Third Bird Photography: Pennington Flash & Sankey Valley Country Park

Sunday 5 September 2010

Pennington Flash & Sankey Valley Country Park - 5.9.10

Today I thought a trip to Pennington Flash as we hadn't been there in a few years! We started off at the scrape where we had been lucky with Snipe before. We were told that a pair had just passed right in front of the hide and into the undergrowth (probably heard we were coming!!) They did come back and were pestered by the Lapwings.

Snipe

In the meantime there were about four young Herons practicing their gliding techniques as they tried to chase each other off.

Grey Herons

Some rather nice Lapwing were lit up in the (very brief) sunshine.

Lapwing

As usual at this time of year there were more insects than birds.

Hoverfly

Drone-Fly

Hoverfly in Hedge Bindweed

Greenbottle

As it was rather quiet here we decided to check out somewhere else: Sankey Valley Country Park, as it was on our way back. We went into the visitor centre and were met by a very helpful, very tall chap, who is also into photography. He is in the process of building a feeding station that is photography friendly: we must return!

We armed ourselves with a map and ventured out. After an initial tarmacked path we turned to the right up a narrow slightly overgrown pathway where there were lots of Snapdragon-like plants with bees crawling in and out of.

Wild flower

We continued along the path to the meadow where we saw a few Spotted Woods and a Comma Butterfly. On the way back I was stood still at one point and I heard a buzzing round my head - I immediately thought it was a daddy long legs so shook my head, then I thought it's too loud to be a daddy long legs, so asked John what it was - he said it was a Dragonfly trying to land on my hat! Unfortunately it flew off before we could get a nice photo of it sitting on my head posing for the camera!!