The Manchester Birder

Working from home is littered with potential distractions and temptations, and all three of these birds in the last week have been species that have caused disruption in that I have either started late, finished early, or woken up late as a result of staying out to find them! Osprey as a species feels like it has hit a critical mass in recent years, with colonisation occurring in lots of southern England, the midlands, as well as Northumberland, parts of Wales, south Cumbria, and of course the Scottish traditional strongholds. The number of non-breeding birds that seem to have lingered in Lancashire over the last couple of summers is good news, and especially seeing birds coming back to the same stretches of the Ribble means there is potential for breeding on the plethora of reservoirs and lakes to be found in east Lancashire, north Manchester and even where I am in the flat plains of west Manchester and north Cheshire.  Reports of an Osprey lingering at Pennington Flash across a w...

As a birder, I often struggle with my eyesight.  I wear very strong prescription glasses, and this makes birding in rain or humidity a proper pain in the neck.  Droplets on my glasses and steaming up when using binoculars are frustrating.  I find a change of focal length disorientating and difficult to adapt to; moving between binoculars and naked eye, or telescope to camera, or in particular from phone to optics leaves my vision momentarily fuzzy and blurred.  So I often depend on my ears when I'm birding.  I'm not brilliant at instant ID when it comes to bird song, but I usually use birds calling as a way of homing in on them and confirming identification visually.  I don't know how I'd manage to go birding without that sense, given how slow my eyes are to focus.   Positively accessible The Merlin Bird ID app from Cornell Labs has real application here, giving instant access to at least an approximation of this sense that a hearing impaired pers...

As so many of my blogs begin, my baseline for birding was set during the 1990s.  Little Egret was a twitchable rarity.  Cetti's Warbler was an exotic species only found in famous locations in Norfolk.  Marsh Harrier was a summer migrant to Leighton Moss.  There were six (6) Red Kites in the whole of the UK.  A single pair of Ospreys bred at Loch Garten.  England's last breeding Golden Eagles occupied a crag at Haweswater.  Avocet was rare outside of East Anglia, Black-necked Grebe was vanishingly uncommon and it was a fifty mile each way trip to see birds like Peregrine and Raven from my Manchester base. I sometimes feel I'm stuck in that time, comparing all my sightings to how rare or scarce or common birds were in the mid to late 1990s.  I get excited about birds that most people dismiss.  Young birders of my acquaintance never really react to a Cetti's Warbler bursting into song, while I remember seeing my first about six years ago and bei...

My friend passed me his thermal imager on a survey of Jack Snipe on patch in the winter just gone, but I struggled to use it, finding the flares of white light too distracting and the sense of scale confusing.  It had been a very successful survey.  Between us we found 27 Jack Snipe and over 50 Common Snipe in one bog.  He used the thermal, and I did a binocular scan.  It wasn't even a close competition: he found all 27 Jacks and over 40 of the Commons.  That thermal was a game changer, for someone with the ability to use it. When I was 14 I was part of a large and active group of birders of all ages which exposed me to two things that were good for my development as a birder: experience, and a broad church of opinion.  All forms of birders were there, and I do mean all .  Strict patchers, full-blown twitchers, bird racers, conservation experts, even former egg-collectors turned real birders were part of a patchwork of views and opinions that helped me...