April 23rd – A waiting game. Still she patiently sits on her nest, secluded in the safety of the disused canal basin in Pleck, Walsall. Her mate patrols the canal on the mainline nearby, and today she had mallards for company.
It’ll be interesting to see if she has eggs, or if this is a dry run. Quite safe in there, the nest is surrounded by fences all round, inaccessible to the public.
I love watching the swans.
March 24th – Compression of the neck… herons are more and more common now. Barely a towpath ride goes by without seeing one, and on longer rides like last week, I’ll see five or six, which must be a symbol of how clean the waters are now and how the fish population must by bountiful, too.
This proud bird was on the towpath in Pleck, just by the wall of Rollingmill Street Cemetery, pretty much the industrial heart of Walsall. Wary of me but not skittish, by dismounting the bike and taking things gently I got close enough for some decent pictures, I think.
I adore herons.
March 4th – A beautiful day, but still windy. The golden light of spring shone its benevolent best over the canal at Walsall, and it felt good. What was really impressive was that I saw the Pleck kingfisher again – well, actually kingfishers, as one seemed to be seeing another off the territory near the Scarborough Road bridge. I couldn’t get the camera out in time to take a picture, but there was no mistaking the twin cobalt blue flashes. They both seemed to go for cover in the trees somewhere in the bottom picture.
Interestingly, I rode the canal through to Goscote on the way home in the light, too, and saw one there. It’s clearly a great year for these beautiful little birds. I hope I get a good picture of one soon.
March 2nd – Fiddling with a next camera. After a brief flirtation with a Canon at Christmas – I hated it – I’ve just acquired the new Panasonic TZ70, the upgrade to last year’s TZ60. I’ll be twiddling with it for a while to find out what’s improved – and low light handheld images have definitely improved.
People often think I must carry a large camera around; I don’t – I just go for a little compact in my pocket, that’s easy to pull out and take spontaneous images with. I’ve tried big stuff in the past and find the size to be a hinderance.
No doubt for a few weeks I’ll be swearing at moved, changed or lost features – but having tried alternatives, I’m still resolutely a Panasonic chap.
As an aside, the works are very intense at Bentley Mill Way under the aqueduct – I won’t look at the plans as I want to gradually see the outcome. But that’s a very big culvert in there, I must say.
February 24th – Little firsts are the art of getting through winter. Little, tiny victories that mark the passage from darkness to light, and tonight, on my way home from work, it was my first normal-time commute in something approximating daylight, rather than darkness.
OK, it was wet, windy, murky, verging on the brink daylight, but it was perceptibly not dark. A little victory.
The joy of this almost totally took my mind off what an unutterably foul ride it was…
February16th – The greyness continued, and hung over the morning commute like a portent. Wet, dark and with a building wind, I edged into Darlaston over the River Tame at Bentley Bridge. The flood channel here has never been pretty, but on this awful Monday morning, it had something about it.
Maybe, somewhere downstream, there was a brighter day.
February 11th – I noticed back in the summer that the old Pleck Working Mens Club was empty and derelict. I find it sad, as I went here once or twice, years ago, for parties and even a wedding. Like all such clubs, beer was cheep and the comfort basic, but there was real community here and the atmosphere was relaxed.
Sadly, like so many clubs, it’s fallen victim to social change, member numbers dwindled and now there’s a planning application for 11 dwellings on this site.
This will never be a club again, I guess, so any re-use of the land is good; but anything built here will be haunted, I hope, by late night shouts of ‘Pint of the usual Alec!’ and ‘Soon be time for the bingo!’
How times change.
February 3rd – A nice sunset, and an excellent moon tonight. I caught the red sky over the M6 from Pleck and I was struck by the apparent speed and flat landscape.
My goodness, it was a cold run home tonight. Very enjoyable ride, though.
January 21st – On a grey, depressing day, I stopped to check out the new magic bicycle symbols added to the footpath in Pleck just by the motorway Bridge on the Darlaston Road. I guess this is part of the commitment to safer cycling routes with the road improvement scheme here. It’s dismal.
A bit of tactile paving, blacktop some verges and a splurge of magic paint. A grim, shared use path hazardous for pedestrians and cyclists, along the front of a factory gates with little visibility.
The people who design and implement this rubbish aren’t cyclists. They aren’t thinking about cyclists. They’re ticking boxes on a form to satisfy a requirement.
This is why we can’t have nice things, people…
January 13th – I know these are poor quality pictures, but I hope you’ll forgive me just this once because they show something astonishing: it’s a kingfisher, by the canal. That on its own is notable, but not remarkable; however this fellow was just in the bushes overhanging the Walsall Canal next to the Scarborough Road Bridge in Pleck, Walsall.
If Walsall were a city, we could call this place inner city; it’s one of the most densely populated parts of town, and not the kind of place one would expect to see such a glorious bird.
These were very hurried, very long range shots (30x zoom) on a dark, overcast day in a rain shower. A Community Payback team were working not 20 metres away.
This is stunning to me. I never thought I’d see such a thing in a place like that.
A real find on a very grey day.
BrownhillsBob's #365daysofbiking 