When you think of city living, what most people picture is excited yuppies sipping natural wine, wearing sunglasses, with some tapas -or a raucous rave in a basement below a warehouse in a soon-to-be-gentrified industrial estate. What they might not think of, however, is the simple joy a nesting bird can bring.
Cormorants are now widespread across Britain, and as a bird which eats fish, can be found on the coast or around inland water. At one point, due to fertiliser pollution, they were threatened — but numbers have bounced back in the last 40 years, particularly in areas which border the Irish Sea.
Now, Manchester is famous for having everything except a beach, as Ian Brown once quipped. But it does have plenty of inland water — which is where one cormorant chose to come.