Bits of Birdwatching Stuff: Year end round-up

Tuesday, 31 December 2024

Year end round-up

Wryneck, Rishton Reservoir

Any year that begins with my walking down the road from home to see a cattle egret is going to have points of interest.

As ever the weather has been a feature of the year and, as is becoming a pattern, it has been utterly unpredictable. Overall it's been a grey, wet year interspersed with sunny periods ranging from half an hour to half a week. June and early July was a long wet week in April, with conspicuously negative effects on both insect life and breeding birds. A lot of the Summer breeding birds, particularly the warblers, gave up and moved on before August was half over. How lasting those effects will be is something to worry about.

Whether it was the weather or old age creeping up on me I found Summer birdwatching very hard work this year. It felt like I wasn't trying but looking back I can see that I was doing at least as much birdwatching as ever. Perhaps the perpetual leaden skies dampened my normally ebullient spirits. Autumn seems to have been spent chasing after specific birds — not just year listers and lifers — and not finding them, the dip list was a bit dispiriting. It would be easy to feel a bit down on my luck so I'll make the effort to look at the many positives.

I really shouldn't be surprised that adding to the life list is hard work now I'm approaching the halfway mark of the British List. Don't think I didn't scope out the logistics of a day trip to Lothian looking for rare scoters! Repeatedly. And there were dips: I was within twenty yards of what would turn out to be the pale-legged leaf warbler at Bempton, and probably considerably nearer the barred warbler at Hoylake, a garden or two from adding the scarlet tanager at Shelf to my British List, probably a reedbed away from the marbled godwit at Flint, and God knows what else I've overlooked elsewhere. The year listing was similarly peppered with the ones that got away. Everybody saw yellow-browed warblers but me.

Oddly the fact that I have been within a hundred yards of two would-be lifers a few times at one place hasn't got me down. I'm very happy that they're there and that someone responsible for them has trusted me enough to tell me about them. And I may yet get them. Or not, as the case may be.

It felt good to finally see a roseate tern though I wouldn't have predicted seeing one right in front of the hide at Hodbarrow. Now I've got my eye in I wonder if I'll be able to spot one in passing some time.

The trip out to see the black-winged pratincole on the Nottinghamshire border was a thoroughly enjoyable adventure and a nice, if distant, bird. A credit to the patch watcher who found it.

Wilson's phalarope is a bird that I've missed a couple of times so it was good to see the bird on the Junction Pool at Marshside. A very different beast to the other phalaropes, much more like a shank than the others.

It took two goes to get the wryneck at Rishton Reservoir, a bird I've been dipping for years. It was lovely to finally see one and well worth the wait.

I'd gone to Bempton hoping to bump into a scarce warbler and instead got a very bad and entirely unsatisfactory view of a long-eared owl deep in the cover of a hawthorn tree in the pouring rain. Like you do. I'll see one properly some day.

Another first of a different kind was seeing both Greenland and European white-fronted geese in the same year.

I won't make any guesses about next year's lifers save that they probably won't include red-tailed tropicbird or blue-footed booby.

The list of places to visit or revisit grows exponentially. Which is great so long as I don't treat not getting to All The Places as a stick to beat myself with. I've not explored Cumbria and Yorkshire as much as intended and I've neglected parts of Cheshire and most of North Wales. On the other hand, Warrington and St Helens have had a thorough going-over and I've explored a lot of new places. Of course, the problem with exploring new places is that along the way you do a lot of: "I wonder where that goes…" It's not a conscious thing but I do find myself following the impulse and ending up having a deep rummage round in different places each year. So this year it turned out to be Warrington and St Helens. I'm not going to try and predict what happens next year, it'll be interesting to find out.

The stats

The year list ended at 213, the same as last year, which will do me.

Species counts for the BTO recording areas for 2024:

Caernarfonshire 25
Cheshire and Wirral 118
Cumbria 83
Denbighshire 41
Derbyshire 60
Flintshire 41
Greater Manchester 132
Lancashire and North Merseyside 159
Lincolnshire 22
Nottinghamshire 22
Shropshire 24
Staffordshire 28
Yorkshire 89

The Greater Manchester list stands at 190, the British list at 307, and the life list at 387.

As usual I'll finish the round-up with a few of the reasons why I go out birdwatching. This year I think I'll do a separate post for the landscapes and supporting cast because even on quiet birdwatching days there's a good reason to be out there.