May was ‘Puerto Rico Month‘ on 10,000 Birds and - hopefully - we managed to provide some quality and interesting content (we certainly tried anyway). I guess we’d probably be fooling ourselves though if we didn’t admit that the most exciting feature of ‘PR Month’ was the offer of a FREE ‘Endemic Dash’ holiday on the Enchanted Isle courtesy of Kevin Loughlin and Wildside Nature Tours (anyone out there want to tell us it was one of the carefully-written species accounts instead? No? I figured not…)

Anyway (in case you missed the no-expenses spared publicity drive we embarked upon) we held a competition to find a winner of said holiday, and in time-honoured tradition (and unique to 10,000 Birds I think) the ‘jammy finger’ was dragged into service again and has picked a winner!

And the winner is…what’s that? What is the ‘jammy finger‘ you ask? Okay, well it is a very small digit belonging to my daughter which after being dunked in a jar of the ’sweet stuff’ is then prodded (randomly and with no hint of suggestion or coercion by an observing adult!) against my laptop screen to select one name from a list of entries…although in this particular case there were so many entries that I had to print out the full list and fly in a twin jammy finger from Australia just to make sure that the system wasn’t overloaded!

The ‘twin jammy fingers’ whittled the entries down to two Finalists, who were then assigned the identifiers ‘Tea Bag’ and ‘JamJar Lid’ and an exciting final round of ‘Choose The Hand to Pick a Winner’ took place. The things we do for you guys…

I even took photographs…

The importance of the task ahead appeared not to impress at least one of the two judges…

…though her attitude changed markedly once the jam jar was opened…

…whilst Judge No2 got into the spirit of things from the get-go…

With two finalists chosen it was now down to whether the ‘tea-bag’ or the ‘jam-jar lid’ was selected in the ‘Which hand do you want to pick?” Final Round…

So that’s what happened, thankyou, and goodnight…wait, what’s that? Who won the competition? Ah, I should have known THAT question would be asked…

Okay, the winner of the Wildside Nature Tours ‘Endemic Dash’ of Puerto Rico is -

Congratulations to Patrick and have a great trip (and, boy, will we be expecting one heck of a Trip Report from YOU when you get back!)

In the meantime, thanks again to Kevin Loughlin for providing such a superb prize - and commiserations to everyone who (this time) missed out.

• Like to see what we posted during ‘Puerto Rico Month’ (and what birds our lucky winner will be seeing)? Just click http://10000birds.com/tag/puerto-rico-month