This morning, with the help of Paul Culyer (NRW) we started the annual breeding seabird census along the Castlemartin peninsula, spending a few hours counting auks etc in the Elegug Stacks area and later at Stackpole Head. Guillemot numbers are looking pretty good and the colony on the top of the stack is is very dense in places. Counting these from photos will be slow but interesting as usual! Until we manage to do some additional counts from the sea, it is still too early to estimate the size of population. Gull numbers seem down again though, as do fulmar numbers.
A guillemot with yellow/orange bill and feet, noted by Chris Taylor a short while ago, is still present on the edge of one of the count zones on the north side of the main stack.
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| Yet another example of the impacts of fishing litter in the marine environment! |
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| Not much space between the birds in this small part of the colony |
A red kite flew along the coast from the east and circled round a few times over the auk colony, hoping for the chance of an easy meal perhaps before it headed off back east again.
Yesterday there were three sanderlings in transition to breeding plumage at Bluckspool beach, but there was no sign of an unexpected great grey shrike reported to us yesterday by Mick Brown, who had seen one near Bluckspool during a guided-walk through the area on Sunday. In an area the size of Castlemartin though, it could be anywhere!
