We had another brief visit to Pembroke Millponds yesterday, to see if we could find any more ringed BH Gulls. The Polish-colour-ringed 1CY was still there, but we could not see any others among the 50 or so BH gulls present. Numbers of little grebe were reasonable, with around 34 noted. As usual, most of these were on the middle pond, including a feeding flock of 14. The female goldeneye had seemingly moved on.
Today, we noted 32 dunlin, 7 turnstones and a couple of ringed plovers on the shore off Front Street, Pembroke Dock. A flock of 162 black-tailed godwits was avidly feeding along the muddy shore at the Waterloo end of Cosheston Pill.
For
anyone with an interest in our breeding seabird populations, the latest UK Seabird
Monitoring Programme (SMP) report has recently been published. It focusses on
the years 2021 to 2023 but covers long-term trends back to 1986. Data from
Welsh seabird colonies used in the analyses of trends for various species
includes information from a number of Pembrokeshire colonies, notably from key seabird
monitoring sites such as Skomer Island.
You can download a copy of the report here. Additionally, graphs from the report are published on the BTO's Trend Explorer webpage which can be found here.
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| The SMP trend in Wales for razorbill shows a large increase |
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| However, the trend in Wales for some species, such as Kittiwake, shows a significant decline |