During our second day the road took us to the far south west, or to more precise, Lands End. After this it is America ;)
To get there we took the narrow roads with beautiful scenery, and now the sun actually came out behind the clouds and we finally had 15C (until then it was cloudy, short shows and around 10C)
It was lucky that we started around 9 because we were did not arrive until 13. Once there, we had lunch, walked around and enjoyed the sun, the ice cream and the views.
Going back to my interest, the birds. In the area there is a special crow specie, a cornish chough.
At the end of the 18th century several naturalists noted the decline of the chough in Cornwall.
They were concerned that choughs were suffering at the hands of sportsmen and suppliers of natural history specimens.
However, trophy hunters were not the only problem. The steady degradation of the chough’s preferred habitat – grazed cliffs and heathland – played a major part in the demise of the chough in the county. In past centuries, sheep, cattle and ponies would have grazed the cliffs all year round, keeping vegetation short and open, providing perfect conditions for chough to find a supply of insects such as cranefly larvae, dung beetles and ants.
The removal of stock to inland pastures, where they could be managed more easily, meant the cliff slopes soon scrubbed over and choughs found it increasingly difficult to find suitable feeding areas. Nesting had all but ceased in south Cornwall and the Lizard by the mid 1800s.
By 1910, the chough had disappeared from all southern coastal counties of the UK with the exception of Cornwall, but even here there was concern that it was doomed to extinction, with reports that former haunts on the north coast remained unfrequented. The year 1947 saw the last successful nesting attempt in Cornwall.
But in 2001 choughs returned naturally to Cornwall!
Talked with a local ornithologist, she mentioned that they had seen more nests further towards the east (Lizard). Another rocky part of the coast, which was according to her very close by. You can perhaps see what I'm coming to, that close by took us almost an good hour.
(Unfortunately we did not find any of them there either ://
Few hours later when the clock was approaching 19 we gave up and went off to search for somewhere to sleep..
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| Land's End (The south-west point) |
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| Land's End |
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| Lizard (The south point of England) |
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| Lizard |
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| Land's End |
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| Halo |
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| The beatiful stone chat |
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| A young rabbit |
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| Rock pipit |
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| Buzzard flying over me |
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| Nesting carrion crow (?) |
