It is 10 years since the first Mid Wales Midwinter post and I’m back spending a few days before Christmas with my old friend Tony Cross. The rural landscapes of rolling mountains, small green fields, steep bracken-clad valleys and cliff-lined coastline are as beautiful as ever. Of course, the day we take the mountain road…
Category: Welsh Wildlife
Ffridd
The unenclosed hill slopes or ffridd are a mosaic of bracken, scrub, heather, grass and wet flushes that lie between the pasture fields and the mountain plateaus. Around the Elenydd mountains in mid-Wales, ffridd is rich with small birds including redstarts, yellowhammers, tree pipits, whinchats and stonechats. Redpolls, siskins and mistle thrushes are common in…
Cwm Doethie’s Merlins
Right at the heart of the Cambrian Mountains in mid-Wales, the Doethie valley runs north off the Pysgotwr which in turn runs down into the Tywi by the Dinas nature reserve; it is a rare valley in that there is no road or driveable track just a path used by walkers and mountain bikers between…
Rhandirmwyn
The small village of Rhandirmwyn sits within the upper Tywi valley on the northern edge of Carmarthenshire in mid-Wales. Red kites held out around here in perilously small numbers through the 19th and early 20th centuries until they gradually reclaimed much of Wales through coordinated protection and monitoring by local watchers and the goodwill of…
A Tale of Two Tresses
Cors Fochno or Borth Bog on the western edge of mid-Wales, holds a recently discovered population of Irish Lady’s Tresses Spiranthes romanzoffiana; it is a pretty orchid with small white flowers in three spiral rows. Spiranthes romanzoffiana occurs in sites with wet, acidic peaty soils, in western Britain and Ireland but also much more commonly…
Mid Wales Raptors
The Clywedog reservoir in Mid Wales supports breeding ospreys; on a recent trip with Tony Cross to ring the two young it was a chance to snap the anxious parents and ruffled young. Over the weekend we also ringed a brood of kestrels in Cwmystwyth, sparrowhawks on the edge of Borth Bog and an albino…
A Curlew in a Cage…
…does not put all Heaven in a Rage, in fact quite the opposite; it is 10 minutes to settle the captured bird after it has been colour-ringed and a GPS tag put on; a small but important part of the ongoing conservation work for this rapidly declining breeding species . It is late April and…
Cae Hir Gardens
The gardens at Cae Hir run up a hillside in a quiet corner of deepest mid-Wales; they are a revelation of quiet colours and varied forms with long views under a remarkable diversity of trees and through gaps in hedges and borders; and their establishment is a fascinating story of singular endeavour and creativity.
Llangrannog, West Wales
The walk from Llangrannog to Cwmtydu runs along a wild coast filled with flowering heather, peregrines and choughs. The only blot on the landscape is an incongruous dry ski slope at the Gwersyll Yr Urdd but this is filled with children enjoying the rush. The elegant peninsula of Ynys Lochtyn runs out into the grey…
Nightjars and a little night music
Throughout the clear-felled forests of Wales, nightjars are regularly dispersed; monitoring of the breeding population has demonstrated that their numbers appear to be steadily increasing, probably due to the changing climate. Whilst this summer has been, in large part, a cold and wet exception, the warming world provides better feeding conditions as the nightjars hunt…
Pembrokeshire coast
The coastal grasslands and scrub and especially the earth banks that form the field boundaries are flower rich with a purple pink palette of thrift, thyme, English stonecrop kidney vetch and lesser centuary amongst the bracken, gorse and bell heather. The unimproved pastures are grazed by sheep and the better grasslands hold dairy cattle. A…
The Welsh Marches
A unique patchwork of fields rolls over the valleys around Church Stoke. The farms are mixed; winter wheat, rye grass silage fields, and pastures grazed by sheep, and dairy and beef cattle, but the overriding impression is of fields of green. The intensive agriculture means the fields no longer hold many curlews and lapwings but…