Each year has a different feel as your ideas of what kind of birder you are, and more importantly, what kind of birder you want to be- cut and change. 2003 was the year of raw excitement as for the first time, I plunged into different countries and habitats and watched some mythical birds from the Collins Guide - such as the Hoopoe, the Hawfinch and the Bittern - finally become realities.
By 2004, it was time for all those British birds hovering around on the edges of awareness finally got seen - Lesser-spotted Woodpecker, Tawny Owl, and so forth. 2005 was another step towards dream birds, with the first Bee-eaters in Portugal and Lammergeiers in the Pyrenees still some of the most vivid memories of stepping out into big Europe, whilst back home names like Speyside became real places, and lekking Black Grouse became real spectacles. By the year's end, 270 species in Europe in a year was for me pretty unbelievable.
2006 was a dutiful British year that saw bike rides in howling gales to Severn Beach, arriving with just enough lung power to see Storm Petrels dancing on the waves. Abroad, I finally started planning for my birding, and on Corsica found all the endemics and races in two weeks of holidaying.
2007 deserves its own set of stories; it was only last year I became a proper birder, went the whole hog by public transport and shoestring budget, and at the year's end looked back on a year filled with as many madcap experiences as the 264 birds I managed to scrape, car-less, together. See below for all that.
So now, in 2008, I'm in a kind of limbo between British twitching and Western Palearctic exotica as I soak up the colours and variety of new countries and their avifauna. Similarly, I'm caught between chasing rares and the hard work it'll take to pin down the last of my "old list". At the year's start, it began with Capercaillie. Now I'm smiling, as you will understand on reading the Diary.
On the WP front, it's all bright and breezy, partly because of the different mentalities you entertain "over there" as opposed to here. Sitting in the Albufera Marsh in Mallorca this April, I desperately tried to remind myself that none of the birds I was seeing - Purple Herons, Gallinules, point-blank Cetti's, and so forth - weren't lifers, and that I was supposed to be looking for Moustached Warbler, the speciality of the park. But it just wasn't working. In the sun, with the occasional Swallowtail or attractive Spanish brunette to further divert my attempts, I simply enjoyed the fact that I was birding.
In the UK, by contrast, this is rarely the case. Aside from Norfolk, with its timeless feel enhanced by free-flowing Barn Owls, birding can be harsh and sparse with little feel-good factor if you don't find the species you're looking for. My search for Caspian Gull this year took me to forsaken, gravelly, blasted, Midlands places where all happy thoughts are soaked up by the industrial fumes. If I hadn't gone, however, I'd never have met the likes of Paul Jeynes - great guys with great commitment, turning what I thought was an urban wasteland into birding hotspots through their hard graft after work each day.
So 2008 is a two pronged job - the warm satisfaction of multiple lifers, colourful birds and the headrush of being abroad with different smells, languages, butterflies and so on - and then the harsh graft of the UK, the combing of Kentish meadowsweet for Marsh Warblers and the birdless hush of Bedfordshire pine woodlands with no return until morning because the last train's gone into the sidings for the night. All in all, a good combination.
Yesterday I bought the Handbook to Birds of the Western Palearctic, a fascinating well of detail and knowledge I began to soak up when birding with Jules Sykes in Valencia last week. Primary patterns, moult, 1st winter warblers... this is the new world that awaits - the next peg up. And in birding, you really can just keep on going.
At the end of 2006, I took the list of the 280 "regular" British species as per the old BirdGuides British Birds CD to task and, as the year went on, continually planned just ahead. My aim was 270, though in reality I never thought I'd pass much beyond the 230 set in 2005. I did. But in pushing myself for birds as trivial as Smew and as peripheral as Rock Dove or Cory's Shearwater, I hit Land's End and Fair Isle, Pembrokeshire and Norfolk, the tops of Cairngorm and the middle of Birmingham.
A year list is ultimately what it means to you, because unless you're Adrian Riley, you can't boast the best, and unless you're LGRE, you can't boast the most consistent over the years. So ultimately, a year list is how much satisfaction you gain after the Surfbirds rankings close and you realize you may well not even be in the top 10.
I wasn't. My 264 birds, good as it was for a non-driver, non coast-dweller, came 27th in the BOU rankings. So not even close. Excuses? A full-time degree, social life, other interests and lack of money and a car are all fair, I think, so why bother to write about such a trifling list? And more importantly, what does it mean?
Here are some of the encounters I'd like to set down to confound anyone who thinks a year list is solely about the birds. In 2007, I came to realize that for those who remain enthusiastic, but not obsessive, the birds are a focus around which so much else can be enjoyed. If you don't believe me, read on:
SPEYSIDE: Just the act of getting up at dawn for the Caper Watch is something in itself; the forest feels alive, you can feel all the things you can't see and what you can - a profusion of common species remind you that you're in a unchanged fragment of the UK. The birds here are few, a friend of mine complained that a week's bird tally clocks on average less than 80, but its the mythical factor: lekking grouse, ospreys, golden eagle - these are the stuff of child birder's dreams. And because many, like the Caper, are seen so rarely, or so badly, that you don't feel satisfied, you are given the excuse you need to return to this place again and again. Like any forested area, as your local knowledge improves, as does your fieldcraft, more and more of the secrets come out of the woodwork to take you back in time, to when this tiny bubble was just one of many places like this in Scotland.In July I was back, looking for Dotterel on the high tops. On my first attempt, lost in dangerous fog, I encoutered a Kiwi - man, not fruit - on Carn Ban More. "You lost, mate - have a cuppa" he suggested, so we brewed up in a cairn, hoping the Dotterels might join us.In hindsight, it appears they are not tea-drinkers and this certainly is not contradicted in BWP.
CORNWALL, AUGUST: Like most of my birding this year, I hit youth hostels and camped. On my first trip, I camped under a storm before getting the six o'clock bus to Porthgwarra. Sea-watching erodes your brain: you've been sitting there for hours and realise you have been thinking nothing, just mesmerised and spaced out by the waves crashing in your scope.Cornwall has a very strange feel to it, like it used to beinhabited and isn;t any more; it isn't the lack of people so much as the quiet, tiny villages and vast presence of the sea everywhere you go, as if any moment, it's going to take back the land.
FAIR ISLE, SEPTEMBER: I took the boat. Having spent the night before in a Shetland bod, with a 50mph wind blowing skuas past my window, I looked forward to the crossing's opportunities for shearwaters and minkes. Half an hour later, several pre-crossing digestives were being reborn into the North Sea as my stomach felt its contents best suited to the deck. I arrived green but the observatory was buzzing with life, the anticipation on this place is amazing; everyone's aware of the history, of the culture of lancy's and PgTipses in cabbage patches, and so forth. My september was the worst on record, but the experience of seeing Barred Warbler in the hand, of self-finding laplands and finding this to be normal, was great. And the vast space of all these places, compared to the bustle of the south, makes you feel you haven't switched islands, but countries. Humour is needed when you end up finding the same two scarcities every morning, and it was provided. Impressions of a certain birder in the voice of Tommy Cooper and an old man convinced he had, this year, recorded five species of shrike in his garden entertained. His garden was in - Surrey.
NORFOLK, NOVEMBER: The bollocks. In true birding, Norfolk is regarded as a mixed bag. Still potential, butthe inevitable "not what it used to be" mingles with complaints of huge crowds, Cley becoming shite, and so forth. Yet to escape from Oxford, in the centre of nowhere, to hit the coast at Sheringham and, next morning, watch owls coming in off the sea, and Litle Auks whizzing past, was liberation. And then there's the arrival of the geese - dull from a species point of view but burnt into the psyche of anyone who was once a homo sapien; images like this are stored over generations, I think, and to be surrounded by wildmills and see skein after skein pouring down onto Holkham - its a humbling sight, reminding you how long they've been here, compared to you- and that's that.
Anyway, that's enough romanticism for now.Just a few thoughts as to why a year-list is a great thing to do apart from the birds. The UK is actually huge; not in size but the variety of places to fill you up, and a yearlist might just be the kick you need to see more of it, before booking that quick flight to Mallorca. Ahem.