"Look up" is the catchphrase immortalised by everybody's favourite birding pseudo-celeb, David Lindo (The Urban Birder, no less). So I gave it a go recently at The Mall, and lo and behold...
A White-tailed Eagle was circling over the house, much to the chagrin of a couple of local buzzards. Luckily I was out in the garden at the time photographing Siskins demolishing my nuts. I rattled off a few shit shots as the humongous bird wheeled lazily on-high drifting off slowly to the north-east.
News broke, with Seppy scrambling for his scope and making a beeline for the majik patio. He pointed his optics in the approximate direction, and by pure fluke clocked a very large black dot being harassed by a couple of significantly smaller dots.
Bingo! Or was it?
Despite some precedent on this very blog for ticking questionable reintroduced raptors, it turns out my shit shots weren't quite shit enough, and the Irish White-tailed Eagle Reintroduction project lead, on perusing said shots on Twitter, confirmed the bird to be a young male released in Killarney National Park only last August (08/21). Ticking it would be too much of a stretch, even for Seppy.
That just wouldn't be cricket! Or golf, come to that.
Untickable japes aside, it's been steady gains with nothing out of the ordinary on either patch, with the usual spring arrivals trickling in. Squince sits second on the podium with 77.87%, the Mall in third on 68.94%.
Now I just need Seppy to stop dragging me all the way to Galley for Irish ticks (Dotterel and Western Subalp were well worth the spin over, mind you), so I can spend more time trying to find something tasty on my own patch.
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