Grey Phalarope (just) in the Danelaw, I mean, Greater Manchester

Worthington Lakes is a set of reservoirs on the very boundary between Greater Manchester and Lancashire.  There will be grumbles about this, usually from men (and it's always a certain kind of man who finds excessive pleasure in pedantry, even when it's misplaced and inaccurate) who insist on boring at me to change my blog name because "it's not bloody Manchester, it's always been Lancashire..." It's been Manchester since 1974.  52 years is enough.  Or should I still be referring to it as the Danelaw?  Either way, it's a source of encouragement when a rare bird is found at a local place.  

I've lived in west Manchester for over 15 years in my current phase here, and over 35 years altogether, and Worthington Lakes is the kind of local little nature reserve/countryside area that you could go birding at every day for three years and never see anything outside the same 45 species you see every time.  It's so similar to a dozen other places nearer to where I live that, despite only being 7 miles away from me in a straight line, I have never been there before today.  I've only really heard of it before in the context of it being one of the more reliable sites on the Lancashire/GM border for Dipper and for an overwintering Scaup.  Don't get me wrong - it is as much a site worth visiting as Cutacre is for me, and I bet it's a damn sight less overrun with bloody dogs - it just doesn't have anything I don't already see within a walk from home.  So it's always sort of been on the edge of awareness, and I never got round to visiting it.

Good job there are people out there who do check on these places regularly.  Yesterday afternoon a Grey Phalarope was reported on the northern reservoir by local super-finder Phil Rhodes, one of three or four names that are associated with almost every scarce bird found in GM west.  I decided that I would visit early the following day and see if I could pick it up again, having never seen Grey Phalarope in the GM area.  I woke up too early, set off too early, and in the dark missed the poorly signposted carpark for entry into the reservoirs.  Eventually managing to park and walk to the side of the water, I realised that not only was it jet black under the trees before sunrise, there was also a clinging mist over the water.  How was I ever going to see this Phalarope?  I needn't have worried: I slowly wandered along the footpath and within 20 minutes had my first view of the pale shape of the wader chugging along like a ghostly baby steampunk duck no more than three metres from the edge of the shoreline.  For the next three and a half hours the Phalarope did relays of that shoreline from causeway to causeway, occasionally drifting into an inlet or under a tree, but mostly just doing the clockwork thing back and forth.

In some light it was clear that the red colouration of the summer bird was still fading, and the face, head and throat were still variously peach-flavoured when the Phalarope was stretching for an insect on the surface of the water.  Then the sun would go behind a cloud and the monochrome patterns on the back would stand out more, and I'd be left with a much more black and white and shades of grey feeling about it.  A sturdier looking bird than the dainty Red-necked Phalarope I'd watched a few weeks earlier near Sheffield, it was the first time I'd really spent time studying a Phalarope face-on.  The bill profile made me think more in terms of pelagic species than I'd ever considered before, and I got the sense of a hardiness about it that I think is lost in how dinky Phalaropes are.  These birds are hardcore.  

They breed in the high Arctic on lakes and pools, the females might find multiple partners to fertilise eggs, and then migrate once a couple of broods of eggs are laid.  Males remain to incubate and rear chicks, before migrating south to the wintering grounds off the west coast of Africa and the tip of South Africa.  When not migrating through inland reservoirs in Wigan, Grey Phalaropes spend a lot of time at sea.  Such tiny birds on such powerful water is hard to imagine, but they really are fearless little things.

It was a pleasure to catch up with many familiar faces at Worthington today, from Neville hoping the Phalarope would swim five metres further up the inlet and therefore be eligible for the Chorley and Lancashire recording area, to Mick who patches faithfully at Worthington and had missed the wader the day before on an away day to Hesketh; from Andy and Colin catching up with their second Grey Phalarope on-site over the years, to Lee and his lad who is just beginning to enjoy his birds, there was a who's who of local birders and it felt good that so many people could share this rare Manchester sighting.

I know my dabbling in amateur Latin and Greek gives some readers light relief, so the scientific name of the Grey Phalarope (which is often very red), is Phalaropus fulicarus; phalaropus comes from the Greek for Coot (phalaris) and foot (pous), therefore meaning "Coot-footed" and fulicarus is from the Latin "fulica" which means... of course, "Coot".  So the whole scientific name of this bird is Coot-footed Coot-like bird.  A bird an eighth the size of a Coot, that spends its summer bright red, its winter glorious silver, migrates thousands of miles to live in the Arctic, or on the sea off Africa is named after a rotund black bird with a white bill that seems happiest on ponds inland.  Got it.

Makes me wonder if those that so named the Grey Phalarope had ever really seen a Coot.