…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…
Category: Welsh Wildlife
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…
Shropshire hills, mires and mosses
The rolling landscape around Churchstoke on the border between Shropshire and Powys is a mix of green fields and woodlands except for some steep-sided landmarks like Roundton and Corndon Hills where acid grassland, bracken and gorse remain. Most of the valleys are drained and improved with monocultures of rye grass and arable crops but a…
Curlew country
A weekend in the spring sunshine and a cold east wind helping my old friend Tony Cross colour-ring curlew and dippers in Wales and Welsh Marches. Male curlews are highly territorial so they respond to a playback of their effervescent bubbling call alongside a stuffed curlew (inappropriately called ‘stuffy’) placed by a net and we…
Cors Fochno
Cord Fochno, is a raised mire; a great lens of peat next to the Dyfi estuary a few miles to the north of Aberystwyth. At its heart, there is no solid ground, just layers of compressed Sphagnum mosses laid down on a freshwater wetland since the end of the last Ice Age. In the past,…
Llyn Brenig and Llyn Bugeilyn
7th and 8th July 2018 On the way to the Elenydd mountains to check a merlin’s nest on the edge of a forest of Sitka spruce that has sadly failed, we stop at a small village hall to try to catch breeding swifts. There are perhaps 10-15 pairs and they come and go flying in…
Elenydd Meadows and Woodlands
10th June 2018 From the roadside, the hay meadows at Hirnant Farm (Caeau Hirnant) on the winding road along Craig Goch Reservoir are a rare picture of summer colour; yellow with rough hawkbit, bird’s foot trefoil, yellow rattle and buttercup, white with pignut and eyebright and dashed purple with red clover and marsh orchids. The…
Elenydd
21st – 23rd April The Elenydd mountains are an empty landscape of soft grassland plateaus cut by deep, bracken-clad valleys; the myriad small streams feed the Cothi, Elan, Teifi, Tywi and Ystwyth rivers. The highest plateaus are capped with blanket bog and mires full of sedge, cotton grass and Sphagnum fill the shallow depressions. These uplands are…