September is, for me, a month of staying near home. I’m lucky up here in the Northwest of the county to have good birdwatching sites nearby – Wood Lane reserve near Ellesmere and Sinker’s Fields in Whixall – so I’ll be making the most of them to watch out for passage migrants. These are the birds which use the area as a sort of motorway service station on their migratory journeys southwards to warmer climes. Some fly by day, some by night but they all need somewhere to stop and rest, feed, drink and ready themselves for the next leg of the voyage. I’m going to have to be up early to catch arrivals and departures at dawn!

Wood Lane has an enviable list of passage birds. The waders are particularly well-represented, the list including avocet, grey plover, dotterel, whimbrel, godwits (both kinds), ruff, curlew sandpiper, little stint and Temminck’s stint, red-necked and grey phalaropes, sandpipers (common, purple, green, wood and pectoral), redshank and greenshank. Some appear regularly, some have been recorded only once or twice, but the possibility is enough to get me out at first light. There’s none of that ‘yawn … another lapwing!’ going on now. I like lapwings as much as any bird, I love the way they fly and the wild swanee-whistle calls, but there’s something different in the lift of your heart when you catch a glimpse of something really noteworthy, really unusual, on your local patch. Scanning with binoculars, you see something just a bit different about a bird, maybe the way it moves, the colour of its legs, a flash of white where there wouldn’t be one if you were looking at one of the site usuals. Then the scrabble to get the scope on the thing before it disappears behind a clump of reeds, and yes, you have it! Whoop! Last time I saw one of those it was in Shetland (or Iceland, or Sweden or wherever the creature spends the summer months) and now here it is, on my doorstep. Hurrah! By tomorrow it may be gone again, heading south with winter on its wings, but right now it’s blessing me with its presence and making the day a special one.

Sinker’s Fields (Whixall canal floods) is another grand place to spend a few hours with stop-over visitors, and Venus Pool another. Both sites have comfortable hides, which is a bonus early in the morning. However, passage migrants can turn up anywhere, so I’ll be keeping an eye out wherever I am. I have happy memories of a morning in the Boathouse on Ellesmere mere when I was working there. An odd little bird turned up right outside the windows by the footpath that runs along the mereside, and it took quite a while with binoculars and bird book to realise it was a young wheatear. It wasn’t that the identification was all that difficult – it just seemed such an odd place for it to be. Similarly, the fly-past of five calling whimbrel seen through the same window. Autumn passage birds are even less predictable than spring ones – the southward migration tends to be more protracted, and many birds take a more easterly route – but we shall see. And even if we don’t see this time, the chance of spotting a rarity will take us out again, and again, until the season settles and the long-stay winter visitors arrive to turn another page of the birdwatching calendar and herald the winter season proper.