Whiteford Lighthouse in the Burry Estuary

Whiteford Burrows/Sands and the area around the estuary in Llanrhidian and Llanmadoc is an absolute haven for wildlife and birds. I noticed late one afternoon in January 2005 that I was surrounded by thousands of birds. Their calls were deafening and I watched them soar and dive in the last rays of the Winter sun. Fantastic. How many more then, must there be in Summer? There is a great diversity too, as the National Nature Reserve constitutes mature woodlands, marshes and wetlands.

As you would expect, since Gower is an AONB and owned partly by the National Trust and the Glamorgan Wildlife Trust, it is generally a sanctuary for wildlife.

Visitors to my holiday home left a note in the visitors book to say that it is "a walkers' and birdwatchers' paradise". Since then, I have become more aware of the number of birdwatchers that come to Gower. (Especially when one of my relatives looked out of my window one morning and saw two young men staring up at the tree in our garden with binoculars.
"We're not looking in your bedroom window, honest. It's just, you've got a rare bird in your tree!")
Over the subsequent weeks, we found many binocular clad visitors walking up and down for hours to see this bird that had been reported as an infrequent visitor to Gower.