Total number of species seen in 2020 : 108 !!
Total Life Ticks in 2020 – NONE!!
2020 – The first year of Covid. Fortunately for us, we managed to get our annual winter holiday in Lanzarote. The sightings are summarised here. This was a blessing because it was not too long before the Covid pandemic struck putting an end to a whole year of birding – more or less.
Our Lanzarote holiday was between 12th and 26th of January 2020. In February the first cases of Covid appeared in the UK. At that point it was not clear how bad it would turn out to be. So we still had some birding chances in February when we had various outings to the Wirral on the 11th and 25th. Even in March we got in a trip to Wales and another to the Wirral. By March, though, the first deaths from Covid were happening . By the middle of March Public Health England stopped performing contact tracing as widespread infections began to overwhelm capacity.
On the 23rd March the Prime Minister ordered a partial lockdown and the rest is well known, as cases increased alarmingly and deaths rose exponentially. Lockdowns became regular but altering in strictness and sometimes regional rather than national so it was often hard to legally and/or morally find the opportunity to do any birding beyond our garden. By 2021 the lockdown was complete and those cahnces disappeared entirely.
Before that came into effect, though, we managed a few trips including to Brockholes on 16th September to get my scope fixed at the new In Focus shop there. There were also a couple of days out to the Wirral on 18th and 29th September and one to Martin Mere on the 22nd. Even in October we managed a trip to the Wirral on the 7th. Our last outing wasn’t really a birding one but I did manage to get a couple of year ticks at Tatton Park on the 15th October.
Then came the second wave of Covid and for all of the rest of the year and into 2021 we were not allowed to travel except for limited reasons, none of which was birding – although, from reading the birding magazines, plenty of people found a way around this in pursuit of their more important hobby. For us, though, we stayed at home so the only birds we had were out usual birds.
This meant that we had a poor birding year in terms of numbers but we live to bird another day which is not the case for hundreds of thousands of people who died from Covid.
Events meant that a lot of our birding was done in the garden and notable appearances made were a single male Blackcap in February, a Mute Swan over the garden in April as well as the, not so rare, Ring-necked Parakeets on the feeder. A surprising Swift was seen high above the garden on 16th May with more on the 30th June. After September I ceased to record any birds in the garden – it was just too depessing!