The Manchester Birder

A very niche starter, and one for people of a certain age, the theme music of the 90s TV program Due South (by Jay Semko) has always had a strangely transporting effect on me.  Hearing it, I feel a sudden (and almost certainly entirely inaccurate) Canadian-ness flood my mind.  I've never even been to Canada.  I don't know what it is, or why it should be so, but that song simply seems to tap into a seam of nostalgia and leaves me feeling an alien dislocation in the most positive way.  There have been a lot of words written and voiced about the wait from 1991 for a visit from a Nutcracker that would be accessible for all to the shores of the UK.  The build up of sightings of birds irrupting from further east into the Low Countries has had predictions and excitement rising on various group chats and I heard the conversation around where the first sighting might be when I was amongst the throng at the Rufous-tailed Robin earlier in the week.  When the easterly ...

It's so tempting to scroll through RBA or BirdGuides seeing rare bird after rare bird appear on your feed in places like Spurn and Flamborough, and imagine that birders are simply walking around the headland tripping over exotics like they're easy and obvious.  The truth is that seeing rare birds is almost never like that.  It makes sense if you think about it.  It's why not every birder finds any rare birds: it takes a special skill set and requires a large amount of effort.  Even after someone has found a rare bird, say, in the gully at Whale Bridge, South Landing, it's not always a given that you'll see it.  This too requires a skill set and effort.  You have to time it right, plan your trip and then focus on the habitat intently, not distracted by other people or your phone.  You need to know what you're looking for and you'd do well to listen to more experienced birders in your orbit.  You also need a slice of luck... the difference between a...

Worthington Lakes is a set of reservoirs on the very boundary between Greater Manchester and Lancashire.  There will be grumbles about this, usually from men (and it's always a certain kind of man who finds excessive pleasure in pedantry, even when it's misplaced and inaccurate) who insist on boring at me to change my blog name because "it's not bloody Manchester, it's always been Lancashire..." It's been Manchester since 1974.  52 years is enough.  Or should I still be referring to it as the Danelaw?  Either way, it's a source of encouragement when a rare bird is found at a local place.   I've lived in west Manchester for over 15 years in my current phase here, and over 35 years altogether, and Worthington Lakes is the kind of local little nature reserve/countryside area that you could go birding at every day for three years and never see anything outside the same 45 species you see every time .  It's so similar to a dozen other places nearer...

For the second autumn in a row westerly winds have dominated (so far).  This means that rather than the European mainland species and Siberian specialists that we often look to September and October for, we've been treated to the start of an American influx of birds. The last few weeks have seen relatively huge numbers of American waders flow through the UK, and as someone who nominally lives in the west, this benefits me - easterly winds might be best for migration on the whole, but I love a strong westerly. There have been three birding experiences that have made a mixed picture of my week.  Nightjar has been a local breeder for a while now, but is never an easy bird to actually lay eyes on in Manchester.  There are four or five locations where they can be heard, and the distant two-stroke motor noise of their song over the Moss has become one of my favourite local sounds.  When a patch birder in south Manchester was searching for a Spotted Flycatcher as GM patch g...

My first Bittern was an incredible encounter at Leighton Moss in 1993.  Sitting in Griesdale Hide with the 13 other people on the Bolton YOC long weekend to Arnside, a thin row of reeds in front of us no more than 10 feet away had, unknown to us, concealed a Bittern for all the time we'd been in the hide.  It stepped out right in front of me and I whispered at the top of my lungs, "Bittern!"  I sat and absorbed every detail of the bird as it hunted so close in I could hear its softly splashing footsteps in the shallow water.  We'd been scanning the distant reeds for Bittern shapes, for reeds moving against the breeze, for the shadow of a reedbed enigma and here it was, in touching distance.   The Water Rails that breed on my patch are incredibly difficult to see.  We know they're present all year - they're so vocal, so loud, so distinctive that you can't fail to catch up with them at some point.  We hear them contact calling the juveniles, and cat...