With our Donegal trip coming to an end we briefly popped out to Glenveagh National Park in Donegal yesterday morning. 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 and we were pushed for time.
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 (Irish type), a Siskin and Mistle Thrush.
There were 30 Lesser Redpoll feeding in the car park and two of these I thought were Mealy Redpoll (a potential lifer) based on the ID pointers I know such as size, colour, tone, etc…..however after checking the RSPB distribution map they are not shown to occur in Ireland! I’ve posted a thread on Bird Forum to see if anyone can offer useful advice on this. I've also written a description and I'm getting in touch with Sligo birding and the Donegal Recorder to see what they think about this sighting. 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 :)
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