Sorry that it's been a while since the last Sightings blog, but it's been a tad busy here with all the Conwy Connections work going on! Every day when we look out at the work on Y Maes we see something different and new, and it's been the same out on the reserve - change is definitely in the air.
We've still got some of our winter visitors, with the firecrest continuing to be seen by those with either a little patience or a lot of luck, but numbers of most wintering birds are starting to drift down. Red-breasted merganser numbers peaked at 27 but are now starting to decrease, goldeneye have gone down from 12 to 3 and we've only occasional sightings of jay now, but our pair of stonechat on the Estuary Path are still with us - they seem to particularly like following us around when we've been brushcutting some of the rank grass and bramble on the Estuary Path, no doubt grateful for some of the invertebrates we've uncovered. Other wintering birds seen in the last month include a whooper swan on 23th February, 3 jack snipe on 24th February and we still have plenty of snipe around. On one of our wintering water rail surveys this year, as well as finding far more water rails than we thought were there (we peaked at 18 birds), we also counted more than 50 snipe feeding quietly in bits of the reedbed that you don't normally see - just goes to show how much is hidden away even in tiny reserves such as ours. We've just bought a trail camera and bat detectors for the reserve, which we'll be using on a special summer event called CreatureQuest (keep your eyes peeled for details soon on our Events page) which we hope will help us detect even more of the hidden side of the reserve.
Spring is clearly on its way now though, a relief given that winter this year seemed to start last July! Migrant waders are now passing through, with sightings of up to 3 greenshank, 6 black-tailed godwits, the occasional bar-tailed godwit, up to 8 knot, a handful of dunlin, up to 511 redshank, a spotted redshank on 8th March and a green sandpiper on 15th March. The first frog spawn was spotted a while back, a chiffchaff was singing on 26th February, and a blue tit was seen carrying nesting material into one of our Visitor Centre nestboxes last week. It may not seem like it, with a big dump of snow on the Carneddau hills this morning, but the birds know that we've nearly made it through the winter for another year. And there's nothing to lift the spirits more of a morning than the tumbling lapwings displaying over the islands on our lagoons.
Photo: Green sandpiper