At the park

Life (and the awful weather) has got in the way of getting out and about with the camera the past month or so.

I did manage to head out to the local park at the weekend though. There were birds everywhere but mostly flying out of reach of the camera with the amount of dogs bounding about. Still it was good to get out and get some fresh air without having to dry out afterwards!

It's still quite autumnal but most of those leaves are on the floor now, there are still a few splashes of colour around

Weekends in the run up to Christmas are busy busy and with the dark nights I'm not expecting to see much daylight over the next few weeks!

In the Garden

The birds are really taking their time coming back into the garden at the moment. We have a new feeder set up and part of the old one nearer the house, so far i've only seen Robin singing on it. This morning a Coal Tit decided to single handedly try and eat all the sunflower hearts.

Hopefully he'll be back a bit more often now!

Golden Acre and Adel Dam

A Sunday morning visit ended up with us spending hours wandering around, even making it out to Paul's Pond as well as the dam.

Golden Acre was full of people as usual, most of whom seem to miss the extra few yard walk to the dam.

The birds were fighting over the food

The park was full of fungi

Including the amazingly coloured Fly Agaric

We sat quite a while in the Marsh hide, watching Blue, Great & Coal Tits, Robins, Mallards, Moorhens, Chaffinch, a female Bullfinch, a Wren, squirrels and several Nuthatch. It's not often I see these birds and they were a joy to watch.

After a brief chat with one of the regulars about news of possible recent sightings of otters on the dam, which people seem dubious about for now, we headed on to the dam hide. The feeders at the side where busy and out on the water there was a couple of Teal and plenty of Black Headed Gull but not much else about.

We took a walk through the woods and spotted several Long Tailed Tits and a Treecreeper and a lot of squirrels scrabbling about in the undergrowth.

Back near the marsh hide I saw my first Redwings of season, a flock of them being very flighty through a couple of the trees, they didn't land long enough for me to grab a decent photo but I watched through the binoculars till they flew off.

At Pauls pond there was a lone Goosander and the trees in the woods on the walk there were full of Woodpigeons, they were everywhere!

Some other views from the walk

Autumn Days

Saw this Angle Shades Moth on the way home

Eccup

We took a walk around Eccup reservoir on Sunday, first time i've been here in years. It was a little busy with joggers at first, I think we hit the Sunday morning jogging club!

Though we could barely see them we could hear the many geese on the water, I spotted Canada and Greylag. There were a few Mallards around too and the ever present Coots.

I don't think i've actually walked the entire way around before but it's nice walk plenty of different views and the day was perfect for it.

There were lotsof blackberries and elderberries about and we even found a couple of raspberries hidden away too.

A few photos from the walk

Some of wasps looked white, which looked odd till I realised they were covered in pollen from going inside the flowers!

It was a little quiet on the bird front probably because there was so many people about and I didn't get many photos of the ones we did see, I caught the wren by accident!

You can't tell from the photos but this field was filled with Meadow Pipits, Pied Wagtails and Crows