Wildlife Watch Water birds to look out for in the Calder Valley
skipping stone to stone along the Calder, coots, moorhen, greedy gulls, and, as we shall see, various rarer characters.
Anyone passing through Sowerby Bridge has a good chance of seeing the Sowerby Bridge geese. Nesting around the bridges over the Calder and Ryburn, they are known for incursions into human territory: outside the leisure centre, the taxi rank, strolling pavements, blocking traffic.
Their cousins, Canada geese, are almost ubiquitous. I watch them from my window, sailing the canal, nibbling towpath grasses.
Less numerous are Muscovy ducks - typically poised at the canalside, gazing into water, at Sowerby and Hebden Bridge. These grumpy looking birds are also outnumbered by gregarious goosanders: green-headed males, whitebreasted females - whose brownish head feathers look like Mohicans.
I watch goosanders mostly between Sowerby Bridge and Luddenden Foot, vanishing underwater for fish, reemerging and often swimming in pairs.
Preferring densely vegetated freshwater, coots and moorhen are likelier to be seen in habitats like the lake at Shibden, or the pond at Copley Nature Reserve, than the canal. Like balls of black feathers, they are visibly differentiated by their beaks - red for moorhen, white in coots, though chicks of either species sport the former.
You see them drifting on open water, pecking for fish, tottering across the bank prodding spindly legs in and out of sandy shallows, seeking invertebrates or fruit.
Similarly coloured, but much larger, the Calder Valley’s cormorants are often seen at dusk, standing sentry on river logs or the railings of abandoned bridges. Gothic, almost prehistoric, the iconic cormorant is a dark jewel in the Calder Valley’s crown.
The above is just a snapshot of the water birds abounding in the Valley, whose aquatic habitats range from moorland reservoirs outside Todmorden, to the eastern reaches of the canal as it threads through Elland, stately swans gliding like silken flags.
Often, though, I needn’t stray far beyond my door for avian variety.
At the confluence of two rivers, a canal running through it, Sowerby Bridge is blessed with birds throughout the year - including a few surprises.
Only recently, on a gloomy, wet Sunday, I was crossing the bridge over the Calder, when my focus was arrested by a shimmering shape reflecting on the water in a bluey blur. A kingfisher - flying too fast to hold in view, but a brilliant reminder, as it sped into the distance, of the dazzling diversity of birds attracted to the watery wonderland of the Calder Valley.