The Manchester Birder

As so many of my blogs begin, my baseline for birding was set during the 1990s.  Little Egret was a twitchable rarity.  Cetti's Warbler was an exotic species only found in famous locations in Norfolk.  Marsh Harrier was a summer migrant to Leighton Moss.  There were six (6) Red Kites in the whole of the UK.  A single pair of Ospreys bred at Loch Garten.  England's last breeding Golden Eagles occupied a crag at Haweswater.  Avocet was rare outside of East Anglia, Black-necked Grebe was vanishingly uncommon and it was a fifty mile each way trip to see birds like Peregrine and Raven from my Manchester base. I sometimes feel I'm stuck in that time, comparing all my sightings to how rare or scarce or common birds were in the mid to late 1990s.  I get excited about birds that most people dismiss.  Young birders of my acquaintance never really react to a Cetti's Warbler bursting into song, while I remember seeing my first about six years ago and bei...

My friend passed me his thermal imager on a survey of Jack Snipe on patch in the winter just gone, but I struggled to use it, finding the flares of white light too distracting and the sense of scale confusing.  It had been a very successful survey.  Between us we found 27 Jack Snipe and over 50 Common Snipe in one bog.  He used the thermal, and I did a binocular scan.  It wasn't even a close competition: he found all 27 Jacks and over 40 of the Commons.  That thermal was a game changer, for someone with the ability to use it. When I was 14 I was part of a large and active group of birders of all ages which exposed me to two things that were good for my development as a birder: experience, and a broad church of opinion.  All forms of birders were there, and I do mean all .  Strict patchers, full-blown twitchers, bird racers, conservation experts, even former egg-collectors turned real birders were part of a patchwork of views and opinions that helped me...

What.  A.  Month!  April 2026, I'm sad to see you go!  The sheer amount of brilliant migration stories locally and further afield has meant a busy month and I feel a kind of joy from beautiful weather and a combination of ranging out and seeing brilliant species close to home. Local birding A remarkable day on the moors seeing a flock of 16 Ring Ouzels before finding returning Pied Flycatcher and a male Redstart will be my high-water mark for local spring migration for years to come.  Swallows, Yellow Wagtails, Sand and House Martins, a single Swift, Whitethroat, Grasshopper Warbler, Common Terns, Cuckoo and the most showy Lesser Whitethroats I've ever seen completed a local line up of brilliant birds.  It won't be long before Wood Warbler, Nightjar and Quail grace the local area and I can't wait for those warm nights in May listening to the two-stroke engine calls resound over heath.  I have been guilty of struggling with my local area on occasions ov...

In 2008 Cheshire had a breeding pair of Black-winged Stilts at Ashton's Flash.  I have only a hazy memory of hearing about them, as 2008 was in the middle of my wilderness years of birding, and though I would carry binoculars when I went for a walk I wasn't really trying to see anything or travelling very far.  They hit my consciousness because I was living in north Cheshire at the time and I had a commute that sometimes took me close by Ashton's Flash, so naturally when I heard the rumours I had a visit.  I didn't see the birds - I suspect I only found out long after they'd dispersed given how (rightly) tightly birders hold on to rare breeding bird information.  I wasn't too deflated; having a then father-in-law living in the south of Spain meant an annual visit to the salinas where Black-winged Stilts stalk in their hundreds. I'd seen my first Black-winged Stilts years and years before that in my teens in the mid 1990s, though I forget exactly where.  Now ...

One of my favourite weekends of the birding year, I've done a long weekend in Suffolk and Norfolk every spring since 2021.  With a varying itinerary, the point is to explore some places I rarely get to, and to see all those species that we simply don't get in the north west of England; the likes of Turtle Dove, Nightingale, Dartford Warbler, Stone Curlew.  This year it was Lee driving the narrative (and the car - thanks mate!) and we set off a couple of weeks earlier than previous years.  This had an impact on the number of migrant birds we saw, with only a single Hobby and a single Swift seen, and no Turtle Dove.  However, it did coincide with some interesting rare birds and a trip list of almost 130 species is respectable. Friday began early, a 2.45am alarm to get me to Lee's by 4am and a long slog to Weeting Heath to break up the southward journey.  Stone Curlew was pretty much the first bird we saw (and we saw five of them altogether including some courtship...