2019 has been a monster year - and a major contender for my best ever year of birding since I started in the mid 1980s! As its all written up elsewhere on BirdForum I'll try to add links for easy navigation. where there is no link the write up will be on my San Tin patch thread
Stealing Opisska's technique of including trips that started in one year and finished in the next I have a nice excuse to start with my
trip to Japan for Steller's Sea Eagles and a range of other great winter and Japanese endemic birds plus the wonderful
Japanese Serow at the famous snow monkey valley near Nagano. Special mention to my dip of the year - Solitary Snipe - of which I managed untickable views in Hokkaido in late Dec 2018 AND at Karuizawa in early January 2019.
An outstanding weekend on my patch in late January produced an astonishing record of a
Barred Cuckoo Dove at San Tin fishponds, a species that absolutely should not be on fishponds, and of which there are less than ten Hong Kong records. This was followed by an even rarer
Blunt-winged Warbler the day after, which I was delighted to finally pin down with my first ever use of call recording and sonograms, and my first non-trapped
Manchurian Reed Warbler the day after that! I also received an extra bonus from 2018 when I discovered from reviewing photos that I'd actually had two
Pallas's Reed Buntings at San Tin rather than one!
In February I twitched
Hong Kong's first Fire-capped Tit at Kadoorie Farm - thereby adding to my old patch list, and for the first time in more than a decade my ageing team won the
2019 Hong Kong Big Bird Race - with a great total of 158 species - and a margin of ten species over our nearest rivals!
A flying visit to Beijing in March included a wonderful interlude in one of the urban parks with
Dusky, Naumann's and Red-throated Thrushes all coming so close that I didn't need the binoculars I hadn't packed! My other highlight - and the video moment of the year was capturing an oversexed and stunningly plumaged male
Siberian Rubythroat singing itself into a frenzy before chasing off after its rival.
I then had an amazing period between 27th March and 4th April when I added two Hong Kong firsts - a
leucocephalus Western Yellow Wagtail and a singing
Wood Warbler - and a major blocker in the shape of two
Glossy Ibises - the first in HK for 25 years!
The end of April found me
in Helsinki for my first "Conference Birding" of the year. At long last I nailed my lifer
Barnacle Geese and my first
Redwings and
Redpolls for decades at Viiki nature reserve on the edge of Helsinki, but it was the stunning scenery both at Viiki and Porkkala, plus the
Northern Goshawks that flew over my downtown hotel room that I will also remember.
May took me
to Lima for more Conference Birding, with honours split between a fantastic morning at Villa marshes to the south of the city, where I was blown away by the
Many-coloured Rush Tyrants and the flocks of B
lack Skimmers and breeding plumage
Franklin's Gulls sharing a sandbar, and fulfilling a lifetime's ambition to see
Diademed Sandpiper Plover in a one-day dash up to 5,000 metres and down again, which also delivered
Andean Condor, my first ever
Seedsnipe (Grey-bellied), and a host of other high bog specialists.
June was quiet, but a holiday trip to
Darwin, Cairns and the Atherton Tablelands in July certainly had its moments, although I was disappointed to miss Cassowary. Great views of
Platypus was a highlight, as was staying up through the night to watch England win the cricket World Cup. Birding highlights included boat trips on the Daintree River and Yellow Waters in Kakadu. Images of a
Comb-crested Jacana shielding its chick under its wing and a
Lewin's Honeyeater in the gloom were among my favourite photos of the year.
August to October was a good time on the patch, with patch gold in the form of Hong Kong's earliest
Yellow-breasted Bunting, a second
Manchurian Reed Warbler, first
Daurian Starling, Black-shouldered Kite, and a trio of
Common Terns plus a
Rosy Starling and my lost wallet, the latter two both found by Chris Campion. A nicely approachable
Red-backed Shrike at Long Valley allowed me to finally tick a bird I've dipped more than once in the last decade.
More conference birding brought me to Bogota, where I managed to squeeze two and a half days of birding into a three day visit without compromising my work objectives. Highlights included falls of north american migrants which included my lifer
Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Scarlet Tanager, Canada Warbler, and an incandescently glowing male
Blackburnian Warbler, plus great views of
Swainson's Thrushes, Northern Waterthrush, and
Black-and-white Warbler, a fistful of forest and mountain tanagers and my first
puffbird (Moustached), tapaculo (Ash-coloured), cotinga (Red-crested), manakin (White-bearded), honeycreeper (Green), and even an
antpitta (Rusty-breasted) so invariably skulking that it was even a lifer for my guide!
One weary week later I was
in Chicago for another conference, where my schedule allowed for a morning on a cold but thankfully windless day at Montrose Point. I enjoyed a nice range of sparrows and finches and a lifer
Tennessee Warbler, but the real stars were a pair of
Snow Buntings, my first since the 1980s, and iPhone
video footage of an astonishingly tame juvenile Cooper's Hawk that literally dropped at my feet in search of prey amongst the leaf litter.
November also delivered Hong Kong's first
Chinese Grey Shrike which thankfully stayed a few days after being discovered while I was in Chicago, and showed well on the Mai Po Access Road, and I especially enjoyed getting close to a lovely pale female
Citrine Wagtail - another San Tin patch tick, while a week later I got a new personal patch record of 95 species in a day, which I pushed to 97 a week later. Other top patch birds included a
Black-necked Grebe - they seem to occur in HK about once every decade, and a freak record of
Eurasian Jay which appears only marginally less regularly.
My 50th birthday took me Japan for a long weekend that included the excitement of my first new scope for 15 years (a Kowa TSN 883) and
a wonderful stay in Karuizawa that allowed me to christen the scope with extended views of a usually super-shy
Copper Pheasant sunning itself on an open path for an astonishing 30 minutes, and to add a twice airborne
Japanese Flying Squirrel to my mammal list.
There was no let up in December with the spectacular unblocking of
Japanese Night Heron as a juvenile found while I was ironically in Japan stayed long enough to give astonishingly close views, and indeed remains in residence, hunting earthworms at its favoured picnic site, apparently regardless of all other users, at the time of writing. Add to these the opportunity to host BF legend Jos Stratford at San Tin during a layover on the way down under,
an amazingly tame male Plumbeous Redstart a few hundred metres from home and a
self-found male White-tailed Robin on my first visit to Ng Tung Chai since January, and December has truly put the cap on what has been a simply outstanding year for consistently exciting high quality birding.
And we still have a week to go . . .
Cheers
Mike
Secondly, we have focused quite a bit on WP birding recently, which does not contribute that much to worldwide lifers, since you are looking for a small amount of species - this year we made trips to Israel, Georgia/Armenia, Canary Islands and Spain, collecting only 32 lifers over almost five weeks of birding total ... but also reaching the 1st and the 3rd place in the Czech WP listing competition, so there is that. 
