A little walk to Bentley Bridge to grab a few things followed by nipping into Wednesfield and back along the canal.

Took a damp walk today to grab a handful of things from the shops along the canals. The weather was cool and drizzled for most of the time I was out but the wind was low enough to make the drizzle not much of a problem for my glasses :)

Hopping down from Deans Road to the canal taking the path on the south east side of the canal that runs alongside Barbel Drive and Perch close. For the purposes of patch notes I'm going to call this section Deans Rd to Cinema when ever I make notes and note specific place names I'll use when I first use them. The first section is the bridge I descended from (Deans Rd) to the 'new bridge' (about 30 years old now, but didn't exist when I was a kid therefore new) that holds Wednesfield Way. I'm going to call this section three bridges for the two bridges and the ghost railway bridge that now has a silver arch bit of public art. In this section I normally see dozens of Coots, Mallards, Pigeons and Black Headed Gulls along with a couple of Moorhens and today was quite (as expected in the drizzle) with the coots and mallards living their best life and a solitary moor hen chilling out on the water. The moorhens like this spot because there is a bit of a public garden in the triangle of land where the roads meet with the canal providing one side and they love to feed under the rose bushes. Most of the pigeons were staying dry roosting under the new bridge.

The next section I don't really have a name for so I think I'll start referring to it as 'between the bridges' for reasons that will become apparent. In my head this section is like two different sections depending on the side of the canal I'm on. On this side it used to feel really rural before all the building work that created Wednesfield Way and the retail park I'm going to and the other side felt really urban with it falling down to the road. Now it's switched over. The side that used to show evidence of mining, old railways with shadows of field patterns and plow marks last farmed in WW2 is now housing and the other side with the remnants of a hawthorn hedgerow now feels the most rural despite hearing the roaring of cars on both sides unless the wind is really low. Generally this is a good spot for song birds, Magpies and Canada Geese as well as the aforementioned mallards, coots and black headed gulls but today only the Mallards and the Coots where evident with Magpies, Pigeons and the songbirds mostly staying out of the rain. Only a solitary blackbird was out and about but I heard a pair of robins on the other side.

The final section of this part of the walk I'm going to call the twin bridges (despite there being three :) ) The modern bridge that links Wednesfield Road to Wolverhampton Road (the road it was built to replace) that carries a lot of traffic to the hospital and the old bridge that delighted me when I discovered it as a teenager are the major bridges. The old bridge has only had foot traffic on it all my life and I'm glad they kept it when they built the new road but I wish it was easier to walk under it these days as the tow path has been shifted to bypass that section when it was upgraded to form a portion of National Cycle Route 81. This section ends at the Cinema but just past the cinema there is a another bridge. The canal used to branch here and one of the locks to this section remains before it's filled in and crossing this stub is a loverly cast iron bridge. If you know the canals of the midlands you know this pattern of bridge and you'll also know the places the iron was worn down by the ropes pulled by generations of horses pulling the barges. Another spot I fell in love with when I discovered it at about 13. This section is normally populated by Mallards, Coots, Canada Geese and Mute Swans. Today it was all Mallards and Coots.

Totals for this section are 12 Mallards (4 female, 7 male and one that looked female but not quite, maybe a young male or a cross breed?), 12 coots, a moorhen, a black bird and a bunch of pigeons I didn't count in the dark. Not bad for half a mile of industrial wasteland in the rain :)

Shopping at Bentley Bridge didn't go quite as well as expected so I popped into what the locals optimistically call 'the village'. It always seems odd to me because I grew up a little closer to Willenhall and Bilston both of which call their town centres towns. My partners grandparents came from closer to the village so it's the village to her. The fact all open land between Wolverhampton and Wednesfield was filled in by housing and industry by the early 50s and the town absorbed into the Wolverhampton district in the 60s it's the village. So while in patch notes I'll call the place Wednesfield I might also call it 'the village' in passing. Don't be confused. It's an urban district on the East of Wolverhampton. And while you can still walk from the town centre to open fields (if fit enough) you can do that anywhere in the UK. I'll do a proper write up on each of the patches later but each will get an introduction like this when first introduced. This sort of post will get shorter in future with the exposition put elsewhere, hey the data is separate already :)

In the village I spotted a pair of Pied Wagtails (one of my favourite species and a mainstay of British Urban life, at least in regions with canals and supermarket car parks :) ) right by the church. So while I might sometimes mock the way locals call the tiny urban centre the village it still has one of the birds you'd see on village greens or around a village pond. I bloody love Pied Wagtails, cheeky little buggers and it always brightens my day when I see a pair. Mostly because the soft side of my Autistic nature means I get upset if I can't see the mate and start worrying. Hard to explain to an NT person but wow I suffer a lot with empathy sometimes. Mostly hard to explain because Autism has been misrepresented in media for 50 years based on the writings of a Nazi but that's a whole different blog post :) Anyway shopping done I returned to the area of the church to look down on the canal because a couple of weeks ago, just before Christmas, I saw my first Kingfisher on that section of canal. No such luck today but I spotted a tree almost covered in mostly house sparrows with potentially some others mixed in. I wish I'd got my camera with me to get a few shots of them and help identify the the rogue birds mixed in but I didn't but, and an important but, I do have a new spot that will potentially allow me to get pictures of some really common birds that don't generally pose for me from the footbridge here.

Noted spots from this section are 2 Pied Wagtails, 10+ House Sparrow, other Sparrow sized and coloured birds.

Hopping back onto the canal at Rookery Street (and therefore only walking on the traditional muddy towpath for about 20m) towards the Cinema this is a section I don't regularly walk but after spotting the winter Kingfisher last month I might walk (or potentially cycle) more often this year. Generally I'll either join here or at the far side of the village and walk towards the Cinema and note recording from this section as a patch of it's own. The canal here is the Wyrley and Essington Canal which is known locally as the Curley Wyrley due to the fact it follows the natural gradient of the land with a meandering path unlink many of the other local canals with lots of locks and straight lines. That means that there are so many different spots really close together. One part can be wind swept and sparse and around the next bend (and there is always a next bend) the canal will be wider, have overhanging trees, shade or reed beds. It really packs in the different habitats. That's why there are going to be so many patches so close together. I don't visit them all at once and they are all distinct enough that they deserve their own notes. Anyway along this section there are another 12 mallards (5 female, 7 male), 12 coots and four moorhens. There could have been a lot more but just like the time I saw the kingfisher (and later heard but didn't see) I was scanning the low branches of the trees on the other side and mentally scoring them as kingfisher perches.

At the cinema I decided to hop over the old bridge and take the return journey from the twin bridges to the three bridges on the north-west bank along the section that used to be almost uninterrupted hawthorn bushes when I first discovered them but it now a lot more patchy. This is a haven for songbirds in the warmer months and a spot about 20 years ago I saw water voles. I haven't seen them since, only brown rats, but it has ideal potential for brown rats so you'd expect them to have the upper hand. I fully expect that a jerk chicken spot and garage down the bank is the reason why there are no voles and a lot less rats than you'd expect here. But a few more large water fowl flew in from their more sheltered spots to the prime feeding ground and alongside the exact same numbers of mallard and coots I spotted earlier there are now a pair of adult Mute Swans, and six Canada Geese in a quartet and a pair hanging out on the water and towpath and the robins are not only calling but singing and showing their faces bobbing in and out of the bushes. Somebody, the council?, the canal and river trust?, I dunno, has cleared a lot of the ground cover cutting back the brush. Not a completely bad thing, it was acting as a trap for rubbish and now provides a place for the moorhens and geese to feed and nest but previously it was ground cover for rodents and other birds. On the whole it's probably a good thing but as I've already mentioned this used to be a home for lots of rodents and now they are less visible and when they go so do the other things that eat them and those are some of the bits of wildlife that excite the sort of folks that rarely think about where rodents live.

After popping back up on the roads I took a slightly less direct route home via Eastfield Park. Despite this being, as the crow flies, the closest open green space to my house and the closest place designated a park I rarely visit here and have never been here with a camera and bins. This was open brownfield when I was a kid and living a couple of miles away I only knew the place as second hand from school friends who called it 'the brickie' well every Black Country kid had a spot in their patch called the brickie and this was only one of about half a dozen in my secondary school class the fact you can't see it from any of the roads in the area meant it was only a short cut between different spots when I was hanging out with friends from this area. I'd been living here for a couple of years before it clicked that the park my eldest son visited with his friends was the same place. When he said the park I always thought of East Park which is the largest park on this side of town and like I said the kids of my generation who lived in this street would have called East Park, the park, and Eastfield Park, the brickie. Anyway it should have a lot of potential but I've never seen it. Most of the wildlife seems to stick to the edges where it can get to the cover of urban gardens. I'm sure there is a fox den here but I've never looked around for it. The wild life is frequently limited to a few kids drinking cider in the evenings and like today people either waiting for their man or the man and the hooded and masked chap in the climbing frame getting increasingly annoyed at his phone looked like a very low level 'man' who hasn't yet learned he's meant to keep the customers waiting and not the other way around. The chap in the bike shelter could have just been swapping layers on his damp ride (which is what it looked like at first) or might have been his buddy watching his back. Anyway the wildlife spotted was exactly what I'd see in my garden a few hundred metres away. Magpies and a grey squirrel hopping into a garden on my approach were the high lights. I've noted this patch under it's name but it's not somewhere I visit often skirting it when I walk to the canal and only really going through it when I'm on my single speed bike taking the route of least traffic pinch points from the canal to home.

A long one with not a lot of content :)