My final new species that I was able to get a decent photo of is the meadow pipit, another somewhat at-risk species in the UK. If you've been following my blog for a while, you might have noticed that there are a lot of little brown birds in the world, many of which are different species of birds. Out of the corner of your eye, or if you're not paying that much attention, you might just chalk everything up to being a sparrow. Here in the UK, you can't make that assumption, but the house sparrow is the only one that lives here (by contrast, in Alberta, we have something like 16 different sparrow species!), so you have to wonder what else it could be. And there are a lot of options--skylarks, pipits, dunnocks, and the females of many species, so you really need to be careful when ID'ing them, but it also means that just because you see a little brown bird in the distance, you shouldn't dismiss it! I take photos of everything just in case. If they turn out to be house sparrows, I tend not to get too excited since I see those all the time--or at least in Canada I do, but you never know when it'll end up being something else. In this case, for me, it was the meadow pipit. Again, I only got one good photo of it, but it was enough to figure out what it was, so that was exciting to have seen another lifer.
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