Travelling to Arnside on the 15th of April to attend a program the next day at Leighton Moss: Birdsong for Beginners

At Leighton Moss RSPB Nature Reserve, they always have something or the other going on. During the months of spring and summer, they have a monthly program of familiarising bird lovers with listening to birdsongs. Well, they are using the word "songs" in a slightly loose way; actually, birds communicate with several different kinds of vocals that include the full-flavoured song, but also includes different kinds of bird calls such as the territory call, the alarm call, the no-reason call (which means we haven't yet figured out the reason) and the other inter-bird clucks and tweets that we know little about. 

To attend this early morning program, I had to travel to the neighbourhood an evening earlier. I stayed at a YHA (Youth Hostel Association)-affiliated private place called the Arnside Independent Hostel. Located on Red Hills road uphill of the Kent river, this place offered a lot of bells and whistles for the room, which, alas, was terrible. I paid £47 for a night's stay which is a check-in after 17:30 and a check-out at 10:00 the next morning. The room was about 50 sq. feet of carpet space with an attached shower (but no toilet) and a double bunk bed. It was not only too small but located beside a busy corridor that links their sitting room and restaurant to each other. 

Arnside Independent Hostel and Study Centre

Lovely view of the Kent river from the picnic area of the hostel

Their resident cat

The footpath that climbs down to the bank of the Kent river

A multi-site arrow pointer at the bank

View of the Kent river and the far bank

In the restaurant, I had a dinner of lamb tagine with rice. The lady cook informed me that a tagine is a Moroccan preparation that is made in the oven. The lamb is added to a gravy made from onions, spices and cooking oil. It sounded much like the way Indians and other south Asians cook their food. It tasted nice too!

After dinner, I went for a stroll down to the Kent river and a beach alongside it. Well, strictly speaking, it is not a beach but a river bank, but it had plenty of sand on it. The walk down to the river bank was quaint. It was a pedestrian footpath that plunged down 100 feet over a distance of about 300m or so. Down at the bank, there were a few people, some with kids. Others were simply going somewhere along the thin cemented pathway that bordered and ran parallel to the bank. It showed directions to Silverdale (the neighbouring city that actually has the Leighton Moss reserve), the town centre, the church, the market and the Arnside railway station!

I took in the fresh air, clicked a few pictures, and returned to the hostel to spend the night. I did sit for a while outside the hotel in the bracing night on one of the picnic tables laid out here. Thereafter, with nothing else to do, I even went to the sitting room to sit by the fireplace and read a few pages from a book. There were others in the room, and I joined them for a bit to discuss matters related to travelling as a tourist in the South Lake district (the area to which Arnside and Silverdale belong). In fact, I learned that the Arnside-Silverdale area is one of UK's AONBs (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty).

In any case, I woke up the next morning (Sunday, Easter) to travel by a private taxi that I had hired by telephone a few days earlier to Leighton Moss. The driver, a lady by the name of Mrs Jane, told me that she and her husband ran this taxi service. She charged me £10 to take me a distance of about 2.5 miles. However, I am not complaining since I had no other alternative but to hire a cab. 

Will write about the actual program in my next post.

Please note: text in red are links. Click on them for more information.

Redoux: Visit to RSPB Leighton Moss Bird Reserve

I made a repeat trip to this excellent bird reserve located in Silverdale in the district of Cumbria. The reason: haven't gone for birding in a long, long time and wanted to do it as I was missing it sorely.

The repeat visit came on a weekend that the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) had announced as the Annual Garden Bird Counting weekend. The aim of this was to watch birds that visited one's garden for an hour and to record all the birds that visited the garden during that hour. I realised early on that this would not work for me as I live in hospital quarters, and there isn't much of a garden there. 

Hence, I decided to go back to his lovely reserve at Silverdale. Silverdale is located north of Lancaster. It is a small town, and is advertised as the best location for a quiet holiday by the authortities themselves. Just five minutes walk from the station is the Leighton Moss Nature Reserve. It is owned and maintained by the RSPB. There is no entrance fee. As you enter, you are into their visitor centre which also has a display of the best ornithological books on sale, a mix of other kinds of merchandise including tee-shirts, cups, etc. and a row of sales counters. Just behind is a staircase that takes one up to their cafe. To the right of the sales counters, one goes past the sales items to a door that opens out on the back of the building and directly on the reserve area. 

Here, one can stroll to their main show area with a canopy from under which you can see and photograph garden birds that stroll the grounds (such as pheasants and dunnocks) or that alight on the feeders to eat the delicious bird food left there by the reserve volunteers (such as tits, robins, chaffinces, redpolls, finches, blackbirds, and even doves and the wood pigeon). Once you are done taking these photos, you have the option to walk to any one of the five different bird hides spread out over the grounds. 

In the event, I visited all five. While the first one is located a very short distance away, there are hides that are upto 2 km away. I had great fun observing birds that wade or swim in the various water-bodies, as well as those that fly here and there. I saw various kinds of these water-birds today. But, most of all, I saw my first bittern today from the Lower Hide (the one that is farthest from the visitor centre).

Not surprisingly, there were a fair number of casual and more dedicated visitors. Many, like me, were birder-photographers, and some had cameras far more advanced than mine and lenses that looked oh-so-mighty. Some even had telescopic viewers. I did chat a bit with some of them, and learned that they were into serious birding only since the last several years (like me, too).

After my birding, I visited the cafe for lunch. They routinely give a 10% discount to guests who visit the centre by public transport or on bikes. I used that to get a dicount. I had a vegetarian quiche, (as the  kitchen had run out of chicken-based items) that tasted quite delicious. 

Here are some pictures that I took:

Male pheasant

Male Chaffinch

Male Mallard duck

Female pheasant

Nuthatch

Female Blackbird

Great Tit

Brown squirrel eating up the bird grain

Egret with fish in its bill

Teals

Teals again

Marsh harrier, record shot

Blue Tit

Robin

Female Blackbird

Grazing cow on the reserve

Cormorants

Pintail (centre)

The entrance to the lower hide

Cormorant drying its wings

My attire on this day 

Watch tower built from Heritage Lottery Fund

The Quiche I had for lunch

I returned home again via train. The journey was as unexciting as the journey I had undertaken TO the reserve in the morning. The only note of interest might be the fact that since the past two weekends, and for the next 6-8 weekends, train services from Blackpool North to Preston do not run and are replaced by BUS services. This is because the railways are carrying out repairs and renovation work between these two stations. While the buses are luxury buses, it does take nearly an hour to travel by a bus as conpared to a train journey which takes only 28-30 minutes.