"Took Boggarts on the saltmarsh": a love for birding Lancashire's difficult landscape

I have spent some time birding in over 40 counties of the UK this year, and this has given me glimpses of the stories that people have told for hundreds of years in those areas.  Stories have always fascinated me.  The human instinct to encode information in a story to help memorise or familiarise it is a deeply weird and wonderful activity unlike anything else in our whole experience.  As I've travelled around the UK this last year I've done some reading on local folk stories and the nature lore of some areas and found some intriguing snippets that have fed my imagination.

Lancashire folklore tells stories of Boggarts (the source material for the spirits of the same name in the Harry Potter stories) - solitary evil spirits who should not be named for a variety of unexplained reasons - that drew people away from the safety of their own homes and into trouble on the marshes.  At the milder end of their scale of mischief some people believed that the cold, clammy feeling we all wake up with in bed, or the unexpected loss of bedsheets on a cold night was caused by Boggarts, all the way through to unlikely drownings and people lost on the saltmarsh or mud off the Lancashire coast being struck by Boggarts.  When horses became frightened for no apparent reason they were said to have "took boggarts".  "Boggart muck" was an old North Western name for owl pellets pre-18th Century.  The superstitious veneer over these stories covers a deeper truth - the Lancashire coast looks flat and benign and slow and gentle and it is none of those things at all.  It can be deadly cold and dangerous to even those people experienced on the salt marsh and who know the tides.  At best a mistake will coat you in stinking clammy mud; at worst you won't return.  It is a landscape as worthy of healthy respect as the mountains further north and the moorland to the east.

My wanderings this year have often taken me to Lancashire. My family's ancestral home and where I learned much of my fieldcraft and appreciation of birds, the nostalgia of 2025 led me to revisit many areas I hadn't been to since the late 1990s along with the hazy half-memories of how to get there and where to walk.  I have seen some incredible wild sights in the county this past 12 months and enjoyed reconnecting with places and birds that are not found in nearby Greater Manchester.  The flood plain and saltmarsh is often a bleak looking place; none of the prettiness of Bowland or the rich verticality of Cumbria; none of the tourist-drawing beauty of North Yorkshire or Dorset; none of the extremes of Eryri or the Cairngorms; but it is a rich, flat bleakness that promises big skies and wildlife at scale.  It's this that draws me back over and over.  There is less of a high profile birding scene here than in Yorkshire or Norfolk though there are some very good birders in the county.  There tends to be fewer rarities discovered on the west, though I'd imagine the smaller coverage allows more to slip through unobserved while the focus on the usual national hotspots becomes smothering as more people flood to twitch the obvious.

Lancashire has its share of nationally recognised birding locations.  Leighton Moss was one of the hubs of reedbed restoration and wetland management attracting Bittern, Bearded Tit and Marsh Harrier in the 1990s, one of only three or four locations nationally to reliably see any of those species back then.  It has more of a nostalgic draw than a birding one these days: I can see almost everything Leighton Moss has to offer on an average day there within 10 miles of home these days (and who would have thought we'd have otter in Wigan in 2025?), but there have been some notable highlights this year well worth the 50 minute drive.  In January I saw Water Pipit at Leighton Moss as part of a day in north Lancashire where I also watched Great Northern Diver on pine Lake, saw 64 Hawfinches at Gait Barrows, and found two Bewick's Swans at Thurnham.  February had a very showy Jack Snipe from the Morecambe hide, and June included the weirdness of a Pomarine Skua sitting on saltmarsh for a couple of days.  July and August had a long-staying Lesser Yellowlegs.  

Further south and along the Ribble valley and floodplain the habitat at Marshside and Banks has been incredibly productive this year.  Whatever the provenance of the series of Snow Geese that have come to Marshside this year, the fact that they keep coming back to the landscape with huge geese and swan flocks means it's a good place to become familiar with the features of the species.  The Ross's Goose that appeared briefly in early October will never be accepted by any rarity committee (because rare geese never are in Lancashire) but was as wild as any I've ever seen and my third of the year including two in Scotland.  Montagu's Harrier in August at Crossen's Outer and White-winged Black Tern in September followed a relatively showy Temminck's Stint in spring.  A first year male Smew on the marine lake at Southport was a great way to see a fast-declining species.  Marshside has become my go-to if I have half a day and I've burned out on my local patch.  The joy of watching Hen Harriers, Merlins, Peregrines, Twite and tens of thousands of ducks, geese, swans and waders close to home is a delight.

A little inland is Martin Mere.  I've had a love-hate relationship with the Mere over the years.  Expensive to access on a day ticket, I dislike the captive bird element of the reserve.  The escapes from Martin Mere cast a long shadow over any potentially wild ducks and geese in the county and it's always a first thought when seeing any rarities within 20 miles.  The Bar-headed Geese and Black Swans that live across the Lancashire plains likely originate from within the pens of the aviary there, and this removes credibility from other wild birds.  The feeding on site that attracts the Whoopers and Bewick's Swans also brings in potentially wild geese that then copy the behaviour of the wildfowl nearby - Red-breasted Goose in 2024 that was initially wary and distant on saltmarsh eventually fed so close to the hide that people had to remove long lenses from their cameras to get proper photographs.  Was it a wild bird?  We'll never know.  With that said there is often a great selection of wildlife to see there.  Glossy Ibis, Ring-necked Duck and Cattle Egret on a day list in December is relatively incredible: ten years ago two of those species would have sparked a reasonable-sized local twitch and thirty years back Ring-necked Duck wasn't as regular as it is today.  The fields around Martin Mere have also been my best place to see Quail for a couple of years now.  

Though I love being out and experiencing flocks of geese flying over, the sounds and the scale of it all, searching through huge flocks of geese isn't my favourite birding - I tend to get migraines from eye strain and struggle with distance - though there is something satisfying at picking the odd one out from thousands of Pink-feet.  Lesser White-fronted Goose (provenance unknown but almost certainly discounted just because Lancashire) and a Tundra Bean were present in February and just this week I spent a happy two hours combing through 3000 Pink-feet for two Tundra Bean and a Russian White-fronted Goose at Plex Moss.  

It's here in the December gloom that I was reminded of Boggart folklore.  Though I love birding in this county above almost all others, the cold, clammy hand of disquiet struck while driving across the moss.  Lost on tiny, uneven, subsidence-prone roads, with narrow misses from farm vehicles as the light drew in I suddenly understood exactly how people could get turned around on the landscape in times past.  No signal for my phone map, frozen with the cold wind and exposure to the relentless and coverless wilderness I would have been in trouble without my car.  A night of trudging across an unreliable mudscape that looks flat and green and inviting in the morning sunlight but is revealed to be treacherous and slippery and concealing hidden depths once a wrong step is taken would leave anyone "took Boggarts".  A place due respect.  Happily my radio began working and signal was restored to my phone showing me that I was only half a mile from civilisation and a straightforward drive had me back amongst the coffee shops and bakeries of small village Lancashire where thoughts of supernatural mischief receded into the warm welcome of the people of one of my favourite counties.