Patchwork Challenge

I’m relatively new to my patch, this being my first year here but already its one of my favourite patches I’ve ever worked. This is mainly because I live in the middle of the patch, can do a wee bit of birding everyday because of this and if the weather is terrible I can simply seawatch from my sofa! Lazy birding at its best and my sofa list has reached 101 so far. Seawatching   The patch itself is nothing special when it comes to range of habitats, sand dunes, a few fields, caravan parks and a village. No fresh water, no mud flats but I still get a fair share of ducks and waders flying past. Hemsby is strangely under watched, just how I like it and when I had a quick search at past records on www.birdguides.com I found very few records (73 in total and I constitute about than half of these in the last 5 months!). The past records have been pretty good, pallid harrier in 2006, pallas’s warbler in 2004 and an amazing spell in October 2003 where a dusky, humes, pallas’s and...

It makes sense for bloggers to look back over the year and write a post about the ups and downs, and ebb and flow of their birding year. It's fun to reminisce after all, and it's much more pleasant writing a blogpost full of goodies than it is filling space when you've gone out and seen very little. Accruing these memories is one of the things that makes patching so important to me. I had a few Iceland gulls earlier in the year, not rare of course, and just about annual on patch - but of much higher personal value than the tens I saw up at Peterhead, the few I saw while out on surveys, and even the one that flew past the office window in Falkirk! Quite often the good memories are forgotten among the rarer stuff too. Looking back through my notebook I recall a tree sparrow in May, the thrill of the chase while digging out and eventually IDing elusive gropper and reed warbler in the autumn, and the rush I got from a couple of black tailed godwits migrating south with a bu...

Following on from Marks post here are my BTO Birdtrack ten to watch for 2013. It was quite difficult to choose, I don’t get many waders so that ruled out a few of Marks choices. Seawatching is an area where quite a few have been selected from, mainly because I can seawatch most days and it will provide the most data. The rest come from vis-miging, thrush surveys and a declining wagtail. Red-throated diver – good winter numbers slowly build up from September onwards. Every time I seawatch, whether from the dunes or sofa, I try and keep a count already. Largest count to date is 175 in ½ hour one morning and on another day I had 89 pass in one minute so I think if I make a concentrated effort on these it should be quite interesting. Common gull – my second one that will match Marks list. I get quite a few on patch and they linger over winter but I have never really counted them. Black-headed gull – My third and last one that matches Marks list. Like common gull I see them through...

Look, on the right. Your right....the computers left. There is the form into which you can input your comparative scores. Hi tech or what! All you need to do is fill out the three simple boxes and the internet will do the rest for us. We know (and we're very grateful for it) that many of you have already inputted your comparative scores onto our housekeeping spreadsheet - apologies for asking you to do it again! The reason for this is that the housekeeping spreadsheet is a little confusing in places, and also, because scores could well have changed since you put them in - it was about three weeks ago for some folks after all... If we dont hear from you we will either assume the score you've entered on the housekeeping spreadsheet is the one you want to use - and if there is no score entered anywhere we'll assume you dont have a comparative score to imput So, input your name, your patch, and your comparative points score. If you have scores for the last two years, use ...

Over the last couple of evenings, despite my terribly slow broadband and forgetting my login details, I’ve managed to get all of my Girdle ness records for 2012 uploaded onto Birdtrack. It’s something I started using back in the summer - and instantly found intuitive and user friendly – but stopped using for no reason other than going away on a boat for a while and sort of forgetting about it. I know….not good enough…. When I say all of my Girdle ness records though, unfortunately, that’s not really what I mean. I uploaded 135 records of 77 species – mostly migrants, interesting records like a December chiffchaff, or large counts, like 119 red throated divers south in an hour in September. I’m relatively old skool in my birding in as much as I carry a notebook and pencil with me and actively use it to write things down in, but while going through my notebooks for 2012 it became clear that I didn’t really write down enough. There are plenty of birds that would merit closer attention ...

Since the start of my birding days in the early 70’s I seemed to have had a fascination about how many species I could see wherever I happen to be. Testimony to that being a flick through my notebooks where I’ve written out bird lists whether it is an annual list for a ‘patch’ or the ‘holiday list’. Today it’s just the same although I just write ‘notes’ in the notebook now and generate the ‘lists’ on the computer! So when the ‘patchwork’ challenge was mooted to me I was intrigued. However, I quickly realised that it would mean a change to what I had become accustomed to calling the ‘patch’. When I moved to ‘the Mullet’, over 10 years ago now, the term ‘patch’ represented the long thin strip of land, bordered by sea on either side, that stretches from the bridge at Belmullet to Blacksod Point and within this my patch list stands at 262. Now having read the rules, if I was going to participate, I would have to nominate a ‘patch’ that is ‘a maximum area of 3 km 2 ’. I was up for it...

With girdle ness fresh in the memory, or at least just a few scrolls down the page, here's a look at what's missing from my patch list... Birders like to do many geeky things - looking at birds being a good example, as well as keeping lists, and some at the far flung reaches of the scale like to make the odd graph or two. A lot of us like to look at other things as well, when there are no birds to look at.  Dragonflies seem inexplicably popular; as are moths (insert winky face). Butterflies get a wee look in and mammals probably would as well, if there were a bit more variety. One thing that unites most of us is our desire to predict. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s struggled to pronounce ‘accentor’ after half a bottle of Bruichladdich while trying to predict the next British first. Thank god willet rolls off the tongue more easily... Making a prediction for your next patch tick would probably be a lot more ‘feet on the ground’ than ‘head in the clouds’ unless you...

At the age of 18 I decided that Aberdeen Uni was the one for me – it was on the east coast, and perhaps more important, it was a suitable distance from home, and it would have me. In preparation for the big move north I spent endless hours looking through the regional round-ups that were (and perhaps still are?) a regular feature in ‘Birdwatching’ magazine. A few themes arose…there were lots of geese and gulls, and king eiders put in frequent appearances. Another name kept cropping up as well though – Girdle ness – and handily for me it was within walking distance of town. I don’t recall my first trip there, but there are a few memories that linger from the early years. I recall one May morning birding in a shirt and tie and without bins (it was after a very heavy night…) with a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup.  My companion gave me the requisite amount of grief but then forgave me as I pointed out a quail running up along a dry stone wall – his first and my only ever p...

In June 1995 my father made the wise decision to take me out of school for the day to go see a 1 st -summer Hobby that was frequenting the reed fringed channels down at Kilcoole. Whether this was an attempt to spark an interest in birding or whether he just wanted to go see the Hobby himself anyway and had to bring me along I’ll never know. Either way, it worked! Hobby After that we frequently went birding to Kilcoole and Newcastle together. Whilst we had no car at the time a handy bus service brought us all the way from our home in South Dublin to Newcastle village. A quick stop in the shop for a Mint Cornetto became a mandatory start to the day before walking down Newcastle Sea Road, out onto the beach at Six Mile Point and then North along the coast, scanning the sea and marshes before catching the bus home several hours later from Kilcoole village. A perfect system. The patch boundaries With the acquisition of a family car a few years later, birding trips with my fa...

As well as our year long patchwork challenge, there are a few other very worthy initiatives that might interest patch birders. Mark Reeders Foot It runs through January and is based upon, as the name suggests, the number of birds that can be seen on foot from home. Hopefully Mark will be along soon to tell us a bit more about it but in the meantime you can find details here Also running in 2013 is this pan-listing challenge  This is a challenge to record 1000 species of, well, anything, within a 1 km square. As it says on the blog, ' There's nothing like a bit of friendly competition and camaraderie to spur one along' so if you need an excuse to start looking at the wider wildlife around you, perhaps this is the way to start. I'm sure the good men at the blog will be able to point you in the right direction regarding ID help for all those little creepy crawlies. Like the patchwork challenge, Mark is encouraging all taking part to submit data to birdtrack - and...

This patchwork challenge has taken off more than we could have imagined so before I go any further, thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project in any way. Contributions to the blog, follows and retweets on twitter, interaction on facebook and Birdforum have all helped make this into something much bigger than we could have made it by ourselves, so, from both Ryan and Mark, a glass is raised to you all... So what has it become? Well, obviously it is early days but the numbers look good. Today we passed 7,500 pageviews on the blog (not bad for two weeks...) and 247 followers on twitter - which is so near to 250 that I'm sure you'll let it slide! The most important number though is the number of patches...and today we passed the 100 mark! This is at least 3 times as many as I thought we would get... So, thanks for all the interest, and please, keep the blogposts coming! It makes the blog a much more interesting place to be and if you dont, there's gonna be a...

Lots of birders will have visited my patch at some time. Some may even have had a tick or two in my patch. For about 49 weeks of the year, I have my patch pretty much to myself. For three weeks in the autumn, I can’t move for birders! My patch is the Virkie, Toab and Exnaboe area in south mainland Shetland. I finally put roots down in Shetland in June 2007, after a rather protracted move from Leicester. Anybody who has birded the Virkie Willows, or looked on the Pool of Virkie from the well-known turning-circle, will have seen my house: it’s the one closest to the Virkie Willows. I define my patch as per the map below: basically, the bit of land between Sumburgh Airport to the south and Ward Hill to the north. The area lives in the shadow of Sumburgh Head somewhat, which steals a lot of my migrant birds, but a bit of persistence over the years has certainly paid off. The obvious focal point is the Pool of Virkie, possibly one of the best sites in the whole o...

I realized something pretty fundamental recently. I. do. not. like. work. This is a bit of a problem really, as work, or at least the money that one accrues as a result of it, is pretty essential. It keeps me in cakes and my girlfriend in those expensive satchels that are all over the telly at the moment. It pays for my holidays. It’s added another dimension to my social life, and it means that if I ever wanted to watch an episode of Judge Judy, it would be guaranteed to be one that I hadn’t seen before. So, unless you’re willing to hitchhike forever eating Go-cat, work is just the thing for you. The thing I resent so much about my job is that it takes so much of my time. Five out of seven days a week, it uses up a pretty large portion of the available daylight, a time at which I’d much rather be out doing other stuff. And when I say doing other stuff, I mean birding. I don’t really think there is any solution to this whole work thing. I have friends who get paid good money to...

The second post in our series introducing the patches takes us over the Irish Sea. Despite much moaning coming from Galley Head about how rare long-tailed tits are and that they deserve more than one point in Ireland (he see's thousands of Cory's per year, an easy six points so no sympathy!) a fantastic five patches have been submitted so far. All coastal, all with huge potential and good birds behind them this could be a close run thing, will it be a yank or gank year? You can find the Galley Head patch here http://patchlistchallenge.blogspot.co.uk/p/patches.html  and now to introduce the others, Tralee, Kilmore Quay, The Mullet and Blackditch. Below are the maps for Tralee and Blackditch. A nice mix there with two in the south west, one in the north west and two in the east coast. Good luck guys, I hope you get your long-tailed tits!  The Mullet local patch   Blackditch local patch Tralee local patch 

To start with I better explain that I am writing this on behalf of my dad who has birded the area since long before I was born in 1979.   The patch is set in rural Aberdeenshire and has a nice mix of woodlands, farmland and the River Urie gives it some fresh water, along with a few ponds, all with Bennachie over looking it. Bennachie As I was growing up my dad used to tell me about the birds he watched in the 70’s, and how he watched green woodpeckers at their nest, a rare bird now not seen in the area since the mid 90’s and I never came close to seeing a nest! During my childhood I remember watching long-eared owls breeding for about 10 years every summer and it was this that really got me in to birding. During the 90’s we had a bit of a purple patch with owls, with barn owls, LEO’s and tawny owls all breeding but unfortunately only tawnys remain now. In the early 90’s we also found our first buzzard for the patch, amazing to believe now a days as there ...