I’ve been at birding for over two and a half years. And sometimes I wonder has it allowed me to experience more in the previous two and a half years than in the ten years before that. The joy of seeing baby birds, the excitement of seeing a tense stand off between a buzzard and some gulls, and the absolute wonder of seeing flocks of perhaps a thousand birds flying through the air.
But in September, or just under two and a half years into birding, I passed a personal milestone that I’ve been awaiting eagerly for for some time. I photographed and identified my one hundredth bird.
I spotted bird one hundred shortly after spotting bird ninety nine, which for me is lucky, because my brain doesn’t like numbers with nine at the end. They have always seemed incomplete to me. 39 feels like an incomplete 40, 59 feels like an incomplete 60, and so on and so forth. So, you better believe if I’d been stuck at bird number 99 for a long time, that would have irritated me!
As I started to see more and more birds and add them to my list, I spent a bit of time thinking about what constitutes a “proper” sighting. I don’t think for example, going to a zoo and seeing an ostrich really counts as a bird sighting. Ostriches are cool, and I’d love to see one in really life (highly unlikely due to my travel anxiety), but seeing one in a zoo doesn’t really count as a wildlife sighting. So I think if I I just included any and all birds I saw in every context whatsoever, my birding list would be fairly meaningless. So here are the sightings I decided do not constitute a true wildlife sighting.
Any bird that is currently in captivity.
So as already mentioned, seeing a bird in a zoo, or a bird that is somebody’s pet, doesn’t count.
Any bird that I’ve been able to name and identify for as long as I can remember
I love robins, mute swans, and mallards, but because I’ve been able to name and identify them all my life, at least I don’t ever remember a time when I couldn’t, to me these don’t constitute any kind of new wildlife “discovery.” Though mute swans and mallards are in a bit of a grey area, because for most of my life I knew mute swans by the generalized name “swans”, and didn’t know they were called mute swans, and I probably didn’t always know that mallards were called that, I would have known them as just “ducks”, but either way, I decided these don’t count as new wildlife sightings. That’s not to see I don’t like photographing these birds, in fact, some of my favourite photos are of these three, but because I’ve always known them, I don’t think they belong on my list of sightings.
I have been able to name and identify herons since before I got into birding, but not my entire life, there was definitely a period when I was a child when I didn’t know what they were called. So I concluded that herons do belong on my list.
So it might seem strange to think that there were only three birds I could identify my entire life, and one I could only identify since late childhood. Has my life long knowledge of birding really been that poor? Absolutely it was that poor! Before I got into birding, I couldn’t visually identify a fairly common bird such as a blackbird! My birding journey started from pretty much total ignorance of the birding world, I started from pretty much zero, which is part of the reason why I’ve found the journey so absolutely exhilarating.
I started with a rule of “Any bird that was born in captivity, even if they are no longer in captivity, doesn’t count”
On my way to do my shopping one day I was surprised to see a budgie sitting on a wall. I didn’t count this as a sighting, this is a bird that was born in captivity, so concluded that in no sense was this a wildlife sighting. I also tried to spread the message on social media that there was a budgie lose, in the hope that their owners could pick them up, as these birds cannot survive in the wild. I hope the bird was okay in the end.
However, I ended up changing this rule
Last year I spotted this beautiful bird while walking through the Lee Fields:
It’s a wood duck! And when I saw this bird first, I thought I’d hit an absolute birding jackpot, I thought I’d spotted a vagrant. This is when you see a bird well outside of their normal range, either because they’ve made a navigation error, or because a storm has blown them well off course, either way, the bird chooses to continue living their life in Ireland. And what I thought I had found was a North American duck that had ended up through sheer accident in Ireland, and had decided to continue their life here.
But my hopes of this were soon dashed. Other wildlife enthusiasts explained that this bird was an “escapee”. Basically a bird that someone kept as a pet, that then escaped and now lived in the wild in Ireland. At first I was very disappointed, I could not add this beautiful bird to my list!
Or could I? The more I thought about it, the more I felt I should make a slight change to the criteria of my list, to allow the inclusion of this wood duck. The budgie I saw, I still believe absolutely didn’t count, because the poor budgie would have died if not returned to captivity.
But with regards to the wood duck, the wood duck was, near as I can tell, acting exactly as they would have if they HAD ended up in Ireland by being blown off course. Eating food in the wild, sleeping in the wild, probably fighting with other birds in the wild. They were born in captivity, but now, the important point was, they were a wild bird. So the wood duck went on my list! But, while this bird was not an example of a vagrant, I’d like to talk now about my first and only example of a vagrant that I did encounter.
A Christmas Eve Sighting on the Courtmacsherry Estuary
I spotted this bird on the Courtmacsherry Estuary on the 24th of December, 2024. I simply assumed it was a Eurasian teal. That evening, I displayed some of that day’s bird photos in a wildlife group, and I was informed that what this actually was, was an American green winged teal!
We’ll never know the exciting story of how this American bird ended up a citizen of Irish waters. Did a storm send them in the wrong direction? Did they get completely and utterly lost, and flew desperately to the nearest landmass they could see? I’d love to know what happened, but I never will. But this American seemed to be doing just fine on our shores, and it’s my first and only sighting of a bird that under normal circumstances does not live in Ireland. Quite an exciting find!
Reed Buntings eluded me for about a year
In July 2025, while on the Cork Harbour Greenway, I saw what I assumed would be my first sighting of a reed bunting. I got the camera ready as quick as I could, but, no luck, the bird was gone, never to be seen again. I’m 90% sure this was a reed bunting, but I’m not, and never can be 100% sure, so it doesn’t count as a sighting. It would be quite a bit of time before I would see another. Then, around June this year, I got a tip off that there were reed buntings in Tramore Valley Park. Off I went, camera at the ready, and I saw this character!:
The eternal mystery of what I saw on the Nagle Mountains.
While on the Nagle Mountains during September 2025, I saw what I took to be a bird of prey. There was no time to get my camera ready, there wasn’t even time to get my eyes ready. And then the bird was gone, never to be seen again.
The best hypothesis I could come up with was that red kites, a bird I have never seen in real life, I’ve only seen pictures of, had finally moved beyond their home in Wicklow and had started taking up residence in the Nagles. An unlikely answer, but a red kite was the only thing I could think of that resembled what I had just about seen. I spent the next year wondering what amazing bird I had seen. I didn’t go back to the Nagle Mountains during this time because it’s hard for me to get there in the Winter. With the short evenings I don’t want to be caught out after the sun goes down while travelling on the bike. But when I returned this year in August, I caught sight of the only thing I think could possibly be the answer as to what I saw:
This is a beautiful hen harrier flying over the heather on the Nagle Mountains, which I of course quickly added to my list. And it’s the only bird that looks even remotely like what I’d seen the previous September. I also wrote more about that particular trip here if you’d like to have a read:
So I’m reasonably satisfied that what I just about saw out of the corner of my eye that day was a hen harrier, though sometimes I wonder, is it possible I’d seen a completely different bird that I’d never seen before, and through sheer bad luck never will again.
Often Heard, But Seen Only Once
I have heard a whitethroat many times, but I have seen one, once and once only. Here’s the one I saw last July:
Perhaps I’ll get another few sightings when Summer comes around next year, but for now, I’ll have to content myself with this fleeting glimpse.
Bird Number 98 (It’s getting exciting!) A Common Sandpiper
A common sandpiper. Bird number 98. And it was only August! At this point, as you can imagine, I was starting to wonder would I manage to finish out the year of 2026 after having reached 100 birding sightings. But, once you’ve reached the nineties, you really have well and truly picked the low hanging fruit, so I wasn’t sure. But then again, I had seen quite a few birds in 2026, so anything was possible.
Bird Number 99, (It’s Getting Really, Really Exciting!) A Canada Goose
A lovely Canada Goose at the Lough. I had reached 99! An achievement I was proud of, but I would have to get off the number 99 soon, because of my pathological discomfort with numbers that end in 9. Incidentally, during this birding session I encountered a pigeon that was in distress and I was part of an effort to help the bird. If anyone wants to read about that here it is:
So I was very happy with getting to see all of these wonderful birds over my near two and a half years of birding. I fully expected I would be stuck at “99”, for a long time, that’s just the way birding goes often times. But as luck would have it, I would end up seeing bird number 100, only a few days later!
Bird Number 100, A Snipe!, YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!!
So there you have it. On September 13th, 2026, I saw bird number 100. A snipe. Which is in fact, a bird I strongly suspected I saw a year previously, but it got away from me before I could ready the camera. They’re quite skittish, snipes, and if not for being able to use the hide in Harper’s Island I wonder would I have gotten to see one at all. This isn’t my best photo, but it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s clear enough for identification, it counts.
But my birding journey isn’t over, and I hope it never will be. I still haven’t recorded 100 species of bird, so that’s something I would very much like to achieve, though I suspect it’ll take quite some time. But ultimately, the numbers game of birding is only a part of what’s interesting to me about it. I think what gets me really excited about birding is that, I don’t know what I’m going to encounter next. What species of birds am I going to encounter fighting next? I don’t know. What wonderful and precious juvenile birds will I encounter next? I don’t know. What is the next animal, or for that matter, inanimate object, that I’m going to hear a starling imitate next? I don’t know. No idea. And for somebody who’s as heavily reliant on routine and predictability as I am, it can be nice to every now and again say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I know it’s going to be awesome.”
So here’s to whatever bird I see next, because I can’t wait for the next avian dinosaur related adventure!
