Tiny chicks and tiny eels

It's been a week of hatchings at the reserve, with our great crested grebes hatching two tiny, stripy chicks from their nest near the Coffee Shop on Monday, swiftly followed by three mute swan cygnets - keep a look out for them on the Shallow Lagoon if you're here this week.  The first moorhen broods are also on the water. Our waterbirds are a bit behind the songbirds, some of which have already fledged; there are young song thrushes and blackbirds out on the grassland, and judging by the busy parents, there are plenty of other chicks in nests: chiffchaffs, wrens, long-tailed tits and whitethroats to name a few.  Our house sparrow chicks, stars of cctv in the Visitor Centre, are on the point of fledging, and will be out of the nest within a few days, if not hours.  The biggest surprise was what we believe to be a new breeding species for the reserve on Tuesday: a female pheasant with a brood of tiny chicks.

Spring migration is coming to an end, but there are still lots of swifts and house martins, which are presumably not all local breeders and still have their journey to complete. The cloudy and wet weather this week has kept these aerial feeders low to the ground, swooping low over the lagoons to catch midges emerging from the water.  It hasn't been a great Spring for wader migration, but there are still a few whimbrels heading north each day, a greenshank that has been here since 14th and a bar-tailed godwit was seen on Friday (22nd). They really ought to be pushing onward!  A female wigeon has also adopted Conwy as its home, having been here for several weeks; but it's not unusual for ducks to summer in places south of their breeding grounds.

A golden plover in summer plumage on Thursday (21st) was also a late visitor, while other unusual sightings include an osprey on Thursday (21st) and four sanderlings on Friday (15th).  A few linnets are hanging around on the saltmarsh, though we have also had reports of lesser redpoll this week, unusual in the summer.  Through the middle ten days of May, most recently on Friday, Sandwich terns were seen almost daily in the estuary, occasionally flying over the lagoons. We see small numbers each year, usually sheltering from strong winds, but to have up to half a dozen every day is unusual - Joe Chester did a great job of getting a photo of one.

In between the showers, the sunshine has brought out the butterflies, with small numbers of orange tips and holly blues, while our weekly bumblebee monitoring recorded buff-tailed, white-tailed, red-tailed and common carder bee on Monday (18th).  Late on Tuesday night, we watched the tide come in, shining torches into the water to look for eels.  Eels are a species in trouble, with declines estimated at 80% in the last 60 years and numbers of juveniles returning to Britain at just 5% of the numbers in the 1970s.  We saw various types of fish, including a small number of glass eels, each less than 10cm long.  As we watched them, we marveled at their amazing lifecycle, which brings these tiny juveniles across the Atlantic to grow and spawn in Wales. Read about their amazing journey here.