Life List

My global life list, including where and when I saw each species. I began keeping a proper record of my birdwatching in October 2022.

I have a historical record of having seen some birds in 2013 and 2016-17. I have mixed confidence in these observations. They’re almost entirely from travel journals, and me either being told or identifying for myself a particular species while in Bosnia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, or Germany. I’ve separated these into a separate ‘Historical’ table at the bottom of the list. They don’t count toward my overall life list, they’re not on eBird, and the first time that I saw each of these species after becoming a birdwatcher is marked with a .

The exception to this is a trip to Peru in 2010. Thirteen records here I have retained as they were with a professional guide who was a birder, I have a list in my travel journal that I remember checking with him at the time, and I have photos of about half of them. One additional record from that trip that was on my diary list but was not sourced from the guide is Chilean flamingo, but even now I’m very confident in that ID.

I use eBird to record my list. One feature of eBird is that it displays non-native birds according to when you saw it in its highest ‘exotic’ category – meaning that seeing a naturalised common starling in Australia will be replaced by seeing a common starling in its native range in Europe. Where this has happened on my list, I have marked the species with .