A new year and our intention is to start this off well in terms off birding. There are a number of nice varieties in the Netherlands and on this basis plans were made for the next three days.
2020 has become an extremely bizarre year, mainly dominated by the Corona virus. Nevertheless, there was still plenty of birding to do in the Netherlands. Outside the Netherlands this year birding was almost impossible and our usual trips to faraway places had to be cancelled. So no expansion of the world list. Let's look back at what we did see in our own country.
2019 is already over and it is time for an overview. It was an exceptionally good year for our Dutch list. We took it a bit easier with the annual list, but ended well over 300 species. The website has also been modernized and given a new look.
Friday morning around half past eight we left for Texel for the fall event of Dutch Birding. This is an annual attempt to find rare birds with as many birdwatchers as possible. The best kind of the weekend is also rewarded with a beautiful binoculars.
After a reasonable number of reports off Cinereous Vultures in Belgium and the Netherlands we also got a chance to add this bird to the Dutch list.
According to tradition, we again participated in the Top of Holland (ToH) this year. The Top of Holland is an event that searches for the rarest bird in the provinces of Drenthe, Friesland and Groningen. The person who finds the rarest bird will receive beside the honour a prize.
We had not experienced much of the bird migration this spring. We left for New Zealand on February 21 and we were back on April 15. After a jet lag and acclimatization, we were ready on Friday for a long Easter weekend at the Kamperhoek. The weather forecast was extremely good and the expectations were high.
2018, a year that has flown by. It indeed seems that as you get older the days, weeks and months go faster. So on 1 January we were in the Lauwersmeer looking at a Black-winged Kite and I am already typing the annual overview. The Black-winged Kite was of course visited for the monthly list. In the same area there were no less than 3 Rough-legged Buzzards . Normally 1 January is spent in Zeeland so this was a first. With 63 species much less than we normally score in Zeeland but for a Black-winged Kite in January, we like to make an exception. Since I have been a fanatic birder for many years on the first day of the new year, I became curious about the number of species I had actually seen on January 1st. After a look at my eternal daily list (which I do not actively keep, waarneming.nl does that for me) it turned out that I have seen 173 species in total on new New Year's Day, I did not expect that.