Wing your way to Ireland for great birding experiences
The island of Ireland is a twitcher’s delight with great bird-watching opportunities all year round.
With dozens of official birding sites on the island of Ireland, from nature reserves to tidal estuaries, lough shores to island hideaways, it’s the ideal destination for bird enthusiasts.
Top sites must include Bull Island, a UNESCO biosphere reserve, which is considered a hotspot with 32 bird species recorded there.
The island in Dublin Bay has a five-kilometre-long beach and tidal estuary, extensive sand dunes and at low tide large areas of mudflats are exposed where wildfowl and waders can be spotted.
Another hotspot is Wexford Wildfowl Reserve where migrating geese from Arctic countries arrive every year to stay over the winter months. These include white-fronted geese, Bewick’s swans, whooper swans and Icelandic black-tailed godwits.
Wexford is one of sixteen reserves across the country covering a variety of habitats, from rocky islands to saltmarshes and lakes, woods and grasslands. They provide great bird-watching opportunities and several of them are also important conservation areas.
In Northern Ireland, Lough Neagh, the biggest lake in the UK and Ireland, provides multiple birding sites. Among the best is Oxford Island nature reserve in County Armagh, which has lakeside and woodland trails dotted with bird hides.
And off the north coast, Rathlin Island is an important breeding ground for seabirds including puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, razorbills, fulmars and even corncrakes.
It’s also possible to catch sight of a variety of birds while enjoying some of the island’s top visitor attractions.
On the Wild Atlantic Way, the Cliffs of Moher is home to colonies of seabirds. including internationally important numbers of guillemot and razorbill, and also significant numbers of puffin, kittiwake and fulmar.
The unique Gobbins Cliff Path in County Antrim, a feat of engineering that takes visitors along the cliff’s edge, down into caves and through tubular tunnels, is also a haven for wildlife and many seabirds can be glimpsed during the guided tour.
Similarly, a daring walk across Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, which swings dramatically over the Irish Sea, is a chance to see guillemots, razorbills, fulmars and kittiwakes swooping over the waves.
And on a walk along beautiful Horn Head cliffs in County Donegal you will see and hear the noisy colonies of breeding seabirds, including European shags and razorbills, that build their homes on the cliff’s jagged rocks.
www.ireland.com
