Welcome to Midlands Birding Blog!

Welcome to Midlands Birding Blog! 
This blog is my birding diary as a young birder from the midlands. Here, I'll post content about birds, Midlands birdwatching, trips and more. It will be specifically about birding in Derbyshire and birding in Leicestershire, as I live on the border of these two counties. I am a keen patch birdwatcher at Willington Gravel Pits, but I love travelling further afield in search of birds, particularly day trips in the UK to Norfolk, Spurn, Frampton Marsh and lots more and when I can, birding abroad. I’ve been lucky enough to travel to Costa Rica and Spain on birding trips and to Mauritius, Iceland, Canada, USA, France and more with my family. Costa Rica was my favourite place to go bird watching and is the primary reason why my life list stands at 836. 
My UK life list currently stood at 254, almost exclusively without twitching, though that being said the best bird I have seen in Britain has to be the Spurn Siberian Accentor in October 2016. 
I currently study maths at the University of Bath but birdwatching time is limited while at uni so I tend to do the majority of my birding when I’m back home in Leicestershire.
I am a keen lister and am always trying to add to my various lists: particularly my worldwide and UK life lists, my UK year list and my patch year list at Willington GPs. I also love to make day lists and I hope to do a scheduled 24 hour-big day soon – my current day list is 101 from North Norfolk in January 2019. 
I helped out at the Constant Effort Surveying Ringing program at Middleton Lakes RSPB in 2019 and hope to go back to that in the summer when I am back from university. Ringing is something that really interests me and when I have a permanent address I plan to put more time into training.
Follow me on Twitter @mattcowardbirds

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