Big Day in the 10k - November in Manchester

In my youth, those dim and misty days of yore before the internet, mobile phones and the wide availability of GPS, I was lucky enough to be involved in the Bolton Bird Race in the January of each year.  I was perhaps 14 to 17 during this period, and took part as one member of a four person team.  It was a day I looked forward to each year.  If I remember correctly, the rules were that you could visit any site within 5 miles of Bolton town hall, starting at any time you wanted and finishing at 7pm at one of the organisers houses in Horwich.  It was a slightly competitive adventure that encouraged people to cultivate a patch and knowledge of the wildlife around Bolton.  The benefits of that knowledge were obvious - if more people know what's present in an area, the more people can be in a position to help conservation efforts locally.  It was a rule that 3 out of 4 members of your team had to see the bird to be able to count it, and only birds seen would be accepted - no heard-only records.  The team that kindly had me on board as a sort of useless birding mascot never won, but we placed third a couple of times and saw over 70 species - not bad considering there was only daylight from 9am to 3.30pm.  For weeks before the race we would be tapping up local birders for information about what had been seen on their slice of Bolton recently, and with favours swapped, loose-lipped gossips sharing too freely, and some misdirection (pointing out possible ground-based birds to distract a fellow team from seeing over-flying Pink-footed Geese springs to mind) it led to a fun social event where everyone learned a bit and laughed a lot.

The aim of the Bird Race has left an impression on me.  I always respected those birders during the race who seemed to have absolute knowledge of their patch, and members of my team who knew down to the tree, the bush, the patch of reeds or heather where we might see certain species made me determined to know my own location as well as possible.  While I would love to recreate the social dynamic of the Bird Race, there really isn't a community of hundreds of birders based solely in Bolton anymore.  In fact, I probably see the same 30-40 names and faces locally year in and year out.  This social aspect of birding seems largely lost in 21st Century Manchester, and even within the much reduced birding community there is a definite in-crowd and an out-crowd around here.  Not that that particularly irks me - I could care less who's a known name or whatever.  What I miss is the sense that there is something working together for a greater good of wildlife and the whole community.  Not that the Bolton RSPB group of the 1990s was perfect - where people are together, there grace is necessary.  But for all the faults and foibles it was better than there not being a large and diverse group of birders who have interesting days out and bird races.

So my attempt at something to improve my own knowledge of the area is the 10k Big Day.  A bird race against the clock, rather than against another team - though I'd love to have more people involved.  The principles are similar.  A 10km radius from my house.  Both members of the team must see (or hear!) a bird for it to be counted.  We collate these days and compare them.  We do one in winter, one in spring, and one in autumn.  Recent birding info collected suggested a local maximum species count of 115, though 15 of these were very unlikely, and at least 10 more would be mutually exclusive: we couldn't be at two different sites 4km apart before first light to pick up owl species, and factoring traffic into a drive for the only site in the west of the circle worth looking at put us off a walk in ancient woodland, hence missing Great Spotted Woodpecker and Parakeet.  So, a possible 90, and a likely 75 species.  We aimed at 80 and hoped for 85.

Today's Big Day began at 6.30am at Cutacre, hoping for owls of various sorts and hearing Tawny, and then a 4 mile walk in very ill-fitting wellies stomping through the wet grass hoping for a 45 species start at the first site.  I find that it's easy to walk around an area like Cutacre CP and sort of daydream as you go, not really paying attention to the passerines that are almost always a Meadow Pipit or a Skylark.  It's rare to really interrogate a site, but today Cutacre got a real grilling - we have ways of making you talk...  53 species on site, including well over a hundred Redpoll over south (usually migrates through in autumn in single figures), a flock of 30+ Siskin (usually present in small groups of 6-8 during winter), 40+ Snipe and a single Jack Snipe on the top marsh.  A pair of Ravens was unseasonal there, where they usually time their arrival with the hatching of Lapwing chicks and treat them as a sort of fast food opportunity.  Two Kingfishers on Swan Lake were also unexpected and hundreds of Redwing were spread across every Hawthorn and Rowan on site.

Pennington Flash is the only real large area of open freshwater lake in the 10k (though wetlands at Lightshaw can be productive and both Scotsmans Flash and Rivington Lower Reservoir are half inside the boundary), so we aimed there hoping for wildfowl.  I love to hate Pennington Flash.  Parkrun was well underway when we got there, and though I'm jealous of their fitness, being in the way of 180 panting joggers while trying to see a Cetti's Warbler at the Ramsdale viewpoint wasn't ideal.  Spending 10 minutes searching for the plastic resident Mandarins at the marina meant we missed out on a ringtail Hen Harrier that flew from Bickershaw over Pennington and away east towards the Moss.  The sixth Hen Harrier I've missed in the 10k this year.  Otherwise Pennington was fairly quiet in terms of wildfowl.  Two skeins of Pink-footed Geese flew over, and a locally impressive 17 Pochard (4 female) was good.  Two female Goosander, no Goldeneye or Wigeon, and a number of dead Mallards (reported for bird flu purposes) left us concentrating on the Egret roost (one Great White and one Little) and the feeders at Bunting hide.  We had Willow Tit at every major site we visited today, and one called briefly here before our real target bird appeared: Bullfinch.  2023 was an excellent year for Bullfinch here.  Dozens of pairs at Cutacre and Pennington Flash, and I even had one in my tiny urban garden.  2024 saw a decrease in number, and then this year has been devastating.  I haven't seen Bullfinch on patch since February.

Today's female Bullfinch was afflicted with what I think is Papilloma virus caused by mites.  It is highly contagious, and spreads at sites like feeding stations, hence the smaller numbers of Bullfinch in recent months.  Sadly, the feeding station that allows local photographers and walkers to marvel at the beauty of Bullfinches is accelerating the spread of a disease that will prevent us seeing Bullfinches.  It's so difficult to convince people that feeding birds like this isn't always helping them: the simplistic part of being a nation of "animal lovers" (read, pet lovers, not wild animal lovers) is that it is relatively cheap and easy to feed wild birds and feels nice.  And, as long as there are some Blue Tits and a Robin or two to entertain the masses, people are satisfied with the amount of nature they're seeing.  The photographers get nice close ups of Nuthatch for more likes on Instagram at the cost of the lives of birds.

We left Pennington with the day list at 72 to check graffiti-covered-shopping-trolley-abandoned-Stella Artois-can-temple sites for Dipper; of which there was no sign; and then headed to the Mosses to locate the last remnants of the farmbird population of the area.  Knowing where to look on the Mosses is vital - the area is big, hard to navigate, and can look completely empty of wildlife on a cursory glance.  Fieldfare, Redwing, huge flocks of Linnets, Skylarks, Starlings in surprisingly large flocks all wheeled around the set-asides that this year are planted with sunflowers.  A lone male Merlin hunted the main Linnet flock, and we spent time finding the Tree Sparrows in their only remaining west Manchester site.  The four birds there vastly outnumbered our total House Sparrow sightings (a single bird in a housing estate) and this helps confirm that numbers of Sparrows in general have plummeted in the last few years.  

With time running out, and having set a provisional target of 80 species for the day, we were still short by 3 species.  Stock Dove, usually so reliable at every major site we had visited today, finally gave itself up, and then the Short-eared Owls (totally surrounded by dozens of photographers arguing with each other about who was ruining which shots...) put on a brief display.  I couldn't bring myself to stay and watch as grown men argued about which side of the field they should crowd, while the owls themselves flew further and further out in response to the disturbance.  Leaving to walk back the long way to the car, I was hoping for a Grey Partridge to push us to the magic 80 species mark, and for once, nature obliged.  A flock of 8 calling noisily flew from low stubble to a grassy field, and left us happy.  The bonus flock of 6 Yellowhammers that flew in and perched high up in amazing sunlight at the very end of the day must have represented the whole population of the area, and, with 81 species, I aimed for home.

We missed Great Spotted Woodpecker, Common Gull, Rook, Greylag, Goldeneye, Marsh Harrier, Peregrine, Long-eared Owl and Barn Owl that I felt we could reasonably have expected from our location and timings, and that would have left us on an amazing 90 species.  While there have been some warnings and serious drops in some species of birds, it's been good to see the recovery of numbers of Starlings and the huge amount of thrushes and finches moving into and through the area for winter.  Perhaps if the November temperature drops below the 15 degrees C it was for most of the day, we'll see some winter wildfowl... but that's an issue for another day.  I'd love to recreate the bird race days, though I don't have any real social reach - but perhaps someone will read this and remember those days fondly, and maybe next year there will be two teams of observers in the 10k Big Day.

The full list:

1. Mute swan

2. Mallard

3. Gadwall

4. Teal

5. Tufted duck

6. Moorhen

7. Coot

8. Snipe

9. Jack snipe

10. Lapwing

11. Tawny owl

12. Blackbird

13. Fieldfare

14. Song thrush

15. Mistle thrush 

16. Redwing

17. Starling

18. Carrion crow

19. Jackdaw

20. Magpie

21. Raven

22. Blue tit

23. Great tit

24. Coal tit

25. Willow tit

26. Long-tailed tit

27. Chaffinch

28. Greenfinch

29. Goldfinch 

30. Siskin

31. Redpoll

32. Dunnock

33. Robin

34. Wren

35. Reed bunting

36. Skylark

37. Meadow pipit

38. Great black backed gull

39. Lesser black backed gull

40. Herring gull

41. Black headed gull 

42. Kestrel

43. Pheasant

44. Woodpigeon

45. Collared dove

46. Feral pigeon 

47. Nuthatch

48. Goldcrest

49. Little grebe

50. Kingfisher

51. Stonechat 

52. Pied wagtail

53. Cormorant

54. Great crested grebe 

55. Shoveler

56. Goosander

57. Pochard

58. Canada goose

59. Little egret

60. Oystercatcher

61. Water rail

62. Cetti’s warbler

63. Pink-footed goose

64. Grey heron

65. Bullfinch

66. Great egret

67. Treecreeper

68. Jay

69. Buzzard

70. House sparrow

71. Grey wagtail

72. Sparrowhawk 

73. Chiffchaff

74. Red-legged partridge 

75. Stock dove

76. Merlin

77. Linnet

78. Tree sparrow

79. Short-eared owl

80. Grey partridge 

81. Yellowhammer