Alexander’s climbing started to take off in January with a third and then three second places in the North West & Lakes rounds of the BMC’s Youth Climbing Series as he continued to improve his skills. The Masked Shrike pin badge marked the last of my involvement with the Spurn Rarity Series but this had already been a worthwhile project that has raised enough money to cover several months of the bird observatory mortgage payments. I have some plans to raise some money for Snow Leopard conservation but more of this in due course. I hiked up Pendle a few times in the dark in preparation for Ladakh but it was not until late February that I took a decent wildlife photo.
My Wild Images and Birdquest Snow Leopard Special tour thankfully produced three sightings of the main attraction, albeit all distant but the real outstanding highlight was a beautiful Pallas’s Cat at Tso Kar high on the Tibetan Plateau. Well worth enduring high altitude and temperatures as low as minus 32 Celsius for. There were some unforgettable memories of that tour including our drivers lighting fires under the cars trying to defrost the oil in their engines. Eastern Ladakh was by far the most rewarding element and also included walk-away views of Tibetan Sandgrouse in the snow as well as my first Tibetan Snowcocks high on the 5200m Polokongka La pass. Thanks as always to Mr Snow Leopard himself, Jigmet Dadul and his wonderful team for looking after us so well yet again.
I struggled to hold on to my next tour, a now familiar journey around Northern India for the most part, visiting my favourite lodges of Chambal Safari, Desert Coursers and Blackbuck Lodge. Chambal Safari Lodge is an oasis of calm in a sea of hustle and bustle and its nearby river is always a delightful glimpse of what all the big slow flowing rivers of India must have been like long ago. The gharials and skimmers were again awesome. I arrived at Chambal directly off the operating table in Agra but there are few places I would rather be in this state than Chambal. Thanks to Ram and Anu for making things much more comfortable for me. At Desert Coursers in the Little Rann of Kutch many of the winter visitors had departed but Dhanraj still managed to conjure up some Sykes’s Nightjars and Desert Foxes and best of all were the Striped Hyenas. We had a couple of encounters out on the salt pans. The Striped Hyena show at Blackbuck National Park was even better, with a mum and three almost fully-grown pups on view daily, at one point even chased by the wolf pack. Mickey Desai’s lodge remains the most luxurious lodge I stay at in India and the outdoor shower in your private courtyard is always something special. The food at all three of these places was top class too, how I love Indian cooking.
This year also saw my first visit to Tadoba Andhari National Park in Central India. We enjoyed almost 30 tiger sightings, some of them multiple repeats of the same animals but there were so many that a few proved to be very photogenic. At last, I finally caught up with Sloth Bears here too and we saw Leopards, Indian Wild Dogs (or Dholes) and the rare Four-horned Antelope (or Chowsingha) a couple of times in some lovely dry deciduous forest. Even the buffer zones were awesome, which is feature of Tadoba, now that control of income has been handed to local communities resulting in much less encroachment. Quiet for long periods then bam! Another great tiger sighting. Thanks here to Aditya and his team, particularly Lahu who kept us on the right track many times. My guardian angel, Mojgan did her best but was no longer able to keep me going and it was clear that I needed another operation. I had two more before I left India and went straight to hospital on my return for a more major one.
Two months of struggling on followed, during which time Alexander competed in the grand final of the Youth Climbing Series, two years off the top of his age group and surprised everyone by finishing 12th in bouldering, even beating the lad who had won every Northwest regional round in the process. I was back on the road again in late May. This time it was for a reunion with my Hungarian friends in Romania. From Bucharest we recced some sites in the south locating a colony of Semi-collared Flycatchers before heading to the Black Sea coast. Our time in the Macin Hills and Dobrogea followed by the Danube Delta was very special and we had a lot of fun. Point blank Collared Pratincoles, a vagrant Demoiselle Crane (my first in the WP since 1986!) and Pied Wheatears were very enjoyable. It was also great to explore the heart of the world’s biggest reedbed and we did a lot of nice artistic stuff here expertly guided by Zoli Nagy with help from our brilliant boat driver Romi. Up to 28 Pallas’s Gulls in breeding plumage around our boat and against the sunset was another highlight. Thanks to János Oláh for the invitation and to Fiteti and Manu for supplying the pálinka and for putting up with me again after all these years. A surprise detour to the forests of Transylvania followed where a stunning couple of sessions in the bear photo hides produced much better results than I could have hoped for. The bears are doing very well here now! Thanks to Zsolti and Tibi for looking after me here.
I was feeling much better in June but still far from right when my Birdquest Iceland tour came around. Iceland is another of my favourite tours thanks to some lovely birding in unique and spectacular volcanic scenery with waterfalls, geysirs, lovely people and good food, accommodations and roads. What more could you ask for? Gyrfalcon was harder to see than usual but thanks to local help we eventually caught up with it. Better still was the Blue Whale on our boat trip out of Husavík! The first time we have seen it here after many years of trying. We even managed to include five Game of Thrones filming locations without even trying as well as the jaw dropping Dettifoss, the thundering waterfall made famous by a scene in the sci-fi film Prometheus. Thanks to Gaukur and Edward for help as always.
In July I was finally just about back to normal again in time for Svalbard on SV Noorderlicht with Wild images and Birdquest, my fifth time aboard. The extent of sea ice was such that getting all the way around Spitsbergen was out of the question but we still had a good time nevertheless. Only two bear sightings was dire but at least we did not miss it, as happened to others recently. We saw more Blue Whales, Walruses, Ivory Gulls and were able to make a very nice landing at a Little Auk colony but the highlight for me was probably our visit to the abandoned Russian mining settlement of Pyramiden and its Arctic Foxes - a very nice bonus. It was sad not to have my old friend Arjen on board but his replacement Phil Wickens was a great expedition leader. A bizarre sighting was a flock of five Ruddy Shelducks found at Ny Ålesund by the UK’s no. 1 bird lister Steve Webb and was followed by another singleton later in Isfjorden. Where had they come from, Central Asia via a Russian river flowing to the Arctic maybe or from somewhere almost as far away in western Europe?
This year saw hardly any birding let alone chasing rarities in the UK, just Curlew Sandpiper (a pair new for me in East Lancs at Alston in the spring); the ‘what-ear’ (Pied or Eastern Black-eared) at Fluke Hall and the last gasp Eastern Yellow Wagtail at Sedgeford on 29 December, my only UK lifer of the year after ignoring/not being fit or able to go for a few others earlier in the year. The mega roost of 20-30,000 Redwings at Longridge Fell found by Pete Morris and Kris McBride was a terrific spectacle and nice to have on the doorstep.
Lucky for me that my tour schedule only stretched to the end of July, so I enjoyed the last five months of the year at home in East Lancs, spending a lot of time in climbing centres with my little star, Alexander. My favourite job is being his dad. He has also started his assault on the world of judo but with nowhere near the same success as his climbing. Despite being strong for his size it involves some very different skills. He enjoys it and is going to stick at it when he’s not got any climbing comps on the horizon.
Finally thanks again to everyone who has supported me in 2019 and kept things going while I am away: my partner Évi, my colleagues in the Birdquest/Wild Images office; my local guides, agents and my group members; Alexander’s climbing coaches at Boulder UK in Bamber Bridge, Jordan, Abi and Ed; Zsolti at Csipi Boulder in Debrecen and finally Elliot Payne, who has helped Alexander to get in the right frame of mind for his climbing as well as teaching him some new skills. Looking ahead, 2020 is set to be a very busy year of guiding and at last Alexander gets to compete against kids his own age. We are looking forward to it.
[2019 Highlights: (left to right rows from top) Ibisbill, River Indus at Choglamsar; Wolf pit at Tso Kar, Ladakh; Tibetan Sandgrouse and Pallas’s Cat, both also Tso Kar. Indian Skimmer, Chambal River; Striped Hyena, Blackbuck National Park; Sloth Bear and Bengal Tiger, both Tadoba. Harlequin Duck, Laxa River, Iceland; White-winged Tern, Gardur; Blue Whale, Husavík and Gyrfalcon. Brown Bear, Transylvania; Collared Pratincole, Dobrogea, Romania; Pallas’s Gull and Dalmatian Pelican, both Danube Delta, Romania. Ortolan Bunting, Macin Mountains; Whiskered Tern, Danube Delta; Lesser Grey Shrike, Dobrogea and Brown Bear, Transylvania. Ivory Gull, Ny Ålesund; Walrus, Sarstangen; Red Phalarope, Longyearbyen and Boreal Jacob’s Ladder, Skansbukta, all Svalbard.]