Redwing | Making memories

St. John’s river walk continues 🙂 You will start at Poleberry, walk along the sport grounds and Tramore Road Business Park, cross the Inner Ring road and stop at the Cherrymount foot bridge. I will leave some short captions over the photographs – you can read them as you walk. But first please watch two videos.

A video courtesy of a Friend of St. John’s River Eoin Nevins brings you back to 2007 – it shows the part of the river you have visited in my previous blog posts.

The other video is about the old Waterford-Tramore railway. The part of the cycling/walkway you are on was constructed along the line of this railway and opened in August 2015.

If you want to know more about our birds, here is a helpful link. When I struggle to identify a bird, I simply send a bird picture to Birdwatch Ireland and always get a prompt reply.

Starlings gather on the sports field netting after the sunset.

Wrens are common on this stretch of the river. They will wait until you walk past, and start singing right behind your back.

Female Blackbird is jerking her tail in annoyance: too many dogs, too many people.

Cormorant is getting ready for his fishing trip.

Cormorants can stay under water a whole minute.

A couple of very shy Moorhens settled at this stretch of the river. They are safe behind the high fencing.

After crossing the Inner Ring road, you are greeted with the bird songs. This is a great bird watching opportunity close to the city boundaries.

Dunnock on the other side of the river sings his head off. Generally shy birds, Dunnocks are seldom seen in the open space. You can read some interesting facts about dunnocks in this article.

A great singer, Eurasian blackcap, could be a winter guest from the Central Europe. Irish population of Blackcaps migrate to North Africa in the autumn.

More wrens in the bushy area. They are one of my favorite birds.

The song thrush is speckled with dark heart-shaped spots, and both male and female look similar. The male Song thrush has a loud and clear song.

You can listen to the Blackbird’s song here to compare. The bird in the picture is a female, you can hear a female song in this video, just wait a couple of seconds. These birds are very vocal, and they have a range of warning calls.

The Collared dove and Wood pigeon are common along the river walk.

This is a male Collared dove, and he is singing ( look at his throat).

Female Collared dove.

Napping Wood pigeon.

This is our winter guest Redwing, a Thrush family bird from Iceland. More pictures in my blogpost here.

Greenfinch is also a rare guest.

Goldfinches are abundant around the Cherrymount foot bridge. When they are busy, you can come up quite close.

That is it for today. We continue our walk in two weeks. More bird sighting as you move closer to the source.

https://inesemjphotography.com/2019/04/06/st-johns-river-confluence/

https://inesemjphotography.com/2019/04/20/st-johns-river-sneaking-through-town/

www.inesemjphotography.com Have a wonderful weekend!

Waterford got plenty of snow last winter. Everything looked so neat.

In the beginning, the falling snow melted after touching the ground. After a month, it started to stay longer and longer.

I am pretty sure that this House of Waterford Crystal employee didn’t have ‘shoveling snow’ in his job description.

After a couple of days like that, people started storing bread and milk.

Then the storm came.

The following morning Waterford was all white and desolate.

I walked right in the middle of the former streets.

South Kilkenny on the other side of River Suir also looked quiet.

I walked past the Rice bridge with my bag of bird seed and apples, cleared the snow from the places with the bird tracks, and tossed a good few handfuls on the ground. Two bridges were barely visible through the falling snow.

Back in town, I learned that Centra across the bus station was the only shop that was open. By the size of the queue outside the shop I could tell that people ran out of bread already.

Reginald Tower has seen snow before. At least in 1987.

When I tried to walk through the smaller streets, sometimes I had to turn back – the drifts were higher than my knees. I know it sounds pathetic to the readers from Canada or Norway.

The other half of my apples went to the flock of cute visitors from Iceland – Redwings.

The storm doesn’t calm down, and I am sorry for the little Redwings. On a day like this, it is nice to be inside, cuddled up with an old friend 😉

I didn’t have enough confidence to build a snowman in the street, but after returning home I could not resist anymore and built a tiny snowman on my windowsill. Snow in Ireland is a rare occurrence. You never know if you live to see another snowfall.

My baby cacti plants are obviously excited about the snow and both sprout flowers.

Unfortunately, these are events of the past. White Christmas is still a dream this December.

Today the streets look as normal – no snow, no excitement.

Of course we have decorations, pony rides, carousels and Ferris wheels, like we always have had at this time of the year, but we are so missing those crystals of frozen water!

I guess we have to be happy with what we have.