Wilton Park, Batley

This is a park about ten minutes drive from us. It has some lovely woods with lots of windy paths, a small lake, a play park, bowling green and a putting lawn. There is also the Bagshawe museum and newly reopened Butterfly House. So plenty to see and do there.

It's a nice walk and we tend to go early in the morning though the woods part is never busy as the paths are quite steep in places - easy going down, not so much walking back up! There were plenty of butterflies about without going into the butterfly house. We saw Comma's, Large Whites, Peacocks, Small Tortoiseshell and Red Admirals. Unfortunately none of them were willing to sit still long enough for a photo - even on the Buddleia's!


I saw my second ever Jay here and my first Nuthatch though today was pretty quiet. There were plenty of Blackbirds, Woodpigeons and an adult and juvenile Robin. Plus a few Squirrels one of which dropped a Beech nut out of a tree that landed at our feet.

This Sycamore tree had strange bark on it, quite different from every other tree around it.


Down at the lake the model boaters where out in force as always on a Sunday morning. The birds pretty much ignore them at first but as more boats turned up the Geese loudly shouted their disapproval!

There were Greylag and Canada Geese. Along with the beautiful guy below, which thanks to the folks at Bird Forum tell me is a Bar Headed Goose, loved the markings on him. I guess it's an escapee from somewhere. He was quite happy with the Canada Geese though.


There were also plenty of Mallards, lots of youngsters and females too. A Moorhen flew down out of a tree on the island in the middle. Now in amongst all these I spotted another bird that I had not seen before and managed to get a blurry shot before the boats scared them all towards the island. Again thanks to the Bird Forum folks, I discovered that I had seen my first Red-Crested Pochard. I wasn't expecting to add a new tick today!


You can just see it to the right of the flapping Mallard!

We spent the rest of our time in the play park for the little one and as is appropriate as summer is finally here we had messy ice creams!! A great early morning walk and a new lifer!