A Winter Walk

My regular "nature notes" column :-

Early in the New Year I spent a clear frosty morning walking one of my favourite local routes: down across the fields below where we live to join the towpath of the Montgomery Canal, then along past Buttington Wharf towards Pool Quay, turning back along the main road and crossing to the stile opposite to join the Offa’s Dyke route across the fields back towards Buttington, then around the back of the new Smithfield before re-joining the canal towpath near the Rhallt and following it back into Welshpool.

It had been a cold night and everywhere sparkled with frost. The canal itself was mostly iced over, but the covering was fairly thin, and absent wherever there was significant water movement. A couple of moorhens paddled away from me as I walked on from Buttington Wharf, their white tail feathers flicking as they did so. Several blackbirds skidded across from my side of the canal to the other, where the trees rising up the bankside seemed alive with birdsong, mostly robins. A wren was prospecting among tangled stems and lead litter; this is a bird that suffers a lot if we have extended periods of hard weather. For the whole of my walk along this section of the canal, there were buzzards mewing overhead.

As I approached the meeting with the main road, a pair of mute swans glided out of the marshy pools opposite and proceeded along the canal in the Welshpool direction. These swans may be mute by name, but though they are certainly a good deal quieter than our winter whooper and Bewick’s swans, they’re not completely silent, and the cob, or male, hissed at me as they paddled past.

The first field I crossed was crisped by the frost and easy walking. Sheep stood and watched me go by. A few crows were among them, pecking at the cold ground or perhaps looking for insect life among the sheep muck. The path gets quite close to the river bank in places. Water birds paddling noisily away downriver were probably goosanders, large sawbilled ducks, though I couldn’t be sure; they moved like them. There were mallard about too, and heron lurched across but didn’t land.

It was a Monday and the market was busy, with the auctioneer in full flow and big trucks standing ready to ferry the animals to such places as Longtown. The path around the back of the market is gravelled but leads into a small area of rough grassland dotted with dead heads of thistles. Finches and tits were active in the overgrown hedge, and there was a noisy crowd of fieldfares in the field on the other side of the railway. I had to climb the gate, which was locked, and waited for ages to cross the busy main road and head back into town. I hadn’t expected to see much more on that last section of my walk, so I was delighted to encounter a busy band of long-tailed tits flitting through bushes on the far side soon after I’d got back onto the towpath, and a pair of goldcrests - really tiny birds - inspecting the branches of an old hawthorn tree near the back of W.R. Davies’ garage. A very enjoyable winter walk.