Whooper did doo

On Saturday I decided to head down to Macroom to check out the Gearagh forest near the town. I had never been there and wasn’t really too aware of its existence till some recent research into Odontates highlighted this as an area of interest. Obviously its winter now so the dragonflies are missing but water birds a plenty are also known to live here. 

 

Being on foot though all my ventures means that I often go to a place primarily to explore/scout and see what the best areas to focus on next time are. This was one of those days and I covered something in the area of 13 miles. Needless to say I was a tad tired afterwards. Anyway, the Gearagh is a lovely area! It is apparently the only post glacial alluvial forest in west Europe which means it is pretty unique. Truth be told I’m not sure what that means exactly but it effectively translates to giant wetland with canals and paths running across it, quite stunning!   

    

There where a lot of trushes and bullfinch in the trees feeding on berries and seeds. Saw plenty of redwings (trushes), though as usual they are just too damn skittish to successfully photograph. Is it me or has there been a serious decline in redwings? I remember Clonakilty last Christmas had thousands; maybe Clonakilty is just a hotspot. I haven’t seen any in the city suburbs yet either.

   

A chiffchaff I think, not so common this time of year.

       

One of several reed buntings.

       

Could have been a great shot but this goldcrest just had to look away.

Not so many bird photo ops around. As with most of these large scale habitats everything was very far away! Thousands of lapwings, wigeon and teal where sitting on the small islands joined by the occasional grey heron and little egret. I did at one point look at a landscape shot and discover that the distant sheep where in fact grazing whooper swans! The next few hours where spend trying to figure out exactly where said field was. The results where mixed. I got some distant shots and some flyover shots!   

A mute swan for comparison.

There they are! whooper swans at last

The yellow bill makes them easy to distinguish.

               

All in all an enjoyable day, if not for the bird variety then at least for this unusual and beautiful landscape!

General greebous

Couple of small updates, after a week of almost constant rain sun has suddenly descended on Cork city and fried its confused citizens to bits. I am thinking of proposing that we rename the Irish maritime climate to an Enigmatine climate due to its severely random nature.

Since I wrote this the weather has turned decidedly average again but I guess that just proves my point.

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Good start for my nature return as the UCC rounds revealed a spotted flycatcher! This seems to be the only flycatcher we have in any great abundance here in Ireland but is by no means easy to find. It’s a summer visitor here and in most of Europe. This picture is not great but fingers crossed that I find some more in the next few weeks. There seems to be a lot of them around the country at the moment so I’m hopeful! 

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The rest of UCC seems largely lifeless with most birds hidden away and recovering from the stress of parenting but one pine tree did reveal an unusual abundance of feeding songbirds. 6 goldcrests, 4 coal tits, 6 blue tits, 7 long tailed tits, 2 great tits and a treecreeper all in one tree. (Treecreeper on top, WOW not my best shot, coal tit bottom, also not great).

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Also made my weekly (ish) trip to the Atlantic pond where I found the usual grey herons but unfortunately no good views of the little egrets. The young heron was showing well again so I had to photograph him despite already having about 20 shots of the same animal (top). Last but not least a little grebe finally wandered into some light and gave me a fairly good shot (bottom), wahay.

 

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Barn swallow and spotted flycatcher added to UCC list

Now lets hope the weather sticks!