Oxford Island nature reserve: the walks and the Kinnego Marina

Some days ago I talked about the first part of our visit to Oxford Island nature reserve: let’s resume from that moment, at the start of the walks inside the reserve, where you can meet people just wanting to have a walk in the middle of nature as well as birdwatching passionated 🙂

The first walk we went through is the Woodland Wander, the one which takes us immediatly in the middle of a wood:

After few steps on this walk we meet the first cabin, the Croaghan Hide, from which we can watch the birds living in this zone: cormorants, terns and goldeneye.

Little surprise: a bird made its nest inside the hide, between the ceiling’s lintels!

We continue our path in the woods:

…and obviously after a while we take a path which isn’t on the map, getting lost in the trees: this is Ireland you imagine from legends and stories.

It seems so much the magic Ireland that we start to joke saying we ended on a Fairy path, then we see an abandoned pile of wood and we get scared for real 😛

Our wandering without a destination in the woods took us exactly at the beginning of another walk: it’s the Old Shoreline Walk, the one which seems the longest of the nature reserve. Here, also since of the nice bench in the middle of the quiet and silent wood, we decide to have our lunch.

Refreshed, we walk still a bit to arrive to the next cabin: Kinnego Hide is the best hide of the reserve and it protect us from the rain which in the while started to fall.

The inside is truly marvellous!

As it stops raining we start to move again: we still have to walk all the Kinnego Meadow Trail to reach the Marina.

Unluckily it starts to rain hard and we can’t reach the Waterside Hide, but as we arrive to Kinnego Marina the weather is back to sunny.

We visit the last walk, the Kinnego Pond Trail: a little artificial pond in which different aquatic insects and ducks live.

With this it ends our visit to Oxford Island nature reserve…at least for this time! 😉