Our visit to Pennington Flash saw us enjoy another fine day but the water levels were incredibly low and some of the ponds had dried out entirely. There was a dry area of about six feet from the ends of the main lake. This meant that the bodies of water weren’t the main interest for…

The first birding group outing of May was to Macclesfield Forest on a sunny, but initially cool, day. Although we didn’t see a huge number of birds, we did get a couple of good year ticks and the woods by the Teggnose Reservoir car park were ringing with bird song.

On the penultimate day of April we had intended to go to Parkgate for a high-ish tide of 9.9m at 1:10pm but with some time to spare beforehand we suggested that we go to Leowowe Lighthouse beforehand as there had been some Whinchat and Ring Ousel seen there in recent days. Since noone of the…

The birding group visit to Brockholes started to look very unpromising as we approached the site and saw that, where the islands had been, was bare, bulldozed mud with few birds in sight. However, the automatic car park car recognition meant that we would have had to pay for a days parking anyway, so we decided to have a look rather than drive on elsewhere. In the end we were glad we did because we ended up having a good day getting some nice year ticks on a day where it seemed that Spring might not be that far away.