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Born and bred in Sheffield, I was fortunate to grow up in Crosspool where a
large part of my childhood was spent exploring the nearby Rivelin Valley; mainly
thanks to my late Dad, who didn't own a car and therefore insisted on marching
me and my sister everywhere on foot. It was here in May 1981 that I made my
first foray into birding, largely thanks to Chris McNaghten, who lived four
doors away and gave me my first bird book: the Observer's Book of Birds - that
semi-monochrome classic. This was soon discarded, but Lars Jonsson's 'Birds of
Mountain and Moorland' acquired a couple of years later, remains my favourite
bird book to this day - truly inspirational stuff. It was around this time that
my life long interest in visible migration first began to stir and I still have
happy memories of counting Meadow Pipits from my front steps before school -
who'd have thought that would ever catch on?!
Around December 1981, I made my first visit to Redmires Reservoirs - a truly horrific experience, which saw me search for a distant Goldeneye bobbing amongst the leaden grey waves, struggling to hold a huge pair of 10x50 ex-army binoculars in a freezing NE gale. My Dad called it 'character-building', I seem to remember calling it something else! In spite of this, the place continued to hold a strange fascination for me, although access was very different in those days, with my teenage curiosity for identifying distant blobs usually thwarted either by the chain-smoking Ellis Colley - the long-serving water bailiff or a pipe-wielding Ken Crookes. A successful permit application in 1986 changed all that, however, and I was at last free to find my own birds. I was rewarded almost instantly, when after a run of easterlies on 1st September, I found my first local rarity: a confiding Wryneck on the Middle Res - part of a big east coast fall at that time. Convinced no-one would ever believe a 15 year-old kid, sadly this record never saw the light of day, but it did teach me a valuable lesson: document everything - something I have tried to do ever since, up to and including my 3,118th visit to Redmires last week! It was here, where I first bumped into such local luminaries as Kevin Gould, Keith Clarkson and Tony Morris. Their encouragement was, and still is, greatly appreciated; as was a chance meeting there with David Herringshaw - for it was 'DH' who gave me that final push to join the SBSG in October 1986. . |
With no transport, the SBSG was a huge influence in those early years,
particularly the field trips to iconic places like Spurn, Gibraltar Point and
perhaps best of all Cley - I still recall a stunning female Wilson's Pharalope
there in May 1987 and a skulking Thrush Nightingale the following year. For the
past two decades, I have tried to remain faithful to local birding, despite
occasionally flirting with twitching and also foreign travel - my favourite
places being Point Pelee in Canada, Ephesus Marsh in Turkey and Finnish Lapland.
With two young sons, my wings have been clipped a bit of late, although I still
prefer pottering around the moorland fringe finding my own stuff, as opposed to
the modern trend of pager/web-based 'birding by numbers'. Although my Sheffield
list is nothing special, I have managed to find 202 species locally, including
White Stork, Black-throated Thrush, Hoopoe, Marsh and Dartford Warbler, plus
breeding Wigeon and Firecrest. The latter remains my favourite bird of all - for
me, they still knock a Pallas's into a cocked hat, unless it's at Redmires of
course!
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