The Manchester Birder

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...

In September 2023 I saw my first (and only, until this morning) Baird's Sandpiper.  It was on the beach at Meols, just down the road from the tennis courts, and I'd raced there one evening after work, hoping the light would hold as I negotiated the M6, M56 and M53 in a stranglehold of traffic.  When I got there, three years ago, the Baird's was so far out on the beach I had to rely on local birders bringing more powerful telescopes to see the bird at all.  A distant buff blob could be identified based on the distinctive horizontal stance and length of the silhouette, being more stretched out than confusion species like White-rumped Sand.  It was an unsatisfying view.  The bird did come in a little closer, but by the time I could properly identify it from plumage it was getting dark and, if I'm honest, I don't truly believe I could have picked it out from a flock of Dunlins in those conditions.  Still, it was a lifer, and I ticked it and then thought no more...

I hate the conspiratorial lean in a conversation, that attempt to gather support through getting closer and offering a furtive opinion.  Conspiratorial was the only word I could use to describe how he leaned into me and offered a three-field-whisper: "Can you believe this was originally identified as a Black Tern?" "Hmm?" "I suppose it's fairly easily done for the more inexperienced birders." "Well," I said, watching this beautiful juvenile White-winged Black Tern sweep at high speed through a cloud of hirundines, "I can see how hard it might be to separate them." This wasn't the answer my conversation partner, a total stranger - and I mean that in more ways than one - expected.  Clearly, I had disappointed him by not knowing the difference between White-winged and Black Tern juveniles off the top of my head.  He moved on soon after, to my very great relief; when a man stands that close to you and talks in that sergeant-major-on...

After singing the praises of my Manchester patch last week it was obvious that the natural balance of karma would demand a negative about Manchester soon afterwards.  The six-day stay of a juvenile Red-necked Phalarope on Redmires reservoirs in Sheffield has finally tempted me to brave the roads, given that it flags up as just over 30 miles from home.  An 80 minute drive over Snake Pass and parking under the humid damp of a rain-soaked pine plantation and I was whistling happily as I walked down to the fence around the reservoir to search for the Phalarope.  Because in Manchester serious patch birding only really takes place in four or five famous locations, no matter how many people actually patch there, these inland reservoirs always leave me assuming that they're under-watched; perhaps a couple of dedicated locals walking every day, reporting back every now and again, but it made me wonder if the increased communication available to birders is concentrating more of us ...

Every birder on every patch, away from the major sites where they turn up dozens of scarce birds every year, feels the same about their own little bit of bird-focus.  We all expect nothing, we all have our local specialities, we all grumble about the same issues.  We all go through phases of frustration and boredom with the same walks, the same areas to check, the same species seen in the same places at the same times of year. Black-necked Grebes at Moses Gate CP Mediterranean Gull at Cutacre Redstart at White Coppice But we persist.  And we persist because every now and again we turn up something brilliant.  Not rare .  Not a " mega " (and how I hate that weird little word, organising birds into ranks , making some more important than others as though there are elements of the natural world that are worth ignoring).  Nothing that would cause the twitch of the year.  But something relatively brilliant.  A little window of hope and variety and nove...