The Manchester Birder

The back six months of 2025 have been surprising and brilliant from a birding perspective.  It hasn't been an easy year personally or in terms of trying to make a Big Year target given how poor the east coast migration in the north has been, but there has still been an amazing array of wildlife on show.  Looking back at July to December 2025 to match the half way point review I did on July 1st I am reminded how much of a privilege and a joy this hobby is. Looking back: July Following the trip for Blyth's Reed Warbler and White-winged Scoter on July 1st, I was lucky to have a week of local brilliance with Lesser Scaup at Pennington Flash, and the only Little Stint I saw all year at Rumworth Lodge.  Quail in Lancashire along with Lesser Yellowlegs, and then a long run south for Night Heron in Worcestershire kept the year list ticking over.  But the best bird of July was the Laughing Gull that spent a couple of days on the beach in the sunshine at Penzance coinciding wi...

  My first Ring-necked Duck wasn't one.  There was a female long-stayer at Lunt Meadows in October 2022, and I drove the half hour or so across to see it.  Everyone I walked past from the carpark said it was showing well from the screen.  Can't miss it mate, it's so close in.  Of course when I got there the only duck in evidence was a hybrid Mallard farmyard duck.  Eventually I found a flock of Tufted Duck and there was one unusual looking bird amongst them.  A little far out for my binoculars and it was the days between scopes after breaking my old one.  I took a series of photos and then told all my birding friends that I'd seen the Ring-necked Duck.  Sometimes we see what we're hoping to see rather than what's there. Looking through the photos a week later and with the benefit of removing that expectation of an easy to find bird I could see that I had a range of rubbish photos of a scruffy female Tufted Duck and it didn't look anything lik...

If there's a phenomenon more boring than Spotify Wrapped I've yet to bump into it.  I literally couldn't care less about my own listening habits, let alone knowing  other people's.  Why do we think anyone else cares that our musical age is 69 (my actual musical age apparently - I like early 70s music)?  Why am I bothered that Slight Return by the Bluetones is (bizarrely) my most listened to song, or that I've listened to 15,000 minutes of podcasts or that I'm in the top 17% of listeners to the Football Ramble this year?  And yet, in the face of this understanding that nobody else is even mildly interested in my personally meaningful statistics in any way, I'm going to do exactly that for my birding year.  Hypocrisy, thy name is blog content. Once December arrives people begin to ask each other what the best wild experiences are of the year, and the answer depends on how you look at what we mean by "best".  Do we mean rarest?  New for me birds?...

I'd always planned a big old day out to end my Big Year in style, though I anticipated it being sometime the other side of Christmas.  But then the streak of excellent birds in the south continued and on top of the long-staying female Desert Wheatear in Dorset a Lesser Crested Tern was reported at Dawlish Warren in Devon.  Bizarre for December, this was the first in the UK for 20 years following a bird in Norfolk in 2005: the lure of a yellow-billed tern was strong.  When Owen contacted me to say he was going the following day, I didn't take much convincing!  A 1am start for a 2am set off is never ideal but with the dwindling hours of daylight available and four target birds in three counties we needed to be in Devon by first light. Four easy hours of driving (for Owen - I passengered gamely all the way) and we arrived after a stop for breakfast and walked to the end of the golf course towards the bird hide.  We must have turned up at a strange gap when birders ...