I've seen stoats at Vyrnwy before, and I'm never sure whether to be pleased or not. They are noted as a predator of ground-nesting birds, and the warblers and pipits have had a slow enough spring as it is. But Sunday morning's sighting was a bit special, from any point of view.
Two of us were gossiping by the car park gate when something small, brown and fast-moving, stoatally impossible to mistake for anything else, came out of the grass opposite, near the tulip tree above the generator house. A bloke on a bike nearly ran it over, apparently without seeing it, and it turned right and started running along the narrow pavement beside the dam roadway. We watched it sprinting along, jinking across to the other side a couple of times and almost going under the wheels of a red Transit van. Then it seemed to realise things weren't right, and it turned and set off back towards us. Someone in a car coming over saw it and slowed down, so it made it successfully all the way back and veered over to the lake railings, opposite the loos. It stood for a couple of seconds looking back at us - meaningfully, I thought. Then it went down into the grass by the water. I went over to have a look, and met it coming back. It had turned back towards its original starting point, but run up against the masonry of the dam itself. Giving me another glare, it sprinted under a rhododendron and vanished from view.
That took a bit of matching for a Sunday morning sighting - not quite up to the otter a couple of months ago, but not bad. But the wood warbler down by the metal footbridge was in especially good form, trembling head to foot with the effort of its song, and piu-piu-piu'ing as beautifully as any nightingale.
Graham