Manchester Birder's April 2026 Summary

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What.  A.  Month!  April 2026, I'm sad to see you go!  The sheer amount of brilliant migration stories locally and further afield has meant a busy month and I feel a kind of joy from beautiful weather and a combination of ranging out and seeing brilliant species close to home.

Local birding

A remarkable day on the moors seeing a flock of 16 Ring Ouzels before finding returning Pied Flycatcher and a male Redstart will be my high-water mark for local spring migration for years to come.  Swallows, Yellow Wagtails, Sand and House Martins, a single Swift, Whitethroat, Grasshopper Warbler, Common Terns, Cuckoo and the most showy Lesser Whitethroats I've ever seen completed a local line up of brilliant birds.  It won't be long before Wood Warbler, Nightjar and Quail grace the local area and I can't wait for those warm nights in May listening to the two-stroke engine calls resound over heath.  I have been guilty of struggling with my local area on occasions over the last few years, overdosing on local patching without any real birds of quality or enough variety to keep me walking and checking, but April is the best month here.  I have got to learn the lesson that though my friends in the south have migration happening in March it takes much longer for all the birds to filter in here, and the second week of April seems to be peak for Manchester.








Further afield

A busy month has had me in Preston for brilliant Bonaparte's Gull, breaking a sort of hoodoo after seeing my first a couple of years back.  A visit to Durham for Marsh Sandpiper and hillside birds, followed by a tour of some sites in the Midlands for Hooded Merganser and heath migrants like Tree Pipit were an excellent middle of the month treat before the north west and north Wales hosted Wryneck, Hoopoe and Black-winged Stilts (with a Woodchat Shrike in Liverpool at the time of writing, but unable to visit!).  These high quality birds were all less than an hour from home and I'm delighted to have seen them.  Between these was a weekend in Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire to see the scarce breeding species that we just don't get here, and aside from Turtle Dove we struck gold.  Zitting Cisticola, Iberian Chiffchaff, Little Stint, American Golden Plover, Dotterel, plus Stone Curlew, Dartford Warbler, Nightingale, Hobby, Bittern, Wood Sandpiper, Spotted Redshank and more made it a memorable weekend as it is every year.











Though I'm not trying for a Big Year (last year was more than enough!) my year list is healthy and has led to a few people asking me if I'm secretly pushing to better the 308 species from 2025.  The short answer is no, I'm just birding and enjoying myself.  I've got a couple of good birding friends who seem to be setting targets for themselves and I'm piggybacking on their efforts - being a birding wingman rather than driving a big list for myself.  Ending April with a year list of over 230 does seem like a Big Year might be accidentally on the cards, but I've no plans for a Scilly or Shetland trip this autumn, so I'm unlikely to get much past 270 species for the year.  Interestingly, last April I wrote that I'd missed five species of birds (Birds I missed: Dotterel, Bonaparte's Gull (twice!), Hoopoe, Wood Sandpiper, Little Stint...) and I have seen all five of those, corresponding numbers wise to the Scottish species I haven't seen this year.  So 233 species at the end of April compared to 236 in 2025 and I think a plateau might have been reached - though I still haven't seen any Eider this year, so there are a few species I should get eyes on!

A much bigger focus for me this year has been to take better photos, and I've met this target with varying degrees of success; where my pictures have been better they've been really pleasing (for me, and my standards - no professionalism here!) but where they've been bad they've been bloody diabolical!  I've been trying to get photos of every species I see, and I've probably been 95% successful to different levels of quality.  One of the big takeaways of last year was how much I've enjoyed looking back over photos of birding trips and with the arrival of spring and some good light, I'm looking forward to spending more time locally, honing my mediocre skills into something I can feel proud of.

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