The Manchester Birder

  With low tide being at 6am(ish) on Saturday, K and I decided to try for the Black Scoter early.   Though not a new bird for either of us, realistically, the absolutely embarrassingly bad views we had had of the Northumberland bird from a very windy Cocklawburn beach in October 2022 meant that it would feel like a new experience if we could see it in more detail than a blur of black and yellow pixelation at full magnification through a scope.   Aware that it’s a long walk out to the low tide line, we arrived just after first light and began the trudge over slick, wet, muddy sand to where two birders were already on the tideline. Fully expecting a 90-minute scope scan through thousands of Common Scoter, I was delighted that the Black Scoter was the third bird we saw, in with a mixed flock of Common Scoter and Long-tailed Duck (itself a great sighting for the north west coast).  Views through the scope were brilliant, with the huge yellow bill obvious even with the na...

  As a pre-teen, my absolute favourite word was “ferruginous”.  I learned it while obsessively reading a field guide in my bedroom and attempted to use it at every possible juncture.  “That man has a ferruginous beard,” or “careful with that untreated ironwork, it may become ferruginous.”  Typical phrases for a precocious 10 year old.  So of course, on learning that there was a male Ferruginous Duck at Woolston Eyes, I headed across in the midday sunlight, hoping to also see Black-necked Grebes and some early Sand Martins. Every view of Fudge Duck I’ve had before has been distant – a female at Hornsea Mere which may as well have been in another country it was so far out; a male in a ditch in Cambridgeshire that poked its arse out for a couple of seconds in three hours of waiting and watching; a dodgy bird in the late 90s that could have been a hybrid tufted duck female seen through an April squall of rain so intense I still shiver when I think of it now. ...

  A long weekend in two locations across Scotland this month gave me a chance to walk in some big spaces and see some of the iconic Scottish species of birds.   Capercaillie and Ptarmigan are the last two regularly breeding/occurring British species of birds I have never seen and as such they have achieved near mythical status for me, becoming something of an albatross (which I have seen in the UK…), and though I won’t go looking for Capercaillie directly, I wouldn’t mind seeing one.   Taking the chance to visit some of the extended family based in Glasgow, we set off to have a day walking in Abernethy forest and a day climbing Glenshee. Abernethy forest is a strange combination of what looks like ancient stands of pine, interspersed with plantation style straight lines of branchless trees set for logging.  In most of the area where we had decided to walk there was logging activity, and this immediately prevented us from seeing much – so much human activity in the w...