This year at Bird Watching Magazine, we've been running a campaign called #my200birdyear – the idea being that you get out and try to see 200 species in the year. You can set your own rules, so some people are restricting themselves to the UK, others to small parts of the UK, and others, like myself, to wherever they happen to go birdwatching (in my defence, the only foreign trip I've done was a few days in Austria in February).
Rather than turning people into full-blown twitchers, racing off down the motorway in search of rarities at the drop of a hat, we hope that it will get people to notice some of the species that otherwise slip beneath the radar. Things like Stock Doves, hidden among flocks of the ubiquitous Woodpigeon. Or any number of warblers, unobtrusive among bushes and shrubs. Or even the likes of Mediterranean Gulls, tagging along with the familiar Black-headeds.
My own tally so far is 170, and includes a few nice little bonuses like Bee-eater (at East Leake) and Pectoral Sandpiper, as well as the likes of Short-toed Treecreeper from that Austria trip. But what's also interesting is what I haven't seen – I'm still missing Spotted Flycatcher and Green Sandpiper, for example, species I'd normally expect to have stumbled across by now. In the case of the former, that might be down to the fact that numbers are continuing to decline, but there's also an element of luck involved.
If they do turn up (in the next few weeks), 200 should be well within sight, with the chance to add goodies such as Brambling, Waxwing and a few geese once the winter weather arrives. But of course, there'll be something else, too, something I can't foresee. And it's that that makes birdwatching so endlessly fascinating. Birds go wherever the fancy and the weather takes them, and being there to see them is down to a mixture of luck, hard work and playing hunches.
