Wirral, Merseyside and Lancashire, January 20th-24th 2025 ( Sweeping up and definitely not year listing)

This is the fifth calendar year since I came back to birding proper.  Though I’ve always carried a pair of binoculars when walking with the family I hadn’t been birding with any kind of purposeful fieldcraft or intent since 2010.  Ten years later, the pandemic brought me back as I would sit and decompress at a largely abandoned local country park after my daily stint working with the vulnerables.

In that time, my life list (that I pretend to not be too bothered about, so that I fit in with the cool birders on the internet who disdain “listers”, while secretly loving the attempt to catalogue, collect, experience more) has grown by over 130 species in the UK.  My year lists have consistently been around 250-280 species and though this is a very nerdy statistic for me it summarises and encapsulates the amazing experiences that have led to those sightings.  Days at Spurn, Holy Island, Anglesey, Penzance, Dunwich and beyond.  Weekends on the Scillies on small boats.  Whisky-hazed weeks on Mull.  Solo twitches and planned Big Days with friends.  Satnav nightmares and frustrating dips.  Missed-it-by-a-minute-birds and jamming in on megas.  Local patching (which I do but don’t write about as much – there’s only so many times you can write about being genuinely amazed that Willow Tits still exist a mile from home) and exploring new places. 

The year list is a vehicle to help organise my thoughts, rather than being an end in itself.  All lists are, in the way that I use them.  I have zero interest in a league table of who’s seen the most, which, after all, is really only a table of who has the most spare time and disposable income, or the fewest family commitments and real life ties, or who is fortunate to live in the best areas for rare bird vagrancy.  I have no interest in these appendage-measuring contests, but I do love to know what I’ve seen and where, and when.  I like to remember and use that information to build a picture of the bird life around me, a memory that informs fieldcraft and hones birding skill.  (As an aside, I love the moment when a birder asks what number your life list is and you can see in their eyes that calculation – am I better than them?  As if having more species means more skill.  Some of the biggest lists are attached to the biggest idiots I’ve ever met – but of course, there are some delightful twitchers and list-builders too.)

Last year a friend of mine aimed at a Big Year, a 300 species list.  He achieved it, and I was envious in some ways because that seems like an interesting focus for a year and it showed that he had the time and opportunity to do something big and meaningful to him.  I had wondered about trying to emulate his success in 2025, having reached 276 species by mid-November of 2024, when life circumstances intervened to prevent me seeing anything at all.  I decided not to.  His reflection on the year was that he felt he could never relax, never pass up on any bird.  Feeling Saturday impending and wondering if he would be able to get to every rare bird instead of watching the football, or the motor racing, or just grabbing lunch with friends.  Frantically trying to clinch the ID of a Caspian Gull (name a duller bird… seriously, I’ll wait…) at 299 species in December doesn’t seem like the reward that his determination deserved.  So 2025 arrived, and I didn’t even do a New Years Day attempt at a hundred species like I have done for the past 4 years.  I lifted optics for the first time on January 5^th.  Ennui enveloped me, and I struggled to find the motivation to even check sightings on the local forum before trudging a damp four-mile circuit around my patch.

A couple of big twitches spurred me to get out in the field, and lifted me in a mental health sense, and I began to see sightings of interesting winter species not too far from home.  Smew.  Black Redstart.  Shore Lark.  Slavonian Grebe.  Great Northern Diver.  A growing sense of missing out collided with my desire to see a male Smew (I’d seen half a dozen redheads in 2024, but no males since 2021) and I found myself at Crosby Marine lake on January 20^th, trying to work out how to get a decent photo of the duck in the superhero costume. 

Though it was a brief visit, only an hour spent watching the Smew with Goldeneye, it really kickstarted me.  Suddenly, I wanted to see all the birds available in the area, I wanted to sweep up all these brilliant winter experiences, and I began to mentally plan for a run up to Pine Lake to see a Great Northern Diver, a visit to New Brighton for the gorgeous male Black Redstart, a risk of the M62 traffic to see Slavonian Grebe at St Aidan’s.  Of course, two days of fog and heavy rain put paid to most of those plans, and storm Eowyn is currently keeping me indoors.  But the intent is there.  The fire is back.  I’m not year listing, or trying for a Big 300, but I want to see every bird and understand better the world I live in.

I went to New Brighton and watched the Black Redstart on the walls of Fort Perch, like some gloriously out of place celebrity among feral pigeons and starlings.  I waded in some unpleasant mud for miles to try and see Shore Lark in a flock of Skylarks (and failed, hard).  I walked the front at Southport and Marshside in cold rain and saw flocks of Twite, a female Snow Bunting, and the Iceland Gull at Meols.  I was cold, and wet, and tired, and covered in mud but I was free for a little while, of the pressure and the stress and the way that life sometimes bats us aside in scant regard for our feelings. 

My favourite experience of the week was of walking at Pennington Flash; a stroll, a cup of coffee and no expectations.  A Black-necked Grebe was reported on the flash, and though this is a great bird, it’s not unusual to find them on their way in and out of Woolston Eyes breeding grounds.  However, it is unusual to see them in January, and I wondered if it was actually a Slavonian Grebe, sitting a little too far out for an easy ID.  The finder was still on site, and I chatted with him.  He had also wondered about Slav Grebe, but neither of us was 100% confident.  A couple of other local birders assured me that it was definitely Black-necked, but something about the shape and the overall impression of the bird was giving me doubts.  I took some horrendous phone-scoped footage of the grebe and sent it to friends and the county recorder for their opinions, and the immediate response was Slavonian Grebe!  I’ve seen maybe a dozen Slav Grebes in my life, including a pair in summer plumage (top 5 bird right there), so this wasn’t new for me.  I wasn’t the finder, and I wasn’t the person who clinched the ID.  But being there when such a significant species is found on a site like Pennington Flash was a real buzz. 

So sure, I haven’t seen a Chiffchaff or Ringed Plover yet this year, and I’m usually knee deep in Dipper sightings by the third week of January, but my year list already has some amazing winter experiences represented by species I don’t often see.  I'm definitely not year listing... but the Snow Bunting, Iceland Gull, Twite, Black Redstart, Smew and Slavonian Grebe of this week have been some excellent “sweeping up”, and I really can’t wait to get back out there.