As you may recall, I was encouraged by another blogger to participate in a 'race' to see who could achieve 220 species in 2022. Now I am competitive, but - as anyone who knows me will confirm - mostly with myself. Keeping a year list is something I've done for five decades: to some extent it's what drives me out on a cold or wet morning to visit a bird I've seen many times over the past years. This is the antithesis of life-listing, where you might, in theory, only leave home to see a completely new bird! Of course, the company of friends on a day out is, to me, the best part!
Since I began this blog in 2012 I've posted a running total of the year's birds in the right hand column: this I update as necessary, every time I write a new daily account. Occasionally I forget to do so, and new birds slip through: since I have a lifelist of 400+, that's normally no big deal. However, since I was participating in this very minor listing competition (just a handful of birders took part) I decided to check my end of year total, using the UK400 and BOU online lists. As you may have read earlier, I found I had indeed missed a few species, all but one of which I had in fact photographed! After checking through my SD cards, holiday photos etc, I confirmed my actual totals to be:
Year list 2022: 252
5km list 2022: 138
I submitted lesser numbers to the blogger who was keeping the league table: 249 and 138, omitting several that I'd only discovered following this last review. I also published my total on Twitter, which drew an extremely unpleasant response from one of the other participants: he basically accused me of cheating:
To me it looks like a once big time birder got his ass whooped in a little league tournament and didn't like it. Just saying
How rude: and how completely unmerited. I'm not - never have been - a 'big time birder'. I've just been around for 50+ years, since moving to Norfolk in 1972. I took a look at this guy's blog and found that it included, amongst other things, a real rarity that only he saw and of which he had no photographs! Hmm! Bear in mind that among my additionals were Red Footed Falcon, Merlin and Kittiwake, which I not only saw on numerous occasions, but also photographed!
As it happens, no-one 'whooped my ass': even without the late additions, I still took second and first spot in the two leagues! When I complained to the list keeper about the Twitter post, his response was to remove ME from the final results tables!
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