The beginning of the end

Year listing has definitely added a welcome note of urgency to my birding.

The comings and goings of winter birds - the geese, the wild swans and more - interest me every year of course. But the pressure of a year list has suddenly made it all but essential to see as many of these as possible before Spring sets them northwards on their way home.

It's now mid February, and while it's not yet quite the end of winter, it's certainly the beginning of the end. With a free Saturday in the diary I therefore did a quick winter species v distance calculation and settled on a trip to Slimbridge WWT. A good call as it turned out.

The Bewick Swans have already started to return north in drips and drabs, but there are still plenty on the reserve. Likewise White-fronted Geese, Bewick Geese and an unlikely (and probably not wild) Red-breasted Goose. These winter wonders were joined by on my year list by a handful of Common Cranes, a magnificent Peregrine Falcon, more than a dozen Ruff and a flighty Little Stint.

That was an excellent 8 ticks to take the year list to 101 (noting that this also includes Ring-necked Parakeet and Egyptian Goose, both picked up on a quick trip to Regent's Park in London during the week).

If all this makes the trip sound very profunctary and  year list orientated, that would only be telling part of the story. From start to finish it was a wonderful day, with J and myself enjoying the sheer spectacle of Slimbridge every much as we did the year ticks.

Both individually and en masse, the birds were fantastic - there is little to beat the sight of a Golden Plover flock wheeling in the sunlight, of a Peregrine slicing through the mayhem, or of the wonderful White-fronts which bought Sir Peter Scott to this site so many years ago.