Summer 2019Birds at Hollingworth Lake

By Ian Kimber

Hollingworth Lake, nestled in the Pennine foothills, is well-known as a local attraction, drawing visitors far and wide to walk its circumference, enjoy an ice-cream or coffee, or generally spend an enjoyable day out with the family in beautiful countryside.

Hundreds of mallard, Canada geese, black-headed gulls and the odd mute swan will approach almost within touching distance when visitors at the rowing club car park offer bread and titbits by the water’s edge.

Beyond this, most casual visitors will likely not notice the wide variety of other bird species that can been countered with regular and careful observation.

To see the best birds, typically you need to be an early riser.

The Lake acts as a cross-Pennine resting point for migrating ducks and swans, but these are wary beasts and will be off in an instant as soon as any boats are out on the water.

Watch out for wild whooper swans with their straight necks and yellow bills. From late autumn until spring, a bevy of swans seen out in the middle of the water could well be this enigmatic species, en route to or from their Icelandic breeding grounds.

Keep an eye open too, for odd ducks – if you see an all-black duck with a yellow bill (or even a small group of these), there is a fair chance of them being common scooter, a marine species that breeds in northern Europe and Russia.

Visit the nature reserve in the south-east corner, and you will find a small enclosed pool surrounded by willows, and a visitor’s hide where you can sometimes get close views of wading birds.

If you are especially lucky, a fleeting glimpse of cyan and orange, the kingfisher, which will sometimes perch on handy branches over the water.

In spring and summer, watch out for common sandpipers, bobbing as they search for invertebrates along the water’s edge.

Lapwings (aka Peewits, after their plaintive call) are common, but a close encounter reveals how beautiful their plumage really is.

In winter, you may get closer to some of the diving ducks, such as tufted duck or goosander, both regular species.

In spring, great-crested grebes will perform their head-shaking, weed-carrying breeding ritual.

Summer is a time for breeding species, and things quieten down from a birder’s perspective, as the local birds get down to rearing their young, busy with collecting nesting material or food for their brood.

However, there is still the opportunity to see something spectacular.

If you look carefully among the flying black-headed gulls, you may find a more graceful version, likely to be a wandering common tern.

These elegant species, with their black caps, pointed wings and long, forked tails, are a joy to watch as they dive into the water in search of small fish.

Keep an eye open on buoys and posts in the water on which they like to rest.

In the surrounding woodland, one of the commonest, yet most beautiful birds, is the goldfinch.

Look carefully and you may see a plump and rosy bullfinch, and keep an eye out overhead for birds of prey - kestrels, sparrowhawks and buzzards are all present in the area, but tend not to stay around too long for careful observation. Sometimes you may find a kestrel perched atop a tree, but sparrowhawks will dash by in an instant, whereas buzzards can be seen soaring overhead.

With regular observation, it is possible to see around 100 bird species around the Lake itself, and over the years, the reserve has attracted the occasional major rarity, bringing twitchers from far and wide.

In 1983, a collared pratincole from southern Europe was a superb find for a local birder.

In 1993 another southern visitor, black-winged stilt appeared, but stayed for only a few minutes.

In November 2010, an American pied-billed grebe had twitchers descending from all over the country.

More recently, a ghostly glaucous gull from the high Arctic spent much of the winter here in 2018.

Whatever the time of year, there’s always something to see.

Dust off your binoculars and see what you can find.