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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

KB57's 2018 list (1 Viewer)

25th September, Paris

Haven't been to any London parks this year, but rowing on the lake at Bois de Boulogne provided a more than decent substitute location from which to add parakeets to the year list.

223. Ring-necked Parakeet
 
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7th October, RSPB Saltholme

Couple of hours free for a visit to Saltholme, and three high quality additions to the year list...first jack snipe since I got back into birding, actually my second ever (the first being 47 years ago...) and an excellent view too! Thanks to the guys in the hides for pointing all three out, my spotting skills aren't great at the best of times and I wasn't on top form yesterday...

224. Water Rail
225. Jack Snipe
226. Merlin
 
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21st October, Lindisfarne

An afternoon walk on Holy Island at high tide...brisk south-westerlies precluded much excitement, although we managed to miss Cetti's warbler which had shown well at the Lough earlier in the day...apparently a first for the island. Only one somewhat overdue addition to the year list, but a good day out with the spectacle of brent geese flocking on the mudflats.

227. Bar-tailed Godwit
 
4th November, Hauxley

Another long overdue species offshore, reflecting on how little I've got out recently - although it was scoter species #3 of the year...

228. Common Scoter
 
11th November, Saltholme

A day to remember and treasure for me. RSPB reserve strangely quiet, could be something to do with the swift action elsewhere in Cleveland...we were sticking to 2018's 'no twitching' rule, admittedly helped by the fact that my current BirdGuides subscription seems to consist of two copies of 'Birdwatch' per month and no access to the sightings app...

Anyway, we've both seen pallid (but not house...) swifts before, whereas I have never seen my top-of-the-wanted-list outstanding unseen British breeding bird before today...

229. Long-eared Owl B :)B :)B :)B :)B :)
 
9th December, Jarrow

Not much time to go birding recently, but managed a take a couple of hours off to twitch some waxwings...first we've seen for a few years, a real pleasure to watch the 23-strong flock. A redwing made a nice bonus too, seen quite a few fieldfares this winter but thought redwings (not seen since early last winter) were going to escape me.
Locals didn't seem to mind the birding paparazzi encamped outside their front doors either. Whoever designed the planting scheme several decades ago for the housing estate should be congratulated for including so many berry-bearing rowan trees.

230. Bohemian Waxwing
231. Redwing
 
17th December, Lindisfarne

Great day out at Holy Island and causeway saltmarsh. Flock of ca. 80 twite on the mainland in their usual place, three owls on the island - comprising 2 short-eared and a barn, and the usual sea ducks and divers offshore. Our day list of over 50 species included one new addition to the list, owl species #6 for the year:

232. Short-eared Owl
 
No more additions to the list before the end of 2018...laid low with a heavy cold and a ton of work deadlines in the final week of the year, so a hoped-for trip to Teesmouth for bean geese wasn't possible.
Both bean geese species are now promoted to my British 'most wanted' list of potential life ticks, after finally adding glaucous gull and long-eared owl in 2018 (although admittedly I had to go to Notsuke Peninsula in Hokkaido for the former...but as I don't keep a separate British life list, the main thing is I've finally seen glaucous gull).
2018 was a mixed year for me in a birding sense...on the one hand, I made it back to Hong Kong, and visited Japan for the first time, nailing all the classic Hokkaido species such as red-crowned crane, Blakiston's fish-owl, Steller's sea-eagle and Asian rosy-finch - and seeing my first ever albatrosses, in exceptional numbers on the Izu - Tokyo ferry. I also probably saw more streaked shearwaters in a couple of hours than all the other Procellaridae I've seen in my life until then (and yes, possibly including fulmars!).
A short visit to Lithuania was pretty cool too, although aquatic warbler eluded me and a couple of reeling Locustellas refused to reveal themselves...a great view of a singing wood warbler was actually my favourite moment from that trip, as a once-familiar species I hadn't seen for many years.
I also renewed my acquaintance with some species I'd only seen once, many years ago...solitary snipe (Stod Valley, Zanskar, 1981) and jack snipe (Gosforth Park, Newcastle, 1971), as well as one of my favourite birds, masked laughingthrush (Hong Kong, 1988).
On the negative side, I probably had a lot less actual birding than the previous couple of years, a fact emphasised by the size of my British list and absences of species I normally see every year without too much effort. Something I hope to redress in 2019...
 
I know this is probably bad form, as I understand it your list remains in accordance with current taxonomy at the time of compilation, but I can hardly contain my excitement at my armchair twitch of another Zosterops species!

I needed to look something up to check a date (a red-billed chough record providing a memorable event), and noticed two 'new' species on my year list since I updated Scythebill to the latest IOC version, replacing Japanese white-eye. So...

23rd February, Mai Po, HK
#110. Swinhoe's White-eye

3rd March, Miyakejime, Izu Is.
#157. Warbling White-eye

I therefore made it belatedly to a still unimpressive 233 for the year, which I know is cheating a bit!
 

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