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Considering the propensity of county gull roosts and their dedicated band of observers over the years, it has always been somewhat surprising that Bonaparte's Gull has never been claimed, never mind officially accepted, anywhere in the county. It has not been for the want of trying either but finally, the duck (well, gull...) has been broken.
On January 26th, 2019 Heaton Park Reservoir hosted the first ever record of Bonaparte's Gull, now accepted by BBRC, and became the 319th species to be officially recorded in the county. Congratulations to the two lucky, or at the very least observant observers, Pete Berry and Simon Johnson.
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Cetti’s Warbler was first recorded in the county back in autumn 2007 and since then has expanded its range, albeit very slowly, but it remains a genuinely very rare bird away from its stronghold of the Wigan Flashes to Pennington Flash ‘corridor’ with more recent records away from here including Hope Carr NR and Worsley Filtration Lagoons. Given this, it has always rightly been a county rarity and required a submission to be provided to the county rarities committee.
Given that obtaining a description of any Cetti’s is difficult enough due to their generally very elusive nature, this has hampered submissions to the committee of ‘new’ individuals and yet their distinctive and usually often given song generally immediately identifies them. With county birders becoming increasingly familiar with the song of this species and in order to fully appreciate and record their status and distribution in the county, the county rarities committee unanimously voted to remove the requirement for a submission to be provided to the committee for singing birds only. Non-singing birds will still require a submission to be provided to the committee though and with proven mis-identifications occurring even recently in the county, the committee felt this was entirely necessary and justified. We strongly urge records of singing birds to be formally submitted to the Greater Manchester Bird Recording Group though, so a clear picture of their status and distribution can be maintained, along with any necessary conservation of areas they may occur in. Anyone fortunate enough to encounter a Cetti’s away from their core range in the county should therefore contact the county recorder or consult the record submission page. All the best, Ian There are trip report and there are TRIP REPORTS, and this new one, on Cuba by John Rayner, is definitely the latter!
Lavishly illustrated and a wonderful read, kick back and set aside some time to transport to yourself to the beautiful island. They're big files, so may take a few minutes to download but are well worth the wait! Nip across to the trip reports pages now. The British Birds Rarities Committee has added two species to its list of those requiring submissions and also removed two species at the same time.
So, as of 1st January 2019, the following species have been added and will now require a submission to BBRC, regardless of the identification of birds to sub-specific level:
The following species have been removed from BBRC's list and will now be assessed by the Greater Manchester Rarities Committee:
The 2018 summary of the Bittern breeding season in the UK by Simon Wotton is now available on the 'miscellaneous' sections of the articles page. Along with the previous two years they make for very interesting reading.  One of the county's more remarkable, most well-watched and most difficult to identify species was added to the official county bird list after Phil Rhodes found and acrocephalus warbler at Hope Carr, near Leigh, on 20th January 2019. The bird was subsequently identified as a Blyth's Reed Warbler and the rest is as they say...history!
This would have been easily the most difficult species the county rarities committee might ever have had to assess were it not for the many excellent and tremendously instructive images that were obtained by many photographers and not least to the fact that the bird remained present on site for so long and often allowed fantastic close views. Hands up all those who predicted a Blyth's Reed Warbler on an old smelly sewage works in a little ex-mining town in inland north-west England in the middle of winter? So, that's no one then... Yet another trip report to transport you to somewhere warmer, albeit in the UK but still, the Farne Islands in June will do nicely in the depth of our winter! Go to the trip report pages and enjoy!
So, whilst it's still cold outside why not take yourself to a sunnier clime and enjoy Andy Bissitt's trip report of Peru in November and December 2018.
Find it on the Trip Reports page and enjoy! It may be cold outside at the moment, but in Southern India in August its not, plus its also full of some very special birds too.
So, grab yourself a brew, put your feet up and treat yourself to a read of Chris and Vicky Harper's trip report of their adventures to Southern India in August 2018. Some visitors of the Manchester Birding Forum may receive a security alert message from your internet search engine when trying to connect to the forum, informing you that basically the site may be being impersonated (having been hacked). I can confirm that this is NOT the case and the forum is working perfectly normally, in fact, better than ever!
On other 28th September the forum hosting company automatically enabled SSL secure encryption on the forum, which will be much more secure for anyone using it, although the forum never has and never will hold personal data on any of its users anyway. When now using older (cached) pages of the forum, search engines recognise that they are not the newly existing SSL versions and believe them to be possible imitations which is giving rise to the security messages. For me (I initially got the security message too!), just connecting to the new site has cleared any problems but perhaps clearing your cache may be an option too. Details of the upgrade from the hosting company are below: In continuation with our push towards an increasingly secure ActiveBoard environment, we're now planning to enable TLS/SSL encryption (HTTPS) on all forums on September 28th, 2018. HTTPS ensures that transmitted data is private, and protects against eavesdropping attacks. It also helps prevent tampering with requests, and injection of malicious advertisements or code into the pages you view. Additionally, HTTPS enabled forums should also see an small increase in Google search rankings, as they have indicated that HTTPS sites will be favoured over HTTP sites. |
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Birds, birders and birding in Greater Manchester and way beyond...
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