Birds of Conwy - download your checklist

Birders love lists. Well, most do.

Personally, I keep three: one of all the birds I've ever seen anywhere in the world (though I'm a bit rubbish at keeping that one up-to-date); a list of birds that I've seen in Britain (that doesn't increase very often these days), and a list of the birds I've seen at Conwy nature reserve during the year.

This last one is the most 'active', because I can update it using a free app on my smartphone. I make a list each morning using BirdTrack, a website used by thousands of birdwatchers across Britain and Ireland. It's run by the British Trust for Ornithology on behalf of a partnership of organisations including The RSPB and the Welsh Ornithological Society. BirdTrack looks after my lists, which I can analyse to look at trends and changes if I want, but the data is also available to the partners and the county bird recorders. On its own, my bird records are probably only of interest to me, but if you put all my sightings in a big melting pot with millions of other records each year, they can provide valuable information about how numbers or seasonal patterns are changing.

Recording these sightings on my 'phone means that I can quickly update the sightings board in the Visitor Centre when I arrive each morning, and the most interesting are automatically uploaded to this page on our website, along with anyone else who uploads records from Conwy to BirdTrack (the same facility is available on web pages for our other popular nature reserves).

We also gather the nature records from the sightings log in the Visitor Centre and Ruth, one of our brilliant volunteers, puts them on our Merlin database, along with the results from all the surveys we do each year. She has entered thousands of records this year, so a big thanks to her, and to everyone who reports birds via the log.

From this database, we have updated the checklist of birds recorded at Conwy, which you can download below as a pdf. Three species new to the reserve in 2017 have been added, all found by local birder Marc Hughes: Caspian gull in May (photograph above), and hawfinch and great northern diver in November (a black kite was reported in April, which would also have been a new addition but the identification was not accepted by the Welsh Records Panel).

Several other species made a reappearance at Conwy in 2017 after a long absence: glaucous gull (last in 2006), mandarin (2009), hen harrier (2011), marsh harrier (2011), grey phalarope (2011) and Iceland gull (2012).

We have also updated the list in line with the International Ornithological Congress, which changes the order of the listing and some of the scientific names; that change has also resulted in the removal of bean goose from the list, as this has now been 'split' into tundra and taiga bean geese, but the form wasn't ascertained at the time, so we've moved it to the bottom of the list where it resides with a few other queried records.

What will 2018 bring? That's the fun of resetting the list to zero on New Year's Day, and seeing what the weather and the magic of migration will bring us. Get out there and help us by contributing your records to BirdTrack or writing them in the Visitor Centre sightings book.