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Despite the huge normalising influence of the EU, Europe is and will always be a patchwork of languages, cultures and institutions. The birding scene reflects this. Visitors from North America or Australia might be surprised to learn there is no uniform system for reporting or viewing bird sightings in Europe. Even visitors from neighbouring countries typically struggle to find out what has been seen where. There are sometimes even multiple systems within a single country!
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eBird alerts are great. I have a bunch set up for regions near my home and I often temporarily enable them for places that I'll be travelling to. And yet... they don't quite tell me what I really want to know.
Almost all bird species are common somewhere. Even many endangered species have a core habitat where they are frequently encountered. But a small proportion of species are just plain hard to see, whether because they are sparsely or unpredictably distributed, skulky, or live in habitat that is difficult for humans to access.
By choice of home, I do most of my birding in Europe. I've been slowly ticking off all of Europe's regularly occurring bird species. Which got me thinking: Which European birds are the hardest of all to see? Which species are likely to be the last ones to make it onto a European birder's life list?  'Hirsch' also happens to be the German name for the red deer. Photo by hehaden on flickr.com (CC BY-NC 2.0). |