The Manchester Birder

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...

If I lived on the coast I think it would be different, but this years summer lull is a serious one.  Too hot to walk far, all the local water has dried up (except truly big water bodies and reservoirs) and breeding birds seem to be as quiet as I've ever known them.  I've all but given up birding since May, barring desultory wanderings on patch mourning the loss and the lack and the silence. Butterflies and dragonflies have, as with many UK birders, stepped heroically into the breach.  An epic year of butterfly and odonata migration is the positive spin on probably catastrophic climate change that has kept half the UK as dry as I've ever known it, and the strange irony of leaning heavily into a new found passion of searching for these migrants that are only here because southern Europe is experiencing desertification in real time has not passed me by. There is still joy to be found.  After the late spring blaze of fritillaries I wondered if I'd lose interest in butter...

The day after the day after the night before is not a place a man in his mid-forties should ever wish to find himself.  This is the sad truth of two (and three) day hangovers.  This particular man had left his home at 8.30pm on the Thursday night with the intention of a quiet pub quiz, three pints, and an indulgent thirty minute lie in on the Friday morning.  Instead he had fallen in with a crowd of old friends and ended up still sipping gin at 3.22am on Friday morning.  Arriving home after sunrise, he awoke to work five bare minutes before his log on time, and worked solidly if in a certain level of discomfort for eight hours.  6.30am on Saturday and the alarm went off, and this man still felt the hangover bite.  A new low.  Even after 36 hours and a good night of sleep the hangover was winning. Sadly, that man was me, and I was reflecting on feeling the gritty edge of the reality of middle age as Kris picked me up and we headed to Nosterfield as part...