The Manchester Birder

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...

October 14th 2025 was a great day of birding on Bryher.  It was a windy, exciting autumn day and there had been a large fall of thrushes and common warblers on the island.  Flocks of Siskins, Linnets, Goldfinches were in every hedge and bramble, blackberries staining the faces of juvenile birds into interesting and exotic colouration making me twitch at every bird I got my bins on just in case it was something rare.  It's interesting how being in a place like the Scillies, Shetland, or other premier autumn rare locations can adjust your psychology.  The heightened expectation that a rare bird can turn up there much more easily than in the suburbs of Manchester makes you really look at every bird you see.  Normal patch birding has its share of passerines that flit away without a full ID, and they're almost always a Chiffchaff, a Meadow Pipit, a Blue Tit.  But on Scilly, every passerine is a potential rarity.  I dare say I've not been the only person to ...

Something I have enjoyed over the last few years is the chance to sit and think back over the experiences of the past, whether those are from the distant haze of my teenage years or from more recent days.  The fast pace of life, social media and the waning of the attention span sometimes makes me feel like all the birds I see and the wild days I spend are brief sparks of light in a vast and fast moving darkness.  We abandon the past as though it truly is a foreign country, a half remembered recollection dim with the fog of time and alternately shining with the patina of nostalgia.  The other half of Hartley's famous quote, "...they do things differently there" is a perfect description of our attitudes towards the sightings and the pictures of the past.   We live in true tension between a voracious appetite for the new and the next and an almost painful nostalgia; a binge-consuming culture craving viewing calories but always keening for the simpler past.  Th...