Bewick's Swans, balance and a new quest for 2026

One of the best things about birding is being aware of the changing seasons and seeing what that does to wildlife locally and nationally, and globally if you're lucky.  Early in the year I spent a day in north Lancashire looking for Hawfinch, Great Northern Diver, Water Pipit and other winter birds I'd struggled to see in the previous year.  I spent a couple of hours looking for Bewick's Swan at Upper Thurnham that day, and found them, but I struggled to get any photographs of the pair distantly in the herd of Whoopers.  I was slightly disappointed on the day, but the beauty of the seasonality of birding is that I knew there was a good chance of the Bewick's returning late in the year.

And so they have.  A quick dash to Lancashire with Lee to see the swans gave us an epic hour of flocks of waders wheeling in the sky, a smart male Peregrine chasing them in a storm of Golden Plover, Lapwing, Godwit and Dunlin, the cries of Curlew and the alarm of Redshanks undercutting the nasal honking of the Whooper Swans and the wink-wink of Pink-feet.  In the midst of those spectacular gatherings, the understated beauty of the two Bewick's Swans was a counterpoint to the size and scale of the wild environment across the flat Lancashire flood plains; delicate for a swan, neat and a crisper white than the varying tones of the Mute and Whooper Swans nearby, the Bewick's stood apart from the chaotic birdscape in a dignified silence.  The shape of the bill a smaller profile than the heavy bills of Whooper Swans, and the yellow extending only as far as the nasal cavity at most, rather than spreading under it.  Bewick's are beautiful and worth seeking while we still can.

In my lifetime, the fortunes of Bewick's Swan have changed significantly: Gordon Newman on Bluesky shared the wildfowl counts in the 1980s showing that Bewick's numbered over 2000 birds at Martin Mere forty years ago.  This year, there have been two individual birds in Lancashire, and none at all at Martin Mere.  While Whooper Swans have increased many times over, I wonder how much of this is due to migration patterns altering around climate change, and how much due to land use in Lancashire changing over that time.  

It made me wonder what my birding records might look like in thirty years' time.  What species will vanish?  What will I see instead?  Will the push of north Mediterranean species reach as far as Manchester?  Or will the displacement of species mean I have the likes of Dartford Warbler on the Mosses?  As worrying as it is intriguing; I'm glad I can still take joy in the winter spectacles here.

In my middle years the word "balance" has come to mean a great deal.  It's something I've strived for during 2025, recognising the signs of imbalance have a greater impact on my physical and mental health than I'd ever noticed before, and feeling the pressure of not steering too hard in any direction in terms of my approach to wildlife.  I've tried hard to balance twitching for rare birds in order to hit my 300 target with patching, finding as many species locally as possible, maintaining records and surveying as a volunteer.  It's not always easy.  Many birders are susceptible to a monomaniacal hyperfocus on an initiative or goal and it can be easy to over work that one aspect.  I hadn't really noticed that I was doing that until I saw the Rosy Starling on Scilly as my 300th species and then almost completely stopped searching for new species.  I was still enjoying birding, but I had the space to readjust my view about 12 hour round trips for Brown or Lesser Grey Shrike as being excessive.  

A friend of mine has twitched new species for his life list this year and chose to do so at the expense of local birding or keeping a record of 2025 wildlife altogether.  He's added an incredible 80 species to his list this year but he's driven well over 25,000 miles to do it.  Another acquaintance has shrunk his birding to a 5 mile circuit in a local country park for a whole year.  He has complete knowledge of that area, but has only seen a fraction of the wildlife he could experience even in a local context.  Both of them report fatigue in different ways; the one says he can't drive for another bird; the other has worn out the novelty of the local patch and craves variety.  But even knowing this, even seeing my own singular focus on the 300, I crave a framework and a target to guide my thinking and actions.

Part of the driving force behind this blog in 2025 has been that quest to achieve a Big Year and part of my looking for another motivating factor is that I've enjoyed writing.  I'm not sure there would be enough interest in my local patch birding with our very limited species here in Manchester to justify writing about it in that kind of detail, with a blog every 5 days on average.  So I need a focus to take me beyond the immediate area and to give me inspiration to write regularly, and this is where the concept of the list comes in.  I don't know if it's come across this year that listing to me is at best a supplementary aspect of looking at wildlife, but it very much is.  It's a boundary, a way of measuring and judging my activity.  The list doesn't drive my birding, but it does occasionally guide it, nudge it, and impart some impetus to get off my arse and go see something, and gives me a way of framing my writing about it afterwards.  Therefore, a list aim is needed for 2026.

With a UK life list of 377 at the time of writing (yes, I've seen over 80% of the UK species I've ever seen this year...) I think a good idea for 2026 is to try to reach 400 species.  These will all need to be vagrants or rare birds - the only regularly breeding/occurring British species I haven't seen at this point is Capercaillie, and given the issues with searching for them, they're likely to remain so for some time.  I also saw my four worst bogey birds during 2025 (Spotted Sandpiper, Leach's Petrel, Barred Warbler and Montagu's Harrier) which means that I'm all set to create a whole new raft of missed species in 2026!  So there will be at least 25 trips out for species I've never seen before, giving me a focus for migration and to keep learning.  Mixed in will be a focus on my local patches and on some species that I have never managed to photograph.  I find that trying to get a reasonable picture of a bird creates space for me to really watch and observe and get to know a species.

Hoping for more balance while remaining motivated to learn more, to engage more with where I am, and to continue to explore new species might be a stretch too far for me in 2026, but it's good to have goals.