We went to Brockholes not expecting much since it is summer holidays so there are kids running around everywhere and we knew the reserve was right next to the motorway from passing it on many other trips. However I was very pleasantly surprised to get several new species for my year list and life list.
We wasted most of the first hour there going to the (not very good) café and then due to the lack of signage we ended up walking up a ridge, away from the lake and having to go back on ourselves. All wasn't lost though as in a very small section of woodland signed as "The Deep Dark Woods" which was there so kids could build dens, we came across a mixed flock of tits with the first new bird of the day mixed in. Two treecreepers skulked up and down the trees, darting from one to the other. It was quite tricky for René to get any kind of photo at all but he just about managed in the end.
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| Treecreeper |
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| Common Blue Damselfly |
Luckily after some backtracking over the car park and past the children's park area we got back near the lake.
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| Cormorants - also new for the 2014 list |
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| 3x female Tufted Duck were an ID challenge so I was glad we had a photo since these were lifers in addition to being new for 2014. |
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| Common Darter Dragonfly |
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| Grey Heron - already on my lists but still always nice to watch |
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| Great Crested Grebe Juvenile - not new for the list but pretty cool to see the grebe on the right side resting it's legs behind it! |
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| Female Whitethroat - new for 2014 and the life list :) |
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Sparrowhawk - also new for both lists.
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In addition to these new birds, we also saw Sand Martins skimming over the no. 1 pool They darted by so fast that the photos of them were very poor or mostly missing any Sand Martins at all but these little missiles brought my grand total for the year (which I started in June) up to 80.
Brockholes certainly has potential so we will be going back in the autumn when hopefully there should be even more new birds after the migration has started. Next time however we will give the café a miss and walk straight to the path around the lake (past the children's play area). All in all though the bird-to-time ratio was very good and parking was only around a fiver for the three hours or so we were there (£7 max. charge) with no entry fee.
As we finished the walk and headed back to the car park there was an ice-cream van where we asked for two "99s". What we got each was one scoop of blue coloured ice-cream with a squirt of sauce and a flake shoved in for £1.40 each. A stoat ran in front of us into the undergrowth and my ice cream sadly followed it a few licks later, my advice is take your own food/treats but aside from that Brockholes was a great destination and since it wasn't the food we had gone for anyway, we were both happy.
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