Great white egret?

One thing I've learnt whilst writing this blog is never to go out and look for something - as you will almost certainly never see it, but there maybe something else to see.

For example, whilst looking for water voles I've seen foxes and whilst looking for foxes I've seen otters and on Sunday I went looking for hares and didn't see any - instead there was something even more interesting and quite unusual.

Flying overhead from the North East in a South Western direction was a very large white bird:

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First impressions were it could be a stork or a crane. But having studied the photographs, it has the bent neck, normally associated with herons:

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Such a bird is not listed in my reference guides, so it took the internet to resolve the identification and the most likely contender is a great white egret (a type of heron).

An unusual bird to see in the UK, the going birding site for Oxfordshire describes it as 'Very Rare' http://www.goingbirding.co.uk/oxon/species.asp 

Great white egrets can reside in the UK over winter, but they are also migratory, so as this one was heading in a southerly direction, it could be migrating to Africa and may not have touched ground in the county.

As always, corrections are welcome.

Views of the Atlantic

Situated on the Cornish coast, Porthleven is a small habour town, it was once home to lots of small fishing boats.  But due to the decline in fishing stocks and the emergence of large fishing boats the fishing fleet is now massively reduced.
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So Porthleven, like a lot of Cornwall, is now reduced to accommodating tourists and holidaymakers like ourselves.
The local fishing industry is not the only victim of the reduction in fish stocks - the herring gull is now more likely to be found inland than on the coast. Those that have stayed make a living by stealing and hassling tourists, such as this one perched outside our cottage:
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Other sea birds to suffer are cormorants and shags, with the former also moving inland and now considered by some to be a pest due to the amount of fish they eating at private fishing lakes.
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A more optimistic sight is the pod of four dolphins which swam past the cottage (a converted net loft on a cliff) every morning.
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They would then swim to the habour entrance, as if they were entertaining the tourists, before swimming on elsewhere.
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It was only when reviewing the photographers that we noticed, one of the Dolphins was a youngster 
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