Dermot Breen's Blog: February 2020

Friday, 28 February 2020

Falkland Island, 24th December 2019

Second post covering the Falkland Islands. We spent the rest of the day visiting sites near Stanley the capital of the Falklands. I was struck at how similar a lot of the landscape was to west Galway and north Mayo. There are large areas of windswept treeless blanket bog on the island. Similar to Ireland most of these are damaged due to historical peat extraction, drainage and by over-grazing by the dreaded curse of the sheep.

There were still plenty of signs from the 1982 war. Some areas are still out of bounds thanks to the Argies who invaded the islands and indiscriminately laid land mines across the islands before being rightly kicked off the islands.

It was the height of the austral summer here and most birds seemed to have chicks in tow. It took a little a bit of looking but we managed to find a few Ruddy-headed Geese which are now rather difficult to find in Patagonian (we didn't see any after the Falklands). The Falklands have amazingly few native passerines with only eleven regular species being found there. We did well to see 40 species during the entire day which isn't half bad for the island. After the Falklands we were