Since the reserve was created in the early 1990s, RSPB staff, volunteers and visitors have kept records of the wildlife seen here. Over the last couple of years, volunteer Ruth Morgan has been helping us get these in order, and with assistance from our more techy colleagues, we have brought together the various spreadsheets, maps, surveys (and bits of notebook) into the RSPB's super database, known as Merlin.
Ruth has added thousands of records to Merlin, including some of the records that visitors provide in the sightings diary. We don't include everything, of course, but your records of all species are valuable to us, especially for the scarcer species if you tell us exactly where they are - and who you are. We're also really grateful to the experts who come and take a close look at everything from spiders to flies, stoneworts to micro-moths, as these are records that we often don't otherwise capture.
Merlin enables us to produce easily checklists of various species groups, and we're making these available to visitors on our website. These give you an idea what to expect if you visit Conwy, but it also helps you know if you've seen something unusual, which we'd like to know about too.
Here are the species groups for which we've produced checklists so far:
Birds - updated to December 2017
Flowers - updated to December 2016
Moths - updated to December 2016
Butterflies - updated to December 2016
Dragonflies - updated to December 2016
Spiders - updated to July 2017
Julian HughesSite Manager, Conwy