The Manchester Birder

I probably shouldn't have gone birding yesterday.  I'd been birding a couple of evenings the last week, finding a Whinchat at very last light on patch and getting caught in some heavy rain, and I wasn't feeling so good when I set off.  The events of the day slowly drained me until I was shaking with fever or exhaustion. Another high quality photograph.  You're welcome.  This was taken after sunset at long range, with maximum ISO on my camera and has been brightened significantly. I'm not sure if my fuzzy head was affecting my understanding of the directions to see the Hooded Merganser at Alvecote Pools in Warwickshire or if there was some scramble of addresses and post codes from the bird apps that we all use, but arriving at what we thought was parking for the American duck left us with a nearly 3 mile walk to the bird across some terrain that was not straightforward when carrying scope, bins, camera.  There was disbelief as we reached each different milestone ...

Turdus torquatus  is one of those Latin names that very much suits the bird it is applied to. Turdus is the word for thrush, and torquatus has two meanings - one linked to the Wryneck (where the word means "twisted" in honour of the way the Wryneck contorts itself when threatened) and one linked to Ring Ouzel where the word means "wearer of a torc".  Torcs were jewellery made famous by ancient Egyptian culture (but actually present across lots of ancient cultures), and take the shape of a wide semi-circular necklace that covers the upper chest.  The Ring Ouzel is the Torc-wearing Thrush. At 5.48am it was 1C and there was very much a sense of frost and darkness and regret in my car.  I was in urgent need of caffeine, and I had timed my arrival for first light poorly given that I was on the west side of a valley, meaning the light would be later to appear.  I walked the road for a mile up the hill and then back down slowly, hearing Tawny Owls and seeing Barn Owl, ...

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...