Wood Warblers and an eleven warbler day

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 being absolutely amazed that they had colonised Leighton Moss.  Little knowing that Cetti's had been breeding at Pennington Flash, not four miles away, for a number of years.  That plosive torrent of noise that starts their song always raises my eyebrows until my 2026 brain overlays my 1990s glasses with lenses of a more recent vintage, and I remember that Cetti's are found in almost every reed-fringed bit of bog I can think of.

The same applies to Lesser Whitethroat.  It's a bird that I have always associated with the southernmost 25% of the UK, a fair-weather bird, not able to cope with the harsh winters of the wet west or the frozen north east.  I never saw a local Lesser until 2024 when a single singing male began to hold territory near Cutacre.  He sang in a hedge on the narrowest little public footpath between two horse paddocks, and the scrapes and nettle stings I would get while looking for him were a reminder that it shouldn't be too easy to see a Lesser Whitethroat in Manchester.  This year there are two males and a female.  A delight.

One thing I have prided myself on over the last four or five years was how well I had got to know my local area.  Particularly within my "patch" as I call my entire 10km circle, I felt that the four or five main locations for bird species was well covered.  I knew every likely bush, every migration fall area, every little nook and cranny.  I'd picked up 145-155 species every year within that 10km circle, not a bad total for Greater Manchester at all.  But the problem with 10km circles is that they have edges, and those edges become a no-man's land of missing knowledge.  What if I nudged my 10km circle a little north and west?  What if I lost the (largely barren) south east of the circle where it begins to meet Manchester city centre and outlying urban sprawl, and instead included the moorland and deciduous beech, birch, oak and sycamore of the south Lancashire area and the West Pennine Moors?  Suddenly thrown into a mysterious realm of no longer knowing where everything is, I began to explore the next three kilometers out.

A whole new world is opened up here.  Whinchat, Ring Ouzel, Goshawk, Pied Flycatcher and Green Woodpecker are present and not just on passage through.  But the crowning jewel, no more than 900 metres outside my 10 kilometre circle, is a breeding population of Wood Warblers.  My favourite warbler bar none, these are a beautiful, confident confection of lemon and ice, a sorbet of a bird, refreshing and sweet and with a song that pierces the garrulousness of the dawn chorus.  I sat on a large damp stone at the edge of the footpath through their territory (literally - their singing perches span across the road in a huge oak and a leafy beech) and just watched three or four of these birds chase each other, dropping silver coins onto a hard surface in their song, listening to them winding down to the chur as the spinning disc lost velocity.  The Wood Warblers perched openly no more than five metres from me, curious but not cowed as I took photos and watched with my naked eyes.  I realised that until today I have only ever seen Wood Warbler in the Peak District and in Welsh woodlands.  My 1990s-bound self was astonished to see them in trees twenty minutes from home.

That led me on a morning mini-quest to see every species of warbler I could in the local area in a morning.  Blackcap, Garden Warbler, Willow Warbler and Chiffchaff all sang from the trees around the Wood Warblers, and I happily clocked all five species there.  Having found a Grasshopper Warbler singing perch a couple of days ago on the moor edge I stopped there until the reeling began and got eyes on the briefly exposed form of the shyest of the warblers in my area.  I dropped into Cutacre on my way home and saw Sedge and Reed Warblers with ease, and Whitethroats which seem to be everywhere.  Nine species of warbler in barely an hour.  Lesser Whitethroat was still singing away in the hedge just south of Cutacre, and I wondered where I could see Cetti's Warbler as close as possible.  News filtered to me then that two Ospreys had been fishing at Pennington Flash that morning, so I abandoned my warbler quest and dashed the three miles to the Flash.

No Ospreys.  They've been in and out all day, and sadly I didn't have time to stay and look.  I slowly drifted back to my car.  And there, on the corner of the canal, sat a silent Cetti's Warbler which took one look at me and burst into staccato song.  Eleven warblers, all close to home.  What a morning.

Wood Warblers are a sign to me that my baseline isn't quite in tune with the reality of birding in the UK, and this can be both positive and negative.  I get a nice surprise when I see Red Kite, Little Egret, Cetti's Warbler, while Willow Tit plunges towards extinction in Britain at an accelerating rate, a nose dive of population which simply will not be stemmed at this point.  Lesser Whitethroat colonises further and further north and west.  Wood Warblers return due to the successful local culling of rhododendron in mixed deciduous forest, which makes me wonder about the local golf development that plans to smash several acres of prime forest where Wood Warblers could call home.  I live in hope that Ospreys will one day hunt all summer long in Manchester, but they'll do it in a place empty of some of the staple birds of my childhood, the Yellowhammers, Corn Buntings and Tree Sparrows that were constant companions in the 1990s.  

For all that we have gained, there is as much that we have lost, and it's easy to give in to melancholy over the shift in baseline as it accelerates away into the bleakness of a monoculture.  Perhaps it's only futile, but maybe the best medicine comes in a small, sweet, lemon and white form: watching Wood Warblers certainly gave me joy in the face of the impending future.  It's not every day you see eleven species of warbler in the north west, and, though I know the causes of the range expansions are often destructive climate effects, I'm still glad of the birds in their own right.