Birds at Birstall

17 December 2013

Retail Park

There's what appears to be a crow's nest in one of the alders outside MacDonald's. Below it a wood pigeon sits preens for a while on a branch then flies down and pecks at the edge of the car park.

House sparrows are hanging around close to the cover of a dense evergreen hedge.

Starlings are checking out a tree near the picnic tables.

3.15 p.m.; Carrion crows are gathering, perching on the top of tall street lamps adding a Bruegellian touch to the wintry panorama of bare trees on the motorway embankment.

Black-headed gulls fly in loose chevrons down the Calder valley as the sky turns rosy in the late afternoon.

In Horbury at sunset a number of starlings have gathered in the Leylandi in the Stan Barstow memorial garden. I can't see them but I can hear their eccentric conversational wolf-whistling.