The Manchester Birder

  Jack Snipe, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, American Pipit, Willow Tit, Little Owl, Kestrel and Eastern Yellow Wagtail are the photographic highlights of the month. This month has been more of a focus on local patches and towards the end of the month looking for spring migrants over Pennington Flash and the Mosses.  There have been none yet, but there is a lot more song and start of breeding season behaviour and it’s good to see the local Willow Tit population seeming to remain steady, and Dipper paired up ready to breed even though the state of the River Croal along their stretch is more polluted and full of rubbish than I’ve ever seen it.  Numbers of Chaffinch locally seem good, after a couple of years of decline, but I haven’t seen any Tree Sparrow at all on the Mosses; a worrying sign, with the House Sparrow population also seeming to have crashed here.  Great Skua killing and eating a Lesser Black-backed Gull during a two-day stay at Heaton Park reservoir in urban ...

  I’m not sure when it became a thing that people walking would leave patches of seed at the edges of paths.   I’ve seen photographers and birders do it, especially when trying for a photograph, but there seems to be a recent trend of random dog-walkers just leaving small patches of seed.   The good intention is clear – a small act of provision for local wildlife – but in the context of the staggering amount of land being taken locally for development of houses (2500 on this greenfield site within five years) and businesses it’s very much a sticking plaster over a big issue. Good intentions aside, this is potentially a damaging activity.   Today it benefitted me in my search for Willow Tits by bringing them to visible sources of food so that I could count them – while I could hear them all around me in the hawthorn hedgerow of my local patch, they can be very difficult to see and count without using playback – something I have done as part of the official wet scrub...