l_raty
laurent raty
I've not owned a car, and have done almost all of my domestic birding on a bicycle since 2010.
I live in a land-locked suburb and don't really have a very good patch next to home. But I'm used to do significant distances on the bike (150-200 km is still a fairly average day) and, Belgium being quite small, I actually twitch the entire country. I count sightings made on non-motorised (bicycle/on foot) trips that started and ended at my home in Brussels; I also quite regularly use a place on the coast (which belongs to my parents) as a secondary base, but I commute by bike -- cycling there, staying a short while, cycling back. The only motorised transport that I usually indulge in when doing this is the occasional ferry crossing, where there is a river on my way and no cyclable bridge or tunnel that I can easily reach.
The current situation here is not favourable to this practice, unfortunately. We can now freely move around (as long as we don't leave the country), but there is a curfew (10pm-6am in Brussels), which is a real hurdle to going far on a slow transport. Finding myself a mere couple of hours away from home when night falls means I can't return before the next day.
Our national database tells me that I have seen 124 spp this year (IOC taxonomy, cat. A only). Best twitched rarities Spotted Sandpiper and Oriental Dove (meena); best self-found bird an Iceland Gull in early Jan; complete 2021 list at https://old.observations.be/user/lifelist/50000?lang=en&jaar=2021. I've not been trying hard to make this list long, however, so there are quite a few gaps, and I'm very far behind the dedicated fuel-assisted guys.
I live in a land-locked suburb and don't really have a very good patch next to home. But I'm used to do significant distances on the bike (150-200 km is still a fairly average day) and, Belgium being quite small, I actually twitch the entire country. I count sightings made on non-motorised (bicycle/on foot) trips that started and ended at my home in Brussels; I also quite regularly use a place on the coast (which belongs to my parents) as a secondary base, but I commute by bike -- cycling there, staying a short while, cycling back. The only motorised transport that I usually indulge in when doing this is the occasional ferry crossing, where there is a river on my way and no cyclable bridge or tunnel that I can easily reach.
The current situation here is not favourable to this practice, unfortunately. We can now freely move around (as long as we don't leave the country), but there is a curfew (10pm-6am in Brussels), which is a real hurdle to going far on a slow transport. Finding myself a mere couple of hours away from home when night falls means I can't return before the next day.
Our national database tells me that I have seen 124 spp this year (IOC taxonomy, cat. A only). Best twitched rarities Spotted Sandpiper and Oriental Dove (meena); best self-found bird an Iceland Gull in early Jan; complete 2021 list at https://old.observations.be/user/lifelist/50000?lang=en&jaar=2021. I've not been trying hard to make this list long, however, so there are quite a few gaps, and I'm very far behind the dedicated fuel-assisted guys.
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