We love mud!

Firstly, a few words about our water. Every year, during the summer, the water in the lagoons drops as a result of evaporation (the sun and the wind) and transpiration (the reeds that grow in the water).  Each day (without rain) through the summer, the water level drops by 1cm. This is replaced only by rainfall, and to provide some context, in the last 90 days, 16cm of rain has fallen, so that's a net reduction of about 74cm.  This is actually what we want: it exposes mud in which birds such as black-tailed godwits, redshanks and dunlins can find food.  From the Coffee Shop, it looks like the water is really low (it is!), but if you walk farther along the lagoon and view it from the boardwalk or the Tal-y-fan Hide, it looks perfect.

The last 10 days have seen a good range of waders feeding on our mud: spotted redshank (Tuesday to Friday 11th), green sandpiper (daily to Thursday 10th), two knots and up to 26 black-tailed godwits (Thursday 10th), golden plover (Thursday 10th and Friday 11th), greenshank and 40 dunlins (Friday 11th), and common sandpiper (Saturday 12th). Bird of the week, however, was a Temminck's stint, found late on Monday 7th and still here on Tuesday 8th, but as soon as the morning mist had lifted, so it did too, flying strongly upriver with a dunlin.  Temminck's stint is a rare bird in Wales (just one or two each year), and is tiny. On Monday evening, it was feeding with pied wagtails, and is about the same size!

Local birder Henry Cook received news this week of a colour-ringed black-tailed godwit seen on the reserve last month. It was ringed as a chick in southern Iceland on 19 June, was spotted on a golf course in western Scotland on 9 August, and three days later was here, where it stayed for several days. It just shows how vitally important every staging post is on the long journey that birds make every spring and autumn.

During the winter, the lagoon will refill with rainfall, and we can top this up by pumping water from the Afon Ganol, the small river at the south end of the reserve. But until we have a period of consistent rain, there isn't enough water in the Afon Ganol to move into the lagoons.  The water that we do have is good for ducks that are starting to return here after the breeding season: pochard, shoveler and wigeon all seen this week.  When we start pumping later in the autumn, we will also fill up the Bridge Pond, but we took advantage of the low levels this week to remove some (but not all) of the reed growth.

Other bird highlights this week include kingfisher and stonechat (almost daily), white wagtail and siskin (Tuesday 8th). Many of our summer warblers have already left for Africa, but a garden warbler on 2nd, reed warbler and lesser whitethroat this morning shows that you can still see the occasional late migrant through September.  There are dozens of chiffchaffs and blackcaps still around too.

The fine weather this week brought out the insects, which lots of butterflies still flying, including many speckled woods and common blues, grayling (on Saturday 5th, rare here) and brimstone (on Tuesday 8th).  It's been a good week for dragon-spotters too, with our first migrant hawker of the year (on Tuesday 8th), southern hawkers and common darters.

The low water levels and fine weather has given us a chance to spray the New Zealand pygmyweed (the bright green plant around the water's edge). It's an invasive non-native plant that, if we don't tackle it, will spread across the lagoons, smothering and deoxygenating the mud. We try to avoid using chemical sprays on the reserve, but this is currently the only way to keep the pygmyweed in check.