Wednesday, 25 May is World Otter Day – a day to celebrate these otterly amazing…

Newquay’s native visitors
You’ll find a huge variety of different animals from around the world here at Newquay, but you might be surprised by the amount of visits we get from native species. Here are just a few of the birds we’ve spotted on site here this spring!

Great spotted woodpecker
Woodpeckers are known for their distinctive drumming and unpaired males can drum up to 600 times a day. They have shock-absorbent tissue between the base of their bill and their skull to cushion the impact of drumming.

Chiffchaff
Chiffchaffs are small olive-brown coloured warblers that weigh less than a £1 coin and flit through trees and shrubs with a distinctive tail wag.

Blackcap (male)
Blackcaps have a beautiful fluting song that has earned it the nickname of the ‘northern nightingale’.

Duck
Ducks have highly waterproof feathers, which are so waterproof that the downy under-layer of feathers right next to their skin remain completely dry even when they dive underwater.

Blackcap (female)
While male blackcaps live up to their name, females have a chestnut cap. Blackcaps are usually summer visitors from Germany and north-east Europe, but they have increasingly been found over winter in warmer parts of the UK like Cornwall.

Blue tit
Blue tits are beautiful little birds, and it is thought that their feathers get even brighter as they get older with each subsequent moult.

Blackbird (female)
Confusingly, female blackbirds aren’t black at all! While the males are all black with bright orangey-yellow beaks and eye rings, females are brown and often have lighter spots and stripes.

Goldcrest
The goldcrest is the UK’s smallest bird and they have thin beaks that are ideally suited to pick insects out from between pine needles.