Late in October 2025, I found myself once again standing at the entrance to RSPB Fairburn Ings, camera and binoculars in hand. A year earlier, I had written about this place’s astonishing transformation from industrial wasteland to thriving wetland. Returning felt a little like visiting an old friend, familiar yet full of surprises.
The morning light had that soft, golden quality that makes you glad you rose early.
A female blackbird greeted us near the path, bringing with it the age-old question that starts many a birdwatching conversation: do female blackbirds have brown or yellow beaks? The answer, as we later confirmed, is brownish, but it sparked a debate all the same.
By the visitor centre, we lingered at the demonstration garden, a neat patch showing how even the smallest green spaces can shelter life. A moorhen pottered about in the corner pond, not your average garden visitor, while a wood pigeon claimed its usual spot on our group leader’s list at number ten. Soon the familiar cast appeared: great tits, blue tits, goldfinches, and the ever-underrated dunnock, quietly working the undergrowth.
At the Kingfisher Screen, the namesake bird remained elusive, though a grey heron stood sentinel in its place, perfectly still as if carved from the reedbed. We turned left along the narrow strip of land between the River Aire and the main lake, pausing at the hide to watch ducks and grebes gliding through the glassy water. The morning sun shimmered across the surface, one of those rare, calm moments that make you grateful to be outdoors.
For the last half hour the reserve felt entirely ours until a group of electric cyclists appeared out of nowhere, with us jumping out of the way. Moments later we heard a scratch and a crash. Another group of cyclists had not managed to react as quickly, and it looked like there had been a minor collision, do hope we all get better at being more aware of other users of our pathways!
By the time we looped back to the car park, the rest of the RSPB group had arrived, and we set off together to see if we could spot a Water Rail at the Pickup Hide. There was no luck there, so we pressed on into the biting wind along the Roy Taylor Trail. The landscape opened wide. Magpies flashed across the path, cormorants wheeled overhead and a crow watched from the pines. On the top lake, the action began to unfold. Gulls called across the water, teal flashed their bright wing patches in flight and shoveler and pintail ducks fed in the shallows.
Then came the moment of the day: a red kite sweeping so close overhead we could almost feel the rush of its wings as smaller birds mobbed it in defence of their territory.
Further on, tufted ducks and little grebes dived energetically, while great crested grebes cruised across and cormorants dried their wings in the sunlight. We paused for lunch, scanning the fields for the cattle egrets that often mingle with the Highland cattle, though luck was not with us this time.
As the afternoon wore on, we watched a flock of long-tailed tits dart back and forth across the path, tiny flashes of motion against the scrub. Back at the Bob Dickens Hide, named after one of the volunteers who helped establish Fairburn Ings as a nature reserve in 1957, the weather had turned since our visit earlier in the day. A cold wind swept through the reeds and there was a lot more cloud cover. Lapwings and starlings took flight in shimmering waves, while pochards and greylag geese paddled below.
We ended the day with a final stop at the more sheltered hide further down the track. There were no spoonbills this time, but the calm of the water and the rhythm of the wind were their own reward. A few of us walked as far as the sluice gate at the end of the reserve before returning to the café for a well-earned hot drink.
As we sat with steaming mugs in hand, I thought again about Fairburn’s remarkable journey, something the timeline display in one of the hides now brings vividly to life:
• 1066: William the Conqueror’s army was delayed here by floods on the way to York, a reminder that this has always been a landscape shaped by water.
• 17th century: Alabaster and Magnesian limestone were quarried nearby, some perhaps used to rebuild the Houses of Parliament.
• 19th century: Coal mining took over, and deep-shaft mines defined life here for generations.
• 1947: The mines were nationalised.
• 1957: Local volunteers, including Bob Dickens, Dr Pickup, and Charlie Winn, began transforming the scarred ground into a haven for wildlife, a vision later expanded when the RSPB took over in 1977.
• 1990s: Mining ceased entirely. Spoil heaps were reshaped into wetlands and reedbeds, and by 2010, bearded tits had nested here, the only known inland site in Britain where they do.
Today, Fairburn Ings is a tapestry of history and renewal. The old spoil heaps, once symbols of extraction, now sustain some of England’s rarest wetland birds. Otters, terns and spoonbills thrive where pit shafts once cut into the earth.
As we packed up and made our way home, I was reminded that every visit here feels like a small act of witnessing, watching not just birds but the long arc of a landscape learning to heal.