The undoubted highlight of the week was a great white egret, found on the estuary by Dave O'Hara, a visiting RSPB staff member, on 14 October. It started out near the reserve entrance gate, but flew upstream along the River Conwy to past Glan Conwy, so views became a little distant. Very helpfully though, it was standing near (or maybe dwarfing would be a more accurate description!) a little egret, so it made it very easy to pick out. It was only with us for a day, and may well have been the same bird that turned up at Ynys-Hir shortly afterwards.
Although the run of less common waders seems to be tailing off a little now, a jack snipe on 15 and 16 October showed well, bobbing away in an island of cut reeds. We also saw the occasional knot, 2 golden plover on 2 and 3 October, a spotted redshank earlier in the month, up to 3 greenshank, and a curlew sandpiper on 11 and 13 October. The RSPB is running a competition amongst staff on its reserves called the "Love Passage Waders Challenge", to see which reserve can attract the biggest variety of waders on its managed pools over the course of a year, and so far (admittedly after only a month) we're currently ranked third in the country. Not bad for a tiny reserve!
Jack snipe photo by Tony Lovett
Other highlights recently have been hundreds of blackbirds, redwings and meadow pipits passing through each morning, 2 chough flying over, 9 whooper swans on 9 October and a build up of winter wildfowl (teal numbers were 295 and wigeon at 140 at the last count). Water rails have been showing well, particularly on the Bridge Pond, where I watched one hunting for tiny fish yesterday, upturning like a dabbling duck to catch them before taking them to the bank to swallow them.
We were hoping to start the pumping on of salt water onto the Shallow Lagoon to eliminate the dreaded Crassula next week, but unfortunately, right at the last minute, the outside funding that we'd been promised was withdrawn. Obviously this was extremely disappointing, given the amount of planning and effort that has gone into working towards this solution, and the timings meant that unfortunately we were unable to look for other funding sources in time. This means that we have lost our chance for a few months, as we won't get the high tides that we need again for a while, but we're still hoping that in the long term we can find a positive outcome with the funding body to allow us to do the work in March next year, or, if not, we'll look to alternative sources of funding.
We'd been keeping the water on the Shallow Lagoon deliberately low (although there's not really been much water to pump anyway over the last couple of months!) for the works. Now that the work has been cancelled we can start pumping water on, but we'll have to wait until the Ganol starts running again as it's still running too low for the pump. So, everybody start doing your very best rain dances please!
If you are looking for the great white egret then I think we've got it. Well we have got two great white egrets, , visible toward dusk as they join the little egret roost at the new reserve at Burton mere the Wirral, part of the Dee estuary reserve area. They have also been seen at Parkgate. So why not pop over the border onto the English side of the river and visit us.