2021: A year in review
Egyptian Vulture, Co. Donegal In early January of 2021 if somebody told me that I would successfully twitch two Irish firsts and have 6 rare finds I’d probably have bitten your hand off for that. From a twitching point of view, 2021 will probably be remembered on a personal level for all the dips. Dips This year I have had an extremely poor hit rate when it came to twitching. It was so poor that lack of motivation saved me some more dips towards the latter end of the autumn. The large majority of my dips involved the target bird having either been seen on the day I dipped or the previous day. Some of the worst dips included Ireland’s first Red-winged Blackbird. However, having a nasty crash while twitching a Sardinian Warbler meant that I never actually got to the site, and then dipping it again two days later was like a kick in the balls. I then missed Montagu’s Harrier by about an hour and Great Spotted Cuckoo by twenty minutes to round off a brutal spring. Autumn dips incl