#My200birdyear

Follow our tips to make your new birding year challenge even better than your last!

You may well be reading this with just a few days left to complete your #My200birdyear challenge for 2018. If so, you may also, like me, be rushing round frantically trying to tick a last few species to push you past the big 200. But, however you’ve fared in 2018, we hope you’ve learned a lot from taking the challenge – we know that we have. Here are a few of the lessons that 2018 has taught me, and some New Year resolutions on how I’m going to do better in 2019.

1 don’t assume too much

Inevitably, there are going to be certain familiar species that it’s not worth getting stressed about if you don’t tick them in the first week of January, but don’t take the laid-back attitude too far. Tawny Owls regularly called just behind our house throughout 2016 and 2017, so I made no effort to find them during most of 2018. Big mistake. Only finally, in December, did I actually look and listen specifically for them, and thus added them as an extra tick late on. For 2019, I’ve gone through my checklist and given myself a target date to see each one, getting more familiar species out of the way early and leaving time at the end of the year for mopping up.

2 Make good use of lunch hours

This is one aspect of my listing that I think I did well with. I’ve been walking every day (actually as part of our sister magazine Country Walking’s #Walk1000miles challenge), and my path usually takes me through Ferry Meadows Country Park. This has enabled me to see such species as Black Tern and Redstart, as well as some more common, but still occasionally elusive, birds such as Lesser Redpoll. And I’ve got fitter, got plenty of fresh air, and had the pleasure of watching a Kingfisher at close quarters again and again. In winter, lunch hours could make up a large part of your birdwatching time, so why not use them wisely?

3 Big days and big months

Of course, the whole point of #My200birdyear is that you tailor it to suit your own birdwatching and lifestyle, and in my case that meant a lot of casual birding, a little bit of twitching (all local to home or the office), and a handful of trips to birding hotspots. But if you do your birding all close to home, why not try a ‘Big Month’ in 2019? April or May are both prime candidates, when there’s overlap of winter and summer birds, and song is at its peak. Or even a ‘Big Day’ can pay dividends – include a bit of visible migration watching, an early start to get