Park visit brightened winter’s day
ON a cold winter’s day, it was good to reach the warm visitor centre of Anglers Country Park, near Wakefield.
This was a perfect location for the Rochdale Field Naturalists’ Society coach trip, especially as the walk entered the first ever nature reserve.
While walking along, listening to the calls of tits, chaffinches and tree sparrows we stopped to admire ferns in adjacent damp ditches and admire a perfect specimen of golden scaly male fern.
Reaching Wintersett and Cold Hiendley reservoirs, a flock of cautious pinkfooted geese peeked over the skyline of the meadow.
Through the curtain-like bare branches of birch and willow there were tantalising glimpses of swans with well-grown cygnets, elegant gadwalls, and showy, plumaged male goldeneyes.
The wet woodlands were full of fungi. The birches held their usual birch polypore, but also a puzzling pale species of oyster fungus and the somewhat rarer, hoof fungus. There were many blushing bracket fungi in various shades of reddening, as well as turkey tail, hairy curtain crust and velvet shank.
We also encountered the black jelly blobs of witches’ butter, candle snuff and the purply silver leaf fungus.
Outside the woodlands in a sheltered field-corner we were pleased to see a few redwings and a surprising 18 blackbirds searching and poking the grassland among companionable sheep.
Eventually we reached the boundary wall constructed by Charles Waterton in the early 1820s around his huge Haw Park estate. A man well before his time, Waterton was a well-travelled, renowned, naturalist/author who eventually walled his entire estate, making him the first person ever to make a nature reserve, to construct bird boxes and to erect several small circular stone huts or ‘hides’ to observe the wildlife.
In the lovely old sandstone wall, our leader Sonia Allen was delighted to see a small nest hidden away in a cavity,
It was winter-quiet, the silence barely broken by the sighing breeze in the tops of the conifers when we were suddenly aware of an explosion of movement - a flock of small birds, travelling together for safety whirled through the trees using contact calls, moving steadily, exploring all possibilities for food.
Most were tit species, coal, blue and great tits, but they were accompanied by chaffinches and a nuthatch. In five minutes they were gone, and the silence fell again.
Among the chaffinches, we finally saw a beautiful brambling - a winter visitor from northern climates.