bonxie birder
Going for the One
On the face of it, the British list sits very well with most of its neighbours. An excellent geographical location, superb reserve network and a well driven observing force. But I wonder if that hides the reality. 620 sounds very good, but according to birdguides, only 223 species are “common” and that includes some quite tricky native birds like ptarmigan, stone-curlew and cirl bunting. This means that only 36% of our list are actually birds we could plan to see. 302 species are “rare”, a large number of which have been seen less than 10 times ever.
When you go on sites like Avibase and download a checklist of a particular country it can therefore be misleading for this exact reason. Before I travel abroad I use eBird as a guide to what I could see and of course it is always way below the total list. I wonder if anyone has attempted to work out a list for every country of the realistic birds that one can see. I would love to discover Colombia’s common to total list percentage or see where we rank in Europe when it comes to non rare birds. I would guess that 36% would put us quite low.
When you go on sites like Avibase and download a checklist of a particular country it can therefore be misleading for this exact reason. Before I travel abroad I use eBird as a guide to what I could see and of course it is always way below the total list. I wonder if anyone has attempted to work out a list for every country of the realistic birds that one can see. I would love to discover Colombia’s common to total list percentage or see where we rank in Europe when it comes to non rare birds. I would guess that 36% would put us quite low.