The grass is brown and desiccated, the leaves on some of the trees curl and fall to the floor, and the media is drawing parallels with the summer of 1976.  This is the heatwave of 2018. My memory of 1976 (I was five years old) was the huge number of ladybirds* - I remember having to pick my way carefully along the path to the school gate to avoid treading on them - but I'm not sure a generation younger than me would…

Over the last couple of years, an exciting project called 'Wild About Nature' has been underway at Conwy nature reserve. Our volunteers have been finding new ways to engage with visitors and we have produced new materials that you can see around the nature reserve. It's all focused on enabling more of our visitors to connect with nature, and we are really grateful to Heritage Lottery Fund Wales for their help…

We're less than two weeks away from midsummer and the reserve is full of life. Plants blooming, bees, flies and wasps are pollinating, dragonflies and butterflies are emerging, and birds are busy feeding youngsters.

On the lagoons, coots, moorhens, mallards and gadwalls have chicks, and there is still at least one clutch of oystercatcher eggs that are yet to hatch. A common sandpiper is hanging around the deep…

Little grebe with chicks

With the breeding season now well under way, the presence of young birds is highly evident around the reserve.

The lagoons are a great place to look out for birds with their young, with at least five broods of coot, three broods of little grebe and a brood of moorhens which have been easily visible from the coffee shop in recent days. Mallards with ducklings are very numerous around both lagoons…

With all our regular summer visitors already back well before the end of April, the past two weeks has seen an interesting mix of other passage migrants dropping into the reserve.

A drake gargany on 2/5 was perhaps the main highlight, present on the shallow lagoon from late afternoon into the evening, but unfortunately wasn't located again the following morning (photo of a previous bird by Jon Ward). An osprey

There's no doubt about the star bird of the last week. This smart male ring-necked duck was found by regular visitor Marc Hughes early on Sunday morning, and many local birders were keen to see it. Originating in North America, it's only the sixth ever recorded in North Wales, and it's the first seen at Conwy.* It arrived, and presumably went, with a gaggle of five pochards, which may prove to be the last…

Last week, you may have read or heard about the latest monitoring results from the UK Butterfly Monitoring Scheme. It wasn't good news. Although 2017 was better than 2016, it proved to be the seventh worst year for butterflies since the survey started in 1976. You can read all about the results on the Butterfly Conservation website.

That 2017 was a better year was illustrated by our own results at Conwy, but we…

It is Spring, isn't it? Yesterday I thought it was, walking around the reserve in a t-shirt, a couple of commas being the first butterflies of the year here. Today, I'm not so sure...

Summer migrants have slowly started to arrive this week, with more chiffchaffs and sand martins around, plus our first swallows (Tuesday 3rd), blackcap, white wagtail, willow warbler and common sandpiper (Wednesday 5th). Perhaps…

Usually by the end of March, good numbers of the early summer migrants have arrived. But March 2018 has been untypical, both for the prolonged cold weather dominated by easterly winds, and for a huge low pressure system over Iberia that effectively closed the door on northbound birds in the middle of the month.

Our first chiffchaff, on 11th March, was actually a bit earlier than the average, but with only a few days…

So, there was Winter, just sauntering along with its usual mix of wind, rain, and then more rain, and just as the days started to lengthen, snowfall, frosts and freezing winds scattered birds across Europe and deposited them in unexpected places. Many visitors and social media followers reported redwings and fieldfares in their gardens, and we had a good number on the reserve last weekend, the latter very unusual here…

The signs of Spring are here if you look for them - catkins on the alder trees and the daffodils starting to push up in the clawdd wall by the Visitor Centre - but we are still in the grip of wet and windy weather. There are plenty of birds to enjoy on the reserve, with lapwings and wigeons especially plentiful, both species taking advantage of the islands that were cut last month. We have raised the water level in the…

Next week, from 7-9 February, we will have a digger on the nature reserve, using a flail to cut back some of the scrub. This blog explains what we’re doing, and why.

Nature reserves should be amazing places for nature. But they don’t just ‘happen’.

We use our ecological knowledge and experience to manage the habitats for the species typical of that site, or for the very specific needs of plants…

The new year has so far produced a nice variety of bird sightings for the reserve with some surprises thrown in among the more regular suspects.

A small number of brent geese have been wintering around the mouth of the Conwy estuary recently, some of which have evidently made their way a little further up river producing sightings from the reserve with eight seen flying over on 10/1, and a single bird over on 12/1…

Every day that I'm at Conwy, I typically start with some birdwatching. I 'open up' the reserve, unlocking the hides and checking the trails, and perhaps doing jobs as switching on the water pump or checking some of our mammal monitoring stations. And, of course, I note the birds that are around, so that we have some information for visitors arriving at the Visitor Centre when we open at 9.30am.

This first…

The star attraction over the past couple of weeks was undoubtedly a hen harrier which made daily appearances between Monday 11th and Saturday 16th December (photo by Bob Garrett). The 'ringtail' bird, a name given to female and juvenile hen harriers because of the barred appearance on the tail was thought to be a first year, and delighted visitors with its graceful hunting displays over the lagoons in close proximity…

The water rails have been the stars of Conwy in recent weeks, with up to four on show at any one time, and the total number on the reserve must be in double-figures. In Welsh, these are rhegen y dŵr, literally 'runner on the water', an appropriate title for a bird that you often only see legging it across a gap in the reeds.

But they've been feeding in the open here, and photographers have been getting some…

With the winter season under way, we're well into our habitat management program which involves cutting back reed, bramble and willow scrub, and other long vegetation from various areas around the reserve. We carry out this work to maintain a variety of habitats to benefit a diverse range of wildlife, keeping areas open and preventing the natural succession to scrub and eventually trees which would otherwise occur. The…

Today was just one of those mornings when the nature reserve was alive with birds. The bushes and trees were hooching with thrushes, primarily redwings and blackbirds, fresh in from Scandinavia. There are plenty of hawthorn and rowan berries, and lots of rosehips, bright red in the sunshine, that will feed them for the next few days. Then I came across a flock of blue, great and long-tailed tits, with robins and wr…

The reserve had a taste of the Arctic this morning, with a whooper swan arriving (and then departing mid-morning) with a group of seven mute swans, and two scaup - a first-winter male and a female. The latter 'pair' of ducks arrived overnight, there having been a lookalike scaup here for several weeks, which is actually a female tufted duck with a broad white 'blaize' around the bill - an identification trap…

Thousands of children will get closer to Conwy’s wildlife thanks to the reserve’s new wetland exploration area

The Mayor and Mayoress of Conwy, Cllr Bill Chapman and Mrs Pat Chapman, joined children from a new Llandudno Junction school on 28 September to open an exciting new wetland exploration area at the reserve yesterday.

Pupils from Ysgol Awel y Mynydd primary school were the first to enjoy a pond…

If you were visiting Conwy on Saturday afternoon and wondered why some of us were peering intensely at the undersides of leaves, the answer is... Rust Fungi!

Expert mycologist Debbie Evans ran a workshop here to share her passion for what are probably the most overlooked organisms on the reserve, or in the countryside, yet I bet we've all seen them. Rust fungi are pathogenic fungi, and around 250 different species have…

Star bird this week was a grey phalarope, initially seen on the estuary during strong winds on Thursday, and subsequently relocated later that afternoon on the Deep Lagoon by Marc Hughes, who took this excellent photo. It fed busily throughout Friday enabling lots of people were able to see this little Arctic wader, many for the first time, as it swam in circles (known as 'spinning'), plucking tiny insects off the surface…

A quick update from us this week, to mention the highlights from the reserve:

• Big daily movement of house martins, with a smaller number of sand martins and swallows. Swifts has been seen almost daily, up to at least Sunday 10th, which is quite late for Conwy; they've usually left the area by the end of August
  
  
• Numbers of warblers are dwindling, with plenty of chiffchaffs still here but other species becoming…

Cast your mind back to early August's long summer evenings. We held two Big Wild Sleepout events, enabling families to camp at the nature reserve, see bats and moths up close, go on an early morning bird walk and, with the help of local astronomers, see the stars. One of our young volunteers, Amelia, made a short film about the event and has just sent it to us. She even composed the music!

Thanks Amelia, a nice…

Late August is a time of change; the school holidays are coming to an end, thoughts are turning to buying new kit for school, or returning to work. And if I see one more Facebook post telling me how many Fridays are left until Christmas...

But there's still plenty of nature-watching to be done. Indeed, late August/early September is one of my favourite times of the year, as you could see almost anything here.