Welcome!

Welcome to the new Birding Tales blog - my first attempt at blogging so bear with me if I mess something up. While we're all pretty much confined to our own homes, I thought it might lighten the mood a bit by recounting some personal birding stories from the past 25 years or so. I did a similar thing on Facebook a few years ago, a tale a day during October, each relating to that particular date, and it seemed to go down well.

This time I will try to post a tale a day during April, but these will mostly not be tied to the particular date, just a more general selection of stories spread across the years. The focus will be very much on my own attempts to twitch rare birds around Britain and Ireland, the trials and tribulations, highs and lows, triumphs and disasters. (Yes, there will be dip stories too, and I've got some doozies.) If you're a birder reading these, you're likely to recognise the places and emotions involved (you may even have been on some of the same twitches), and if any non-birder should stumble across this blog and read some of the stories unfolding over the next month it will perhaps give a flavour of what it is like to be a committed (some might say obsessive) twitcher.

I hope, at least, that some of them raise a much-needed smile.