With beautiful beaches, rugged moorland, secret woodlands, and countryside estates, Cornwall is a fantastic place if you want to spend some time bird watching on holiday.
Hayle Estuary nature reserve managed by the RSPB is home to a wide variety of wetland birds including teals, wigeons, and goosanders. Although winter is the best time to visit, in spring and early summer migrant waders such as oystercatchers, dunlins, and whimbrels can be spotted on the tidal pools and marshes.
Marazion Marsh, also managed by the RSPB, which overlooks St. Michael’s Mount near Penzance, has the largest reedbed in Cornwall and is home to chiffchaffs, cetti’s warblers, little egrets, and grey herons. It’s also an important site for bitterns, and birds of prey regularly turn up including sparrowhawks and buzzards.
For goldcrests, firecrests, warblers, and buntings, make a trip to the Rame Peninsula near the village of Cawsand. It’s a stunning landscape of tidal creeks, sandy beaches, and tranquil farmland that is also good for raptors. Look out for hobbys, merlins, peregrine falcons, and if you’re lucky, the endangered hen harrier.
Stithians Lake is a manmade reservoir that supports a number of breeding birds including little grebes, coots, and moorhens. Greenshanks, ruffs, and curlew sandpipers can also be spotted probing in the mud on the banks of the lake.
Situated between Porthmeor Beach and Porthgwidden Beach is St Ives Island (which isn’t really an island at all as it’s firmly attached to the mainland), renowned for its autumn seabird passage. Skuas, terns, gannets, fulmars, and auks, pass by in huge flocks, as well as waders such as purple sandpipers, whimbrels, and turnstones.
No visit to Cornwall would be complete without a day out on Bodmin Moor, a heather-covered granite moorland dotted with many ancient monuments and ruins. It’s also important for its rich and varied wildlife. In spring and summer, skylarks, stonechats, wheatears, and sedge warblers arrive to breed, while in autumn and winter, thousands of golden plovers arrive as well as snipes and the scarcer jack snipes.
