The Manchester Birder

Any day that includes a noticeable change in habitats is a day I enjoy.  I love the way that moving from lowland to upland changes the bird species that I can see, and hills are one of two primal landscapes that seem to unlock something in me.  Don't get me wrong, I love deep forest, and I love heathland, and the peat mosses of home are the bones of me.  But the rolling hills of the Lakes and the Dales unlock something in me that makes me feel alive.  Like stopping to catch my breath in a place where I can truly relax.  So a journey to Durham to see Marsh Sandpiper had to include some upland birding on the way back.  To miss out on the Dales and the Becks would make it a poor day. Marsh Sandpiper is a bird I've encountered once or twice before.  Seeing more than a dozen at Pont du Gau in the south of France in summer 2024, and the stop-start popped tyre and broken SD card of my two attempts to see the bird in Musselburgh last summer have left contrasti...

April 14th 2024 was a good day.  I saw my first Bonaparte's Gull at Frampton Marsh.  The bird went missing for hours during the day, but after much waiting and checking of Black-headed Gulls, it was suddenly the closest gull to the waiting crowd.  A great experience, and I took some decidedly rubbish photos and studied the bird to learn it for future reference.  I did this because this level of scarce bird felt to me like many other unusual birds found in Britain - one that is possible every year.  It's a bit more rare than Wryneck and so on, but once I'd seen my first I saw a dozen more in quick succession.  Same with Red-breasted Flycatchers, and Grey Phalaropes, and White-rumped Sandpiper and so on.  I assumed I'd see another Bonaparte's Gull in 2025. 2025 saw no shortage of Bonaparte's Gulls come into the UK.  There were birds at Hornsea Mere and in north Wales at Conwy and I went for both, twice each, and missed them both, by less than half a...

What a strange month.  Very slow migration in the north west inland "desert" combined with five days of completely cloud-free, 18C weather and then late March hail and snow showers meant that either birds went straight through north and didn't linger or they were stalled by northerly winds keeping them in staging areas south of here.  My sum total of summer migrant birds this month has been a handful of Sand Martin, 14 Black-necked Grebe, 2 Little Ringed Plovers and one solitary Wheatear.  None of those birds have been on patch or even in county. Locally my quest for Goshawk has been successful and I've had views of a juvenile male bird in what seems to be pre-breeding age display flights where he's either imitating adult birds that he has encountered or is developing a feel for the display forms.  Sadly I can't connect this with any previous records or knowledge because of the lack of Manchester information available generally.  Searching for records of Manch...

With news of the Leach's Petrel at Idle Washlands coming through this morning plans to go birding locally changed rapidly, and I picked Kris up for the 90 minute drive at 10.30am.  This was a late and leisurely twitch!  We arrived on site and were reminded how rare it is to see these birds inland: Mission village was  busy  with parked cars and scope-toting twitchers trying to connect with a bird usually only available on the mainland from Liverpool Bay in the autumn following north-westerly winds.  We quickly got onto the bird and had a moment of strange dislocation, with a bitter wind blowing strongly across the water we were watching Sand Martins swoop above the heads of a Common Scoter and a Leach's Petrel.  The Petrel was so distant and not moving, and for a long time I wondered if it had actually died, but then it unfurled those delicate wings and danced a quickstep on the waves to avoid a Great Crested Grebe. Hydrobates leucorhous  is the scient...

Migration in Manchester is a brief spasm of hope after the dreariness of winter.  We get so little of note passing through that every unusual bird is an opportunity that can't be passed up, and we have such small populations of breeding summer visitors that their return in late March through April is a noteworthy event. The thing that catches me out every year is how long after other places get their migrants Manchester joins the party.  It seems that migration naturally occurs across coastlines and then fills in from there, but it's still a strange moment when I realise that Swallows, House Martins and Wheatears are all present hundreds of miles north of here without ever occurring here.  In my head I still have a childish picture of the UK filling up, a huge cup filling with water like some cheap TV graphic starting on the south coast and progressing evenly up the country.  The reality, when I stop and actually think about it, is of course much more nuanced than th...