The Manchester Birder

I hate the conspiratorial lean in a conversation, that attempt to gather support through getting closer and offering a furtive opinion.  Conspiratorial was the only word I could use to describe how he leaned into me and offered a three-field-whisper: "Can you believe this was originally identified as a Black Tern?" "Hmm?" "I suppose it's fairly easily done for the more inexperienced birders." "Well," I said, watching this beautiful juvenile White-winged Black Tern sweep at high speed through a cloud of hirundines, "I can see how hard it might be to separate them." This wasn't the answer my conversation partner, a total stranger - and I mean that in more ways than one - expected.  Clearly, I had disappointed him by not knowing the difference between White-winged and Black Tern juveniles off the top of my head.  He moved on soon after, to my very great relief; when a man stands that close to you and talks in that sergeant-major-on...

After singing the praises of my Manchester patch last week it was obvious that the natural balance of karma would demand a negative about Manchester soon afterwards.  The six-day stay of a juvenile Red-necked Phalarope on Redmires reservoirs in Sheffield has finally tempted me to brave the roads, given that it flags up as just over 30 miles from home.  An 80 minute drive over Snake Pass and parking under the humid damp of a rain-soaked pine plantation and I was whistling happily as I walked down to the fence around the reservoir to search for the Phalarope.  Because in Manchester serious patch birding only really takes place in four or five famous locations, no matter how many people actually patch there, these inland reservoirs always leave me assuming that they're under-watched; perhaps a couple of dedicated locals walking every day, reporting back every now and again, but it made me wonder if the increased communication available to birders is concentrating more of us ...

Every birder on every patch, away from the major sites where they turn up dozens of scarce birds every year, feels the same about their own little bit of bird-focus.  We all expect nothing, we all have our local specialities, we all grumble about the same issues.  We all go through phases of frustration and boredom with the same walks, the same areas to check, the same species seen in the same places at the same times of year. Black-necked Grebes at Moses Gate CP Mediterranean Gull at Cutacre Redstart at White Coppice But we persist.  And we persist because every now and again we turn up something brilliant.  Not rare .  Not a " mega " (and how I hate that weird little word, organising birds into ranks , making some more important than others as though there are elements of the natural world that are worth ignoring).  Nothing that would cause the twitch of the year.  But something relatively brilliant.  A little window of hope and variety and nove...

300 species in the UK in a calendar year in 2025 was a fun, stressful, exciting challenge.  I loved it and I never want to do it again.  But a Big Year leaves a part of itself in your veins and sometimes you want to have a little of the buzz without all the pressure.  This was my Saturday: I rode shotgun while Kris tried to pick up some species of birds he's struggled for this year.  A vicarious Big Year?  Well, in a small way, I suppose. Kris has worked hard to see Turtle Dove all year, putting in two full days in Yorkshire and Northumberland after two days in Suffolk, and failing to see any sign of them.  So today was really all about Turtle Doves, no matter the rarity of other species we saw.  One of the quirks of a Big Year is that some of the species you expect  to see turn out to be those that avoid you.  In my own attempt last year I failed to connect with Red-backed Shrike and Red-breasted Flycatcher which I had assumed were nailed on...

There is a need, in any debate about changing culture or emerging technology, to watch ourselves carefully for signs that we are entrenched in a position simply because we don't like change.  It's easy, especially as we age, to dislike change because we dislike change, and there are times if we're honest with ourselves where our subjective preferences are informing our response to new things more than the objective truth about them.   I'm a middle-aged man.  I do not rely on my phone to be the primary source of information about everything in my world, and I have never knowingly asked AI to do anything for me.  I eschew AI-based searches online and I have not got an account with any LLM (Large Language Model - such as Gemini from Google or GPT4 from ChatGPT).  However, many people younger than me treat LLMs as something entrenched in their lives.  A person I know well works to train LLM programs by evaluating and rating their responses based on real, l...