Work In Progress

Yesterday morning our Ireland trip was coming to an end so we briefly popped out to Glenveagh National Park in Donegal, mainly as a reconnaissance mission for future visits. Golden Eagles were reintroduced here in 2000 in the hope that they will be able to re-establish themselves as a breeding bird. See this link for more details http://www.goldeneagle.ie Our hopes weren’t high on seeing one though as the area is so vast, we were struggling for time and to be honest I’d much rather see them on the BIG Scotland trip that we’ll probably do next year.

Anyway we didn’t see an Eagle and we didn’t see great numbers of species here but there were some nice spots. About seven Ravens over (year tick), common woodland tits and finches including Long Tailed Tits, Coal Tit (of the Irish race of course), a Siskin and a Mistle Thrush. There were 30 Lesser Redpoll feeding in the car park and two of these I suspected were Mealy Redpoll (a potential lifer) based on the ID pointers I know such as size, colour etc…..however after checking the RSPB distribution map it seems that they don’t occur in Ireland! The whole task of Id-ing Redpolls has just got more confusing and I can’t find much about separating these two, its not even covered in Collins. I’ve posted a thread on Bird Forum to see if anyone can offer useful advice. Also saw two Red Deer sleeping.

Anyway…what an amazing trip, we’ve had a fab time exploring Donegal, got 5 lifers and lots of other nice birds, worked on our gulling skills (even managed to get Max interested – a reformed gull-hater!). We’ll definately be back there not too far in the distant future :)