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…
Tag: Wales
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,…
Eleven Severn Goosanders
July 31, 2016 The River Severn is low and slow-paced, sliding between gravel braids and petty sand banks. Beef cattle and sheep graze the wide water meadows, mallards Anas platyrhynchos shelter in deep oxbows. The weather is kind with a gentle breeze of warm air under slate grey, rainless clouds that drift above the distant hills. Field ornithologist, Tony Cross soon shatters…
Mid Wales Midwinter
Aberystwyth is dark under a deep depression and saturated from the incessant rain. On the seafront, the high-roofed Old College squares up to the sea, foaming waves beat the high sea wall that protects this alarming Gothic pile. Safe on the landward side, we look in vain for a wintering black redstart that often sits high on a gargoyle and repeats its wheezy,…
Hinterland
The weather is uniform grey again in West Wales and the coast desolate and uninviting. This stretch of coast south of Aberystwyth was where the sad-eyed detective from the television series ‘Hinterland’ had his isolated mobile home. Beneath the long grass slope, the lively, lime green shoe-box looks out of place in front of the…
Ringing Breeding Birds in Wales
Friday evening near Llyn Brenig in the Sitka spruce forests of North Wales. The warm, humid air that brought storms has been replaced by a chill northwesterly and clearing skies. In the clear-felled forest, the nightjars ‘churr’ at dusk and we try to lure a male to a large mist net with a recording of the…