The Manchester Birder

  It’s fair to say that I’m having a good year, birds wise.   Though a Big Year list wasn’t my aim, the year list is moving along well, and having moved past 250 species for the year with 7 months to go, it seems right to celebrate the richness of the species I’ve seen in the last ten days or so.   Hoopoe, Newchurch Common, May 12 th The influx of Hoopoes this spring has had me hopeful of a local(ish) one, and I refused to travel for birds as reasonably close as Birmingham, Derbyshire and Doncaster because I was/am hoping for a Manchester bird.   When this singing male appeared at Newchurch Common I was in East Anglia seeing incredible British breeding birds and not really hopeful of catching up with the Cheshire bird, but it did the right thing and stuck around – Cheshire is close enough to call local!   A good crowd of people seeing their first/first for the North West/first for Cheshire managed to connect with this butterfly of a bird.   It was ...

A midweek evening jaunt recently saw me in search of Quail and Nightjar locally.   Having heard a dozen Quail in the last year I decided it was high time I laid eyes on one for the first time since 2022, and so, armed with knowledge of a singing male in Culcheth, which borders the western edge of Little Woolden Moss just over into the county of Cheshire, K and Lee and I spent a couple of hours hard listening.   The fields in the area are vast.   I have no real idea how hectares and acres work in terms of a measurement of size, but I think if I was driving across the area it would have taken me minutes, rather than seconds to cover it.   An hour in, and we hear one, distant, anaemic “whip-me-whop” from the furthest quarter of the field.   Determined not to trespass and out of respect for the hard-working farmers of the area, we find footpaths on the paths app and skirt miles out of our way to try and lay eyes on this tiny migrating game bird.   Two more ca...

  The East Anglia May weekend has become a fixture and mainstay of my birding year.   From my initial solo marathon trek in 2022 where I spent three days learning about what scarce British breeding birds I could see across Suffolk and Norfolk, to this year’s four county exploration, this is one of my favourite adventures and something I plan for and look forward to for months.   There are a small number of British breeding birds that do not breed in the west of the country, and certainly not in my rainy, urban neck of the woods.   This means that if I want to, for example, hear the purring of a Turtle Dove, I have to travel.   Day one: Ouse Fen and Weeting Heath. With Lee very kindly driving (all weekend!) we set off from the north west at 11am on the Friday, hoping that the Great Reed Warbler would be more cooperative than it had been the previous Sunday when the strong winds kept it hidden for hours.   Sadly the Spotted Sandpiper had left Grafham Wa...

  From 13 th to 15 th May 2022 there was a Spotted Sandpiper at Elton Reservoir in Manchester.   An American shorebird, Spot Sands are a 3 or 4 per year bird in the UK, but very rare locally.   I should have made an effort to go and see this lovely wader as soon as news broke on the Friday, but my kids and I were booked into an important family evening and that meant that I couldn’t get there after work.   I would have gone on the Saturday, except that I had a job interview on the Monday, and badly needed to do some prep for it. On the Sunday there was a family medical emergency – which ended well, and the only lasting damage was to my levels of frustration at not being able to get to Elton.   But I consoled myself – my interview on Monday 16 th May was with a place very close to Elton Reservoir.   I could feasibly go before the interview and possibly connect – though the risk of muddying a suit before the day wasn’t necessarily the best idea. ...