Last night Molly and I went out to dinner at a nearby restaurant, and given our obvious American accents, some locals struck up conversations with us. While the Ring of Kerry which are not to far distant get plenty of folks from the USA, the Skellig Ring while only a side jaunt off its more famous cousin don’t see as many folks from across the big pond. Better yet, tourist season is over which means everyone is much more relaxed (locals and guests alike). We drive into parking lots next to beaches and are often the first to arrive on any given morning for our daily hikes. Even when we leave some time later there are normally only a couple of cars.

Everyone says the weather is amazingly good … sunny and mid 50’s (lots of wind). Molly and I tell people that we don’t mind after all the fog, rain and clouds at home in early September. As I noted earlier, this is not a birding trip, but if the birds keep on pking into the middle of my scenic hikes, what is a birder supposed to do?! I have captured 11 “lifers” in the past three days. Amazing.

Yesterday ended with a trip to the Valentia Island Lighthouse. This is the third lighthouse Molly and I have visited since we served as keepers at Crisp Point in early August. This light house has cannon and is still a working aide to navigation!

Our prior hike was a Ballinskelligs Beach. This beach stretches for about 3/4 of mile between the ruins of Ballinskelligs Castle and Abbey. In the dumb luck category we arrived around 9 am just as tide was starting to go our in earnest, which always means shorebirds during migration, and I saw hundreds and and hundreds of our feathered friends which were busy grabbing breakfast on the newly appearing beach from the receding tide. It was pretty neat to hike between the castle and abbey ruins while finding lots of birds.

The find of the morning from a birding standpoint was a flock of 75+ Eurasian Oystercatchers.

However, the Mew Gulls and Sandwich Terns were very much in evidence

Finally, there were a huge number of Ringed Plovers, which to me look like Semipalmated Plovers, but some ornithologist must think they are different bird species!

The end of my hike included the highlight was meeting and watching a gentleman get take his hydrofoil surfboard kite for an amazing ride (I am giving him a ton of photos!)