The Manchester Birder

Following the surprise of the Penzance Laughing Gull, I continued with the planned excursion on the Scillonian III.  In previous years I have stayed at the Garrison on Scilly and booked onto a number of pelagic trips with the excellent Joe Pender and crew.  This year, I left my booking too late.  No place at the Garrison, and no pelagic availability on the dates I could do.  I hadn't factored this in to a birding year that has become a Big Year attempt.  Lessons learned about planning ahead and big projects. So I began to research the earliest dates for the large Shearwaters to be seen in Cornish and Scillonian waters.  The last weekend of July seemed late enough, certainly in recent years, to qualify as giving me a more than reasonable chance of seeing Cory's and Great Shearwaters.  I know they're possible anywhere - the Cory's that graced the Humber last year shows that - but sea-watching for a Manchester lad is not my natural environment, and so I w...

Unusually for me, I'm writing this on my phone, in my tent.  I left for my West Country adventure a day early.  I was becoming an irritating and irritable man, snapping at the people around me that I care for.  So, more from a desire to keep an unstable peace than a fervent need to be birding (though let's be honest, that's always true too) I set off for Penzance at 2.20am. Cornwall always shocks me.  How long it takes to get there, and then, how long it takes to get through it.  At 8.30am, I pulled up at the car park at Long Rock brimming with hope at the report of an early morning Laughing Gull in summer plumage.  Two hours of scanning and checking every gull in the harbour failed to help the amused larid materialise, and I resolved to stump off to Tesco to pick up last minute camping supplies before attempting to pitch a tent in some challenging gusts of wind... after one final check before I went, and there, in the middle of the flock of larger gulls, t...

This was a week off birding.  I know, it surprised me too.  But I've been feeling a bit burned out, and so I turned my attention to other hobbies.  The whisky group reconvened for the first time in 2025 (and that was a source of some stress for a while), and friends returned from working in Kuwait with Cuban gifts.  The whole whisky and cigars thing isn't generally conducive to the life of a birder, with the best of those experiences occurring late at night in the summer heat - and no way I'm making a 4am start to see the best of the bird life after that.  So I planned to indulge the water of life and the craftsmanship of tobacco, and have a break from birds. I was tenderly nursing the neck out of a bottle of Cardhu 16 when I saw the news of Black-crowned Night Heron, Caspian Tern and White-rumped Sandpiper in the north east and Musselburgh.  For a tense moment I thought about stopping the whisky and smoke, but then good sense prevailed and the neck became ...

                                                                   I wrote this last year during what turned out to be the slow fall into a breakdown - that felt sudden in November, but in hindsight had been coming for a while.  This was one of the early dominoes to fall in a long rally that eventually broke me.  I'm sharing it here because 12 months later I was reminded of the solace of birding and also as a reflection on the cyclical nature of grief.  Grief is absence, not something we should "get over", but something we experience when we recognise the lack of someone in our lives.  Grief informs who we are, if we let it.  It makes us recognise the relationships and things that we still have, because that absence forms the space around those that are still presen...

When I decided to try a Big Year, I was aware that the June/July/early August period can be a lull, and other more experienced birders advised me to keep birding during that time, or else the habit of being outside and noticing what's around you can fade.  I took that to heart, and have done a lot of local wandering the last few weeks, with (wrong) low expectations of seeing very much.  I invested in some books and resources about butterflies and dragonflies to better educate myself, and I have enjoyed trying to find and photograph some of these.  However, one of the problems with experiencing a bout of mental ill health is that you feel you can't trust yourself.  Your emotions feel alien.  Sort of like when you turn your ankle and it no longer supports your weight - and from then on, you're always a bit suspicious of trusting what was always a solid foundation previously. I have never been particularly averse to being alone.  Loneliness wasn't ever a probl...

What a six months of birding this has been! But (without it being the focus of the blog), I have alluded to the reality that 2025 has been, behind the scenes, more about recovery from trauma and a breakdown in 2024, and the goal behind the birding has been to slowly come back to a form of coping with the real world.  Progress is, with all things like this, predictably unpredictable, but there has been improvement, and a recent setback aside, I am coming to terms with a new reality.  Along with the blog I have been writing more deeply to help with this recovery, and may share some parts of this writing here, if people would find it helpful to have a vehicle to discuss recovering from mental trauma through birding.   In terms of the birding, with 16 lifers - as many as the whole of 2024 - I have been focusing on the year list in the last three months, and hoping to pick up some new species as I move into the autumn.  I have had some really thought-provoking experi...

Following June of this year is always going to be a tall order, with ten species new for the year list and four new to me at all.  July was going to have to deliver something special in order for it to register in a remarkable year of birding. So it was an absolute delight to arrive early in the morning at Upsettlington, owner of the best place name I've been to this year, near Berwick-upon-Tweed in the Scottish Borders.  This is a beautiful and tiny village that has played host to a singing Blyth's Reed Warbler since June 27th when found by someone on breeding bird survey along the river.  As I walked along this perfect idyll just inside Scotland, I thought about how birds like this Warbler are found.  The Blyth's has a very distinctive call, but it's not so out of place that you would necessarily stop in your tracks having heard it blending in to the wild background soundtrack (Garden Warbler and Whitethroat the two loudest here).  The skill of the finder in t...