January Birdtracking, Footiting and generally collecting blisters!

After his round Britain tour, Lee certainly showed us how it's done on the Species recorded, but with thanks to a few decent walks around Bangor and daily Birdtracking, I came out on top on the Complete Lists leaderboard with 178 complete lists.
In terms of individual records, I finished January with a, personally, very impressive 3836 records, which works out at 1.04% of all Birdtrack records in 2014 (which includes almost 1000 observers!)

With visits down to Warwickshire, up to the Highlands and several commutes between Bangor and Chester, my Birdtracking map for January 2014 is pretty impressive! This map contains the locations of all my records (roving, casual and complete lists) so far.

A really enjoyable month but boy has it been hard work to go that extra kilometre for the extra list!

Not only that, it was ofcourse the infamous January Foot It competition, where I am limited myself to the 2 miles radius minileague this year so that I wasn't tempted to do my ridiculous walks to Llanfairfechan and back. Not only this, I also came back to Bangor on the 13th Jan, meaning I had just over half a month left.
With this in mind, I set my target at 80 species, which I thought was fair but large enough to encourage myself to get out birding.
On the 23rd Jan, I managed to break the 80 species barrier and of course, this came in the form of a gull. A beautiful adult winter Mediterranean Gull at that! This is only my 2nd in Bangor ever, so was a nice bird to get on the Footit list.

One of the more surprising birds to get onto the footit list (and the University Birdwatching Challenge) was the above female Long-tailed Duck! This is a patch tick for me, and I don't think I know of any other records of LTD in the Menai straits, certainly not in recent memory.

With additional Canada Goose and Tawny Owl, I finished January on 82 species out of the prediction 80, so 102.5% score. Not quite as impressive as last year, but still!