Collaborative list – December 2019

They came home exhausted. For lack of shields, they were carried on their “Helm field guides to the Birds of East Africa”.

429 species were seen by The Management in Uganda and may I commend Corey for his very concientious Rock Pigeon (Feral Pigeon) that he noted during a quick transit stop at Brussels Airport; Belgium being a place previously unbirded by the 10,000 Birds beats. Incidentally, Uganda (510) leap-frogged Australia (475) to become the list’s fourth most prolific country behind Costa Rica (763), USA (654) and Brazil (555).

December’s numbers looked like this;

10 beats visited 11 countries (Bahrain, New Zealand, USA, UK, Costa Rica, China, Mexico, Australia Nigeria, Uganda and Serbia) during December. They contributed 150 lists accounting for 1032 species and more than 36,000 individual birds.

The life list was pumped a further 27sp up to 3953.

35 countries were visited during 2019, 7 of them (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Thailand, Indonesia and Barbados) bringing new blood to the Country/Territory/Emirate/Republic/Pricipality/Kingdom/Special Administrative Region list which now stands at 55. 1777 lists were contributed by 13 beats and the provisional count for the year (some still trickling in) reached 2757.

Listed below is the provisional December count, gleaned from eBird before things got too excitable on Dec 31st. The reliable beats however continued to trickle their goodies in to the collaborative list while Redgannet was making mischief with a bottle Irish whiskey and some like-minded chums. Thus 100 species were missed by the time he woke up and noticed that eBird had reset the counters at midnight(do you guys have nothing better to do?).

A big thank you goes out to The Management and beats for their contributions and may you all have a happy and productive 2020.