The Manchester Birder

  “Birding is all about choices and knowing things.”   Someone dropped that little pearl into conversation recently, and it’s been bouncing around the hollow dome of my head ever since.   I’d been seeing the east coast get steadily better and better across the week, and, knowing that my next seven days would be absolutely crammed, I was considering a day at Spurn.   None of my friends could come, and I prefer company on longer drives (often enjoy solo birding closer to home), and my solo status was putting me off.   I stood at the bar at the pub quiz on Thursday night, considering whether this would be a pint of beer or a pint of lemonade.  The choice to get out birding came down to the truism: you don't see many interesting birds from the couch.  Just then a Bluesky post popped up with tales of Bonelli’s Warblers, Siberian Chiffs and Chats, Wheatears of various stripes and more.   How can a person resist? Lemonade in hand, I returned to my quiz...

"There it is!"  An excited group of birders and photographers stood on the Lancashire Mosses near Croston today searching for a Pallid Harrier across a wide landscape of fields and farmland.  The western face of Winter Hill, the most northern point of my own 10km circle for birding, formed the backdrop with stormy skies and warm November sunshine alternating like a landscape scale strobe as the gloriously orange form of the juvenile Harrier twisted in mid-flight and dropped into head height set aside vegetation.  Hundreds of Linnets spilled out of the immediate vicinity, and the odd Yellowhammer fled.  A crow buzzed the location where the Harrier rested, but in another hour of searching, there was no further sign.  My aim - to get some reasonable photos of a Pallid Harrier - had been failed.  In all other respects this was a significant sighting. Autumn 2026 has been remarkable for Pallid Harriers in the UK.  As well as long-staying individuals on Shet...

A very niche starter, and one for people of a certain age, the theme music of the 90s TV program Due South (by Jay Semko) has always had a strangely transporting effect on me.  Hearing it, I feel a sudden (and almost certainly entirely inaccurate) Canadian-ness flood my mind.  I've never even been to Canada.  I don't know what it is, or why it should be so, but that song simply seems to tap into a seam of nostalgia and leaves me feeling an alien dislocation in the most positive way.  There have been a lot of words written and voiced about the wait from 1991 for a visit from a Nutcracker that would be accessible for all to the shores of the UK.  The build up of sightings of birds irrupting from further east into the Low Countries has had predictions and excitement rising on various group chats and I heard the conversation around where the first sighting might be when I was amongst the throng at the Rufous-tailed Robin earlier in the week.  When the easterly ...

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...