Saturday 19th February: Drift Reservoir & Penzance

Although I was on my own until Monday evening when the rest of the family were to come down this didn't mean that I could spend all my time birding: I needed to have some good decorating progress to show for my time down there. Nevertheless it would have been churlish not to do at least some birding and as I needed to head over to Penzance for some random DIY items on Saturday morning I thought that I would pop in at Drift reservoir to see if I could finally connect with the Greenland white-fronted goose that I'd been trying to see for some time now. In addition there was the small matter of a rose-coloured starling in Penzance to which I ought to pay my respects.

At Drift reservoir there were actually loads of geese visible, which was more than could be said for my previous visits though despite my carefully scouring of every last goose there was no sign of the white-front. A flock of six geese, with the greylag goose in amongst them, flew over honking loudly and landed somewhere out of sight, so there were clearly some goose parties out and about elsewhere and my target goose was in all probability somewhere close by. I gave the gulls a good grilling but there was nothing out of the ordinary there either.

There were plenty of these about at Drift

On to the Penalverne estate in Penzance for the starling. I was a bit reluctant about this as residents can sometimes understandably object to having birders staring in at their gardens. However it turned out that the bird was visiting the back garden of one of the houses and the best viewing spot was down a back alley where one wasn't overlooking any house. There were three birders at the appropriate spot and sure enough within ten minutes the bird appeared in a tree where it was on view preening for a few minutes before it flew off again. I hadn't bothered to bring my full digiscoping gear so I didn't take a photo but it was nice at least to see the bird.

I didn't hang around as I wanted to get a full day's decorating in so got my shopping and hurried back to the cottage. My niece was coming over at lunch-time from Truro where she's now working to help out with the decorating so there weren't going to be any further birding opportunities for the rest of the day anyway. The only other thing to report was that during my lunch break I was staring out over the moorland when I spotted a ring-tailed hen harrier quartering over the gorse, a lovely bird to have as a garden tick!