Grey Phalarope and the birding spark

Many people can remember a "spark moment" that changes their interests and sets in motion a passion with something that lasts a lifetime.  I love to hear those stories, whether about birding or about the big passions of a person's life.  If you know what a person is passionate about, you know that person well.  My dad tells a story of the day he decided to first pick up a guitar; growing up in America and hearing the late 1950s early 1960s hits of the day and being blown away by guitar riffs that helped him lose himself in sound away from the mockery of being the little British guy.  That led to a life of happiness in pub gigs and conversations about music, and though now almost completely deaf, he still gets 90% of the music questions correct in the pub quiz every week just from the beat and a half heard bassline.

Though there are a couple of "sparks" that were obvious then and now, my "moment" had stages, stops on the line that stand out as significant in retrospect.  I grew up in a family that was looking up at the bread line like an unachievable dream.  My parents had relocated from their Lancashire home to Manchester to follow jobs that would take a decade to mature in terms of money, and they had three children surviving on hand-me-downs and my mum's skill at making meals from the cheapest cut of meat and the potatoes my maternal grandfather, a farmer, would bring each fortnight.  We were hand to mouth every month, and there were many weeks where my mum would survive on a single meal each day.  I had dreams of karate, and football, and the computers my dad was training to program; and we had money for none of it.  I was unpopular, poor, small and undersized for my age.  I was too smart for my own good, but too sensitive to really fit in, and, having limited contact with my dad, struggled for a male role model.  My dad worked away four nights and five days per week, and then performed in gigs two nights just to bring enough cash in to pay for luxuries like clothes.  A stressed mum, two younger sisters, poverty affecting every choice and every activity and I found myself limited to two main escapes from the bullying and the frustration of not being able to afford anything: reading, and being outside.

I read, and I read.  I read everything.  The library at Leigh was a lifeline, and I remember being dropped off there to wander the aisles while the rest of my family shopped for groceries on Saturday mornings.  I had two library cards and would regularly take home six books each week, and usually, I'd finish them all without renewal.  I devoured books on dinosaurs, sharks, snakes, mammals... everything I could get hold of.  Scifi and fantasy stories interspersed with books about geographical phenomena and the wild world.  One day, aged 9, I took home a small white book called the Letts Guide to British Birds, and, though I look at the book now and recognise how limited it is in terms of birding, back then it was a revelation to me.  I read it and read it.  I copied the contents out and tried to copy pictures and distribution maps.  I took it from the library so often that my aunt bought me a copy for Christmas.  I still own that book.  

But it wasn't the book that started me birding.  It was a residential trip from primary school in what would be year 5, paid for by a really important initiative to help families in poverty to experience more than the local post-industrial depression, that highlighted my interest in the natural world.  A visit to Lowbank Ground in the south Lake District was an amazing experience, and we spent the week canoeing and rock scrambling and generally having outdoor fun in the rain.  There was a taxidermy display of a fox, a red squirrel and some finches in the lounge of the centre, and the outward bound instructor caught me staring at it thoughtfully.  He asked me if I could identify any of the animals, and without really thinking about it the pictures from the Letts book just popped to mind.  I reeled off Chaffinch, Goldfinch, Linnet, Redpoll and Hawfinch, and I remember the look on his face to this day.  I didn't know it at the time, but that man spoke to my teacher and arranged for me to be invited to a second week later in the year in a wildlife based residential paid for by the local authority.  Those five days changed my life.  Visits to the Eider and tern colony at Walney Island, seeing Redstart and Golden Eagle in the hills around Haweswater, being beyond excited to find Dippers on a river near Coniston.  This week changed the pattern of my life.

This led to me joining the Bolton YOC, and their brilliant volunteers opened up opportunities for me that my family could never have afforded.  Loaned optics (eventually gifted to me after I turned 13) allowed me to access a world of detail I couldn't believe.  The expertise, leadership, patience and organisation of those amazing people along with the friends that I made there were a literal lifeline during turbulent teenage years coping with the ways my family were coping with poverty and disappointment.  The RSPB program of twelve outdoor trips, twelve indoor meetings, and annual weekend away were the highlights of my every month, and as I grew older, the opportunities to travel and gain experience and learn with great birders gave me the basis of all my fieldcraft and enthusiasm today.  Throughout 2025 I have had so many moments of connection with memories from my days in the YOC, like some wormhole of nostalgia has conjoined a feeling from being 15 or 16 with my 45 year old self.  

I fell away from birding (though for a long time took cheap, small binoculars out with me when walking) in my late teens and early twenties.  University, marriage, work, raising a family all got in the way, and other interests occupied my time, and, aside from a couple of sporadic trips to Leighton Moss each year, I lost contact with my passion for the wild.   Even during that busy time I was aware that nature was a missing element of my existence.  Fast forward to 2020 and the great collapse of every support system for young people in the UK during Covid.  I've never been so busy, never been so overwhelmed with the sheer misery of existence that the necessary lockdowns caused to the deprived young people of west Manchester, and in between the eleven bouts of Covid that laid me low for much of 2020 and 2021, I found I needed to decompress.  While many people were going stir-crazy at home, I was face to face behind three layers of poor PPE in educational setting every day.  My drive home took me past Pennington Flash, and I would pull in on the odd day just to sit on the benches and stare out over the water.  I remember watching terns fly over the buoys one spring day, and wishing I had my binoculars to see them in more detail and that was me hooked.  I got home, ordered the Collins Bird Guide and a pair of cheap Opticron binoculars and the following week spent three hours watching birds in the deserted car park after work.

I can't tell you the freedom that gave me.  The sheer relief of having a connection with a bigger context.  I suppose that might be similar to the feeling that people of deep religious faith have that they are connected to something bigger than themselves, a way of contextualising experience.  I felt a depth of peace that nothing in my life had ever provided for me before - taken immediately into the safety of my childhood refuge from the stress and worry, and I have the same feeling of drawing a deep breath every time I feel the cool air on my skin on a day out birding.  There is no comparison, no other activity that has such a huge impact on me.  I like a beer, and I like music, and I still love to read; but seeing birds, especially in green spaces, gives me a freedom and a mental strength like nothing else.

I suppose this highlights the importance of a few things.  Without helpful initiatives funded by the local authority I would never have had the opportunity to learn that I had this passion.  We need to make sure that we continue to support those born with significant disadvantage so that everyone has the knowledge or opportunity to gain a passion for nature.  Without the volunteering of those brilliant role models at the Bolton RSPB in the 1990s I would never have learned the skills that keep me happy and healthy today.  We must make sure we nurture curiosity and provide patient expertise for those younger or less experienced than us so that people are encouraged and welcomed into birding and conservation.  Without the access to a green space close to home, I would never have been able to rekindle a passion for birding and find such support for my mental health.  If we don't protect these spaces from all the threats great and small - the dogs off leads and total disregard of our disappointingly arrogant government towards developing green space, the destruction of biodiversity and the normalisation of destructive behaviours - then we cut off a source of peace and wellbeing that benefits everyone.