Manchester Birder's March 2026 Summary

What a strange month.  Very slow migration in the north west inland "desert" combined with five days of completely cloud-free, 18C weather and then late March hail and snow showers meant that either birds went straight through north and didn't linger or they were stalled by northerly winds keeping them in staging areas south of here.  My sum total of summer migrant birds this month has been a handful of Sand Martin, 14 Black-necked Grebe, 2 Little Ringed Plovers and one solitary Wheatear.  None of those birds have been on patch or even in county.

Locally my quest for Goshawk has been successful and I've had views of a juvenile male bird in what seems to be pre-breeding age display flights where he's either imitating adult birds that he has encountered or is developing a feel for the display forms.  Sadly I can't connect this with any previous records or knowledge because of the lack of Manchester information available generally.  Searching for records of Manchester birds is difficult - there's no bird report for the county and hasn't been one for almost 15 years.  I don't know the reasons for this, and there probably are some good reasons, but it feels disappointing not to have those reference works for the county when there are some outstanding publications available from local bird societies elsewhere.  I have more data on bird populations in Yorkshire, Devon, all of Wales and so on than I do on the place where I live and do 90% of my birding.  

Add to this the sometimes pathological tendency towards secretive little clubs of people who hoard knowledge (I know there's a need to protect birds from selfish arseholes who would endanger them, but nobody is convincing me there isn't a huge element of gatekeeping and clique-bullshit to the whole thing too) and the swift redaction of any sightings of actual note from forums or online sources and it feels like I have to know the right people to find out any information about birds, and I'm depending on their largesse and trust in order to know anything statistically significant about birding in Manchester.

There's also a weird tendency for self-appointed experts to hoard knowledge on a one-way system - local groups and people happy to grill me for my sightings but unwilling to share anything back the other way.  It's all a bit disappointing, a bit disheartening.  That there are people who want to hurt birds is just so alien to me, and that there are birders who are willing to use the fact that disturbed people will kill birds to withhold information from people who genuinely just want to understand their environment better sometimes makes me want to wash my hands of the whole community and simply rely on seeing what I see.  I'm sure other regions of the country have similar problems, but Manchester is a small county with limited bird life and a limited number of people involved in birding.  It's an issue forced upon birders here because you can't avoid the in-crowd.

All of which is the long way round of saying I have absolutely no idea how successful Goshawk is across Greater Manchester and the bordering counties and nor can I find out.  

Otherwise, March 31st proved to be a saving grace for local birding with a summer plumaged Slavonian Grebe an absolute delight on High Rid reservoir.  Originally identified as a Black-necked Grebe, an annual bird on passage here, it was re-found in the late afternoon and a plan to go patch birding was amended to take in only my second Slavonian Grebe in my 10km circle and my first in breeding plumage.

Further afield trips to see Lapland Bunting, Woodlark, Black Grouse, and an inland Leach's Petrel have added some variety to my birding and I've been grateful for the company of others.  A number of people have spoken to me about doing another Big Year, and it's this month that the big difference has appeared compared to last year: I had seen 15 more species by this point last year and that included almost all the Scottish specialities.  March 2025 was one of my best months of that year, while I've only added about 7 species to my year list in March 2026.  Low on quantity, but high in quality, I've enjoyed unusually close encounters with some stunning wildlife in the last month.

April sees me joining Lee for the East Anglia weekender a couple of weeks early, so hopefully we'll have as positive experience as last year.  It's a year since I had my purple patch of self-finds locally, with the Bee-eater and Crane (along with Channel Wagtail) around the middle of April - here's hoping there's more like that to come!