For more years than some of us care to remember a group of us have been going out together once a month, initially as Oldham RSPB Outdoor Members Group and then as Oldham Birders. Make-up and numbers have varied over the decades but there have always been a group of us sharing day trips and long weekends birding together. Obviously the constraints of social distancing and staying safe have brought a hopefully brief interruption to this but we are all still in touch and one of the group mentioned this morning that today would have been our April trip. He said he was going out anyway and wondered if anyone else was. So we had the idea of each doing our permitted exercise walk round our local patches -Dukinfield, Hazel Grove, Tandle Hill Park and Werneth Park in Oldham - and combining our sightings of birds and wildlife into our usual group trip list as a way of keeping the spirit of the group going despite the restrictions. Not quite a virtual trip, I know, but that's the title we started with so we're sticking to it. So where you see that # in today's posts that's what it's about. A way of continuing to share the pleasure (mostly ) of going out birding together even when we can't. We're keeping our posts to our individual birding and wildlife threads to keep continuity with sightings in each area, but I hope to add a summary here later when all the info is in. Between the four of us we managed 40 species of birds and 6 of butterflies - Tortoiseshell, Speckled Wood, Peacock, Orange Tip, Small White and Comma -we've done worse on all day trips sometimes All of us saw: Blue Tit, Blackbird, Robin, Dunnock, Long-Tailed Tit, Carrion Crow, and Jackdaw, while Nuthatch scored 3 seen and 1 heard Three of us saw: Goldfinch, Great Tit, Wren, Magpie, and Lesser Black-backed Gull, Two of us saw: Feral Pigeon, Wood Pigeon, Pied Wagtail, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Chiffchaff, Chaffinch, Greenfinch, Bullfinch, Mistle Thrush, Coal Tit, Starling, House Sparrow and Mallard Just one sighting each of: Willow Warbler, Song Thrush, Sand Martin, Moorhen, Little Grebe, Buzzard, Stock Dove, Sparrowhawk, Jay, Treecreeper, Canada Goose, Goosander, Swallow and Herring Gull.

-- Edited by Mike Chorley on Sunday 19th of April 2020 11:01:59 PM