mill Dam it was very wintry, too. In the woods it still felt like February. Young oak and beech leaves were still clinging to the trees and fluttering in the strong gusty wind. On the lake Canada Geese were trumpeting, there were Mallards, Black-headed Gulls (about 25% with full black heads) and a couple of Lesser Black-backed Gulls. At the south end there were only two or three Great Crested Grebes, but the woodland paths were busy with birds. We heard Wren and Chaffinch singing, a Wood Pigeon flew by fast, and then something else, quick over the trees that might have been a Sparrowhawk. We saw Blackbird, Blue Tit, Great Tit, Dunnock, Robin and Goldfinches.

Nearer the bridge there was a huge gathering of Great Crested Grebes. We counted 42 altogether, and John said he had never seen so many together before. They weren’t dancing, but a few were facing each other and head-shaking.

We lunched on the bridge. Below us were Coots and Moorhens, there was a Heron on the far bank and a pair of Mute Swans were nesting right beneath us, brooding three eggs. John thought he had heard a tale from a ranger that a dog had caught and injured one of the Carr Mill Swans a year or two ago, it had been taken to the RSPCA but had had to be put down. It looks like the survivor of the pair has found a new mate.

Around the farms and muddy field paths beyond Otter Swift Farm we admired the planted clumps of Daffodil varieties, the new Hawthorn leaves, and the Blackthorn just starting to blossom.

The Wild Garlic wasn’t in flower yet, but we saw a few flowers of Coltsfoot and some Pussy Willow breaking out.

Near one of the farms some curious domestic geese came to investigate us, and one (the gander?) hissed at us through the fence.

Public transport details: Rail replacement bus from Lime Street at 10.18, arriving St Helens Station at 11.24. Then bus 352 from St Helens bus station towards Orrel and Wigan, alighting Carr Mill Road / Waterside pub at 11.45. Returned to Liverpool by the 352 bus at 2.51, and we just caught the number 10 bus at St Helens bus station at 3.00, arriving back in Liverpool city centre at 3.50.

The weather wasn’t pleasant today, it was windy, overcast, damp and misty, with occasional spits of rain. We took the bus up to St George’s Church, Everton and went inside. This beautiful church was the first ever to be built on a cast iron frame, making the interior gorgeously light and delicate.

Then we strolled in Everton Park. On a clear day there are wonderful views, and it’s a walk really worth doing, but it was very murky and hazy today. There are several newly-erected signboards by the Friends of Everton Park on the theme “Walk into history across a spectacular ridge”. They point out the historical features of the area, like the old fire beacon, the Royalist encampment in the Civil War (from where Prince Rupert said Liverpool was “nought but a crow’s nest that a parcel of boys could take”), the Everton Toffee Shop and the old lock-up.

One signboard shows a panoramic view over the City, naming notable Liverpool and Wirral landmarks, the Welsh peaks beyond and the Great Orme.

Carefully placed against the skyline is a sculpture of Everton worthies. On the left, Molly Bushell, of the Everton Toffee Shop; in the middle, Kitty Wilkinson, “the Saint of the Slums” who founded Liverpool’s first public washhouse and baths; on the right a docker, “selected for his role as a vital labourer at the heart of Liverpool’s industrial revolution”.

The wind was very strong, and some Herring Gulls were hovering in the updraft. The only other birds in evidence were Magpies on the grass. A few flowers were struggling through:  Shepherd’s Purse in rough corners, Daisies in the grass, closed-up Dandelions on a bank, and at the back of the colonnade there were the remains of a small wildflower meadow, with some straggly Corn Marigolds, Corn Daisies and Cornflowers still in bloom. Surprisingly, the tree trunks were rich with lichen, so all those fresh breezes must keep the air very clean !

The sun tried to come out once, but otherwise it was a cold, raw day with a lazy wind (too lazy to go around you, just blows straight through you) and it was more like February. We were too cold and exposed to stay there so we took a short bus ride to Stanley Park and lunched outside the Isla Gladstone Conservatory.

Canada Geese, Mallards, Coots, Moorhens and a pair of Great Crested Grebes were on the lake. We looked for the Mandarin drake, which was last seen six weeks ago, but he wasn’t showing. There weren’t any Pochards either, but we noted a single pair of Tufted Duck. Two Coots were mating on their nest. A male Sparrowhawk flew across the lake and made all the Canada Geese scatter.

Other birds included Wood Pigeons, Carrion Crow, Long-tailed Tits, Goldfinches, Blackbird, Black-headed Gulls, (20% now with black heads) and Common Gulls on the grass.

Blooming in the shrubbery against bare twigs were the flame-coloured cups of Quince.

Another fine display of colour was Darwin’s barberry (Berberis darwinii), a native of Southern Chile and Argentina, named after the famous Charles (and not after his grandfather Erasmus, the 18th century botanist and polymath, as I first surmised.)

Surrounding a gravel circle at the north west corner of the park are eight venerable London Planes, with another unidentified tree in the centre. It has a vaguely pagan and druidical feel to it.

John remembers that same circle of eight trees being there when he was a child, and says they were big old trees then. Are they as old as the park? It was opened in 1870 so that would make them 144 years old. This blog says that “the London Plane is one of the few trees in the world whose life span is unknown to botanists. The reason for that is that this particular kind of plant life has not been around for long enough for its natural life expectancy to be ascertained. No London Plane tree has ever died of old age. Those that have expired were killed by injuries or by diseases, or by both, not by Father Time. The very oldest ones are about 400 years extant.”

Public transport details: Bus 17 from Queen Square at 10.14, arriving St George’s Church at 10.23. Then bus 21 at 11.48 from Netherfield Road South to Walton Road, arriving 11.54. Returned to Liverpool on the 19 bus from Walton Lane at 2.10, arriving Queen Square at 2.25.

It was clear and sunny, and promised to be a warm spring-like day. We took the train to Hooton and turned onto the Wirral Way.

Along the first few hundred yards there are three young Yew trees by the side of the path, each about 8 or 10 feet tall. Were they planted when the Country Park was opened in 1973?  If so, they would now be 40 years old. However, commercial yew hedging is said to grow a foot a year, so maybe they are much younger than that.

Our first birds were Wood Pigeons, then a Robin singing in the bushes, followed by a Goldfinch pecking about some roots.  We probed a hole in the bank, and found it to be at least 3 feet deep. It was too small for a fox and had no foxy smell. Could it have been a rabbit hole? There were lots of small scrapes in the area too, but no other definite burrows. A dead branch had a fine collection of bracket fungi with chestnut-brown tops, probably Artist’s Bracket Ganoderma applanatum. (Added later – no it isn’t, it’s Blushing Bracket, Daedalopsis confragosa. Thanks Sabena.)

Overhead, a small group of Goldcrests flitted about in a tree and we paused to listen to a Chiffchaff, the first of the year. It was only singing a short song, perhaps three or four repeats, so maybe it had just arrived from Africa and was tuning up.  We also heard the call of a Great Spotted Woodpecker and some Jackdaws cawing from the woods. Long-tailed Tits passed through and we stopped to watch three Buzzards soaring high above. Our first Coltsfoot flowers were out, and an early Cow Parsley on the verge.

An early Bumble Bee – perhaps a Buff-tailed – was going in and out of a damp hole in the ground. She was probably an overwintering queen setting up her new nest. A Lapwing was flying and calling above a horse field, no doubt trying to impress a potential mate. A Jay flew up off the path and a male Blackbird foraged in some low branches. Another possible sign of a mammal was a well-defined run through the grass below a barbed-wire fence. Again, there was no fox smell, and no tufts of badger hair on the barbed wire. We weren’t doing well for mammals! But the birds just kept on coming – Blue Tits, Magpies, Greenfinch and a Dunnock. There was a rich song coming from the woods, a bird singing sets of three or four different calls. It was probably a Song Thrush but we didn’t see it.

We arrived a Hadlow Road Station for lunch soon after noon. By that time it was so warm that we had to peel off layers of jumpers to eat in our shirt sleeves. It turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far. A Kestrel swooped past, putting up half a dozen Wood Pigeons, then a Sparrowhawk came past on patrol. We spotted a butterfly going past the signal box, which turned out to be a Brimstone, tempted out of hibernation by the warmth.  In the flower bed in front of the ticket office, Lesser Celandines and Speedwells were blooming amongst the daffodils.

Three ladybirds were basking in the sun. The two red ones were the common 7-spot ladybirds, but we thought for a while that the black one might be the rarer Pine ladybird. But it was just a Harlequin.

After lunch we walked up to Willaston village. They have some very old buildings there, many of which are Grade II listed, meaning they are of national importance. The oldest was Ashtree Farmhouse, which is half-timbered and early 17th century. Willaston Old Hall has a stone over the door saying 1558 but it is believed to be 17th century. However the Old Red Lion on the green is dated to 1631.  On the green itself the great copper beech was a magnificent sight, surrounded by its circle of crocuses. It was planted on 5th May 1935 for George V’s silver jubilee, so is now nearly 80 years old.

We returned via Smithy Lane, spotting Collared Doves on a rooftop and House Sparrows in a beech hedge. A Great Tit was calling. One field of domestic geese had some impressive lines of molehills right across it.  A mammal sighting at last!

Along a narrow section of the path were three sites of Sparrowhawk kills, all within a few feet of each other. This could be the favourite feeding spot of the bird we saw earlier.

Two Buzzards were flying low together, nearly touching, then separating, engaged in their mating dance. Our last bird of the day was a fleeting Bullfinch in some thin trees, seen when we were nearly back at Hooton.  We had lots of spring “firsts” today, so it’s definitely on its way.

Public transport details: Train from Lime Street to Hooton at 10.13, arriving at 10.40. Returned on the 14.29 train from Hooton.

It was a dry, overcast, morning, with occasional fine drizzle and a forecast of heavier rain later. But we opted for an outdoor day and headed for Hoylake, where there was a high tide of 9.7m due at 11.24.

Just outside Hoylake Station was a Pied Wagtail in the car park, and a planter with a sign saying “Incredible Edible Hoylake”. It was empty when we passed but in summer there are food crops to which the residents may help themselves.  The masses of civic daffodils were out, and the street sculpture is impressive, based around a punning use of “knots”. There is a poem called “Knots” by Elizabeth Davey, rope motifs on the bike stands and benches and there are two sculptures of linked birds by David A Annand, one on the pavement and one on the roundabout. All very clever and appropriate.

There was a Magpie on a lawn at The Kings Gap and we hoped to see great flocks of birds on the shore, but when we got there the water was already so high that the birds had flown. There were just gulls bobbing on the waves, Black-headed Gulls, Herring Gulls, Lesser Black-backed Gulls and a few Greater Black-backed Gulls further out. There were occasional fly-bys of small flocks of Oystercatchers, Curlew and Knot.

We walked north east along North Parade, stopping to investigate a garden wall festooned with brightly-coloured fishing floats.

On the rocks behind the Lifeboat Station is the second children’s pirate ship, sister to the Black Pearl at New Brighton, called, appropriately enough, Grace Darling.

We ate lunch in Queen’s Park then walked back to The Kings Gap, where there was now enough beach for us to get along to Red Rocks.  We splashed along the wet, ripply beach, nearly paddling in places! There were “Mermaid’s Purses” (dogfish and small shark egg-cases) entangled in the seaweed.

A Grey Wagtail flew in off the sea, perhaps from Hilbre, and started pecking about in the green algae on the sea wall. A few Redshanks were lingering in the remaining pools, against a backdrop of windsurfers and distant wind farms.

On Red Rocks we spotted a Rock Pipit, a Kestrel swooped past and we heard a Skylark. As we rounded Red Rocks its started to rain intermittently, and as we headed into the blustery wind along the marsh path to West Kirby there were Crows on the path, a Meadow Pipit on the edge of a pond and, in a brief dry spell, a Skylark was fluttering and singing high overhead.

As we neared West Kirby we could see the storm damage from the St Jude storm in late October 2013.  Some beachside lawns had great chunks eaten out of them, which have now been filled in with raw earth, and all the barriers made of concrete “planks” had been chewed up and thrown around, but the fences made of railway sleepers seem to have held.

Public transport details: Train from Lime Street to Hoylake at 10.33, arriving just after 11am. Returned on the 14.31 train from West Kirby.

It was a day of dark, heavy clouds and a forecast of heavy rain later, but it was quite mild. We decided to go to Port Sunlight, where there are several places to shelter, just in case.

We don’t usually visit the Dell at Port Sunlight, but it’s a nice spot in any weather. The gardeners have planted many artful groups of crocuses and snowdrops, each one carefully arranged, and no flower daring to be out of place.

We also noticed lots Daffodil shoots, but they weren’t blooming yet. It was quite a poor day for birds, just a Robin in the hedge by the station; lots of Jackdaws on roofs; a Mistle Thrush in the Dell; Wood Pigeons, Magpies and Crows on the banks and in the trees, and just one Herring Gull overhead.

The Dell is a great spot for trees, though. By the side of the path north of the bridge there’s a Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos), the tallest one in Cheshire at 40 ft (12m). It has clusters of long thorns on the trunk. Next to it is a Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) also about 40 ft high, which is famous for the autumn colours of its foliage. There was also a very nice young Monkey Puzzle tree.

We looked at the house visited by George V and Queen Mary in March 1914, admired the view from the Hillsborough Memorial balcony at the south end of the avenue, looked at the names and medals listed on the War Memorial and dropped into the Port Sunlight Museum shop.

We also looked at two very interesting sundials today. The first was commissioned to mark the Millennium. There is a big-breasted Sphinx, apparently carrying a cross on her back. The bars are marked with the hours, and the shadow of one bar falls on another to mark the time. Below it, on the plinth, is a graph showing “The Equation of Time” from which you can read the minutes before and after the hours, calibrated at five-day intervals throught the year.

In the centre of the avenue leading northwards to the Lady Lever Art Gallery is an even more complex one, called an “annalematic” sundial, in which the shadow-casting object is moved depending on the date. In this case the shadow is cast by the person wanting to know the time.  The little pathway leading into it has tiles marked with the names of months, so you stand on the one for February, in our case. The inner ellipse of white posts marks the hours in British Summer Time, while the outer ellipse of grey posts marks the time in winter.  Sadly, as there was no sun, we couldn’t try it out.

After lunch we went into the Art Gallery to see the exhibition “Turner: travels, light and landscape” including some rarely-shown early watercolours. But I was more interested in a painting I haven’t seen before, kept in the little alcove off the Main Hall. It appeals to the scientist in me, and is called The Forerunner, painted in 1920 by the artist Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale.

It shows an imagined moment in the late 1400s with Leonardo da Vinci demonstrating a small prototype of one of his flying machines to his patrons the Duke and Duchess of Milan, Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d’ Este. Lurking on the left, looking darkly opposed to progress, is the monk Savonarola, who famously organised bonfires of secular books and art in Florence at around the same time.

Public Transport details: Train from Lime Street at 10.13, the Chester train, arriving Port Sunlight at 10.30. Returned from Bebington at 1.53, arriving Liverpool soon after 2pm.

There had been a juvenile Great Northern Diver reported at the north end of Southport Marine Lake on Friday and Saturday, in addition to the two Great White Egrets regularly seen there, so we decided to go hunting! There were engineering works on Merseyrail, so we took the X2 bus instead, having great views from the top deck of the site of the new Thornton relief road. There are just long rows of sticks in the ground so far.

The bus took us to the roundabout at the north end of Lord Street, at the corner of Leicester Street, and we walked down to the prom.  It was a lovely sunny day, but the breeze was brisk and cold.

A flotilla of small yachts were racing around buoys. They might have disturbed the Diver, which was nowhere to be seen, disappointingly. We saw the usual lake dwellers, Canada Geese, Mute Swans, Coots, Moorhens, Mallards, Herring Gulls, Black-headed Gulls, Lesser Black-backed Gulls, as well as a scattering of Magpies and Wood Pigeons. On the side of the north island, on or near a small jetty, there were three Herons and two Oyster Catchers.

We met two other birders with telescopes, who said they hadn’t seen any sign of the Great Northern Diver either. The Great White Egrets regularly roost on the north island, they said, but they fly off about 8 am and return about 4pm, so no chance of seeing them either. They did, however, point out a distant Guillemot at the north end of the lake and said they had seen a Kittiwake earlier, but it wasn’t around when we were looking. We sheltered from the biting wind to have our lunches in this shelter, which looks like someone has been after the lead on the roof!

A large flock of Mute Swans gathered under the shelter, about 25 of them, including four juveniles. We noted five blue Darvic rings on the adults, which have all been reported to Wes Halton at the  North West Swan Study :   LT6, V61, TV4, SV6 and a damaged or dirty one which was probably II6. We haven’t seen any of these before.

One of the juvenile swans seemed to have a green ring, but we couldn’t see the number on it. A green ring might suggest Cheshire, so he or she was far from home.

(Added 22nd February, after hearing back from Wes Halton:
LT6 was a male cygnet when ringed at Forton  on 2/9/12,  so is now 17 months old.
II6 was a 1st yr female when ringed at Stanley Park Blackpool on 2/2/2013 so is now nearly two years old.
V6I was a 1st yr female  when ringed at Stanley Park Blackpool on 23/2/2012 so is now nearly three years old.
TV4 was a 1st yr female when ringed at  Southport Marine Lake on  20/2/2012 so is now nearly three years old.
SV6 was a 1st yr female when ringed at  Millness, Milnthorpe on 20/5/13 so is now nearly two years old.
It looks like the whole lot of them were sub-adults, perhaps best referrred to as  a gang of teenagers.)

We also saw two Coots with rings only on their left legs. Kane Brides’s study of a few years ago marked Coots with coloured rings on both legs, including a metal BTO ring, but these two had just a pair of colours on the left . One was orange over red, and the other was black over yellow. I have asked Wes Halton if he knows anything about them.

As we headed back south we saw two Greylags, and noticed that some of the Black-headed Gulls have their dark heads just coming in. It’s fewer than one in 20 so far. We went south as far as the start of the Trans-Pennine Trail then headed back through Kings Gardens, looking at the progress of the major refurbishment funded by £5.5m National Lottery money. There was a Blue Tit in the park and some Cormorants on the jetty under the pier.

One lady was walking a pair of very pampered pooches in bright onesies!

We admired the gathering of gleaming motor bikes by the start of the pier. There was a three-wheeler like the one Billy Connolly rode on Route 66, a lovely old BSA Sunbeam with a sidecar and several Harley Davidsons, one with a wild boar/”hog” ornament on the front fender.

Public Transport details: X2 bus at 10.15 from Queen Square, arriving Southport Lord Street at 11.35. Returned by the X2 bus at 2.30 from Lord Street Southport.