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Could have done better? Confessions of a year-lister.

10,000 Birds

My British total was a mere 172 species – not bad, but not very good. Every one of my 171 species was a bird that I found myself. It keeps a monthly record of sightings, so I can tell you that it was in February that I recorded my highest monthly species total (106), while my lowest total was in August (39).

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What is the National Bird of Estonia?

10,000 Birds

The national bird of Estonia is the Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica. Of course, in Estonia the bird is not called Barn Swallow. Before Estonia switched over to the Euro the back of the 500-kroon note was graced by the national bird. Estonia is not the only country to have the Barn Swallow as the national bird.

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Fur and Fangs rather than Feathers and Beaks

10,000 Birds

There’s also a much greater variety of species of deer living here now than than there were four or five hundred years ago, for along with our native Roe and Red Deer we also have large populations of Fallow, Sika, Reeves’s Muntjac and Chinese Water Deer. Reeves’s Muntjac , a highly successful invasive species in the UK.

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Fur and Fangs rather than Feathers and Beaks

10,000 Birds

On my 21-day Kenyan safaris we reckoned to find around 600 species of birds and around 60 mammals, both impressive totals. In 2023 I attempted to keep a year list of mammal encounters: the list barely exceeded 20 species, while it became complicated by seeing bats and voles that I was unable to name specifically.

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Finding Birds in Northern Greece by Dave Gosney

10,000 Birds

Dave Gosney’s Finding Birds Series covers mostly the Western Palearctic and describes birding in various regions of Portugal, Spain, Morocco, France, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, etc., with some additions, namely South Texas, The Gambia, and Goa (India).

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Celebrating a Waxwing Winter

10,000 Birds

Secondly, much of the appeal is that this is a bird we don’t see in the UK very often, for Waxwings are an irruptive species, and in most years only a few ever reach our shores from their breeding grounds in the boreal forests of Scandinavia. These birds alerted me to their presence by their delightful ringing calls.

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The World’s Most Beautiful Goose?

10,000 Birds

According to the British Trust for Ornithology’s BirdFacts website, “Although a small number of vagrant Red-breasted Geese from the declining arctic Siberian breeding population winter in Britain each year, the species is popular in wildfowl collections and many birds are of captive origin. That was in October 1991.

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