Saltmarsh savannah

Migrants noted today, whilst wandering the wide open spaces of the Saltmarsh Grasslands, included: 15 White Wagtail, 2 Wheatear, 2 Reed Warbler, 1 Sedge Warbler, 1 Whimbrel, 1 Greenshank and 1 Spotted Redshank (the latter two presumably having a day out from Goldcliff). Also saw a couple of Hares and the female mostly-Pochard hybrid.

Interesting factoid of the day: did you know there is a hoverfly called the Marmalade Hoverfly? Episyrphus balteatus (click here for a picture) was named by James Keiller, a keen amateur entomologist and the famed inventor of Dundee Marmalade. As a result, ever since 1797, all jars of marmalade have a tiny hoverfly logo stamped on the bottom of the jar.

A few more arrivals

One Sedge and two Reed Warblers were singing away at Uskmouth this morning; the only other notable migrant was a Whimbrel on the foreshore although 140 Black-tailed Godwits, where the Usk spews into the channel, were also worthy of a quick raising of the bins.

Have just been flicking through the 'Climatic Atlas'. According to Huntley and his mates the "simulated potential late 21st century distribution" of Cetti's will be 50% greater than current. Almost all of England, Wales and Ireland is likely to become climatically suitable for our noisy little friends, plus south and west Scotland. Of course the downside is that, as Spain turns into a desert, gaps start appearing further south. How exciting,... bet it happens twice as fast as predicted.

One for the knaves

After a wee bit of ringing, dropped in on Goldcliff where at least half a dozen White Wagtails were pottering about, lovely.


Does my supra-orbital ridge look big in this?

Humans are soooo shit

Walked from Goldcliff Point to Redwick and back this morning, in the hope that the Slimbridge White-tailed Eagle might have decided to touch down on the levels - no such luck. A dozen Whimbrel were the 'highlight' along with a trickle of hirundines and a few scattered Cetti's Warblers.


My digi-binning technique could do with a bit of work, the brown blob balancing on the rocks is a Whimbrel, honest. Just above the bird, at the top of the seawall was half a mile of heavy gauge fishing-line and a gaggle of fisher-folk, apparently the latter felt absolutely no responsibility for the former, but then why would they? Click here for another, ever so slightly more extreme, illustration of why humans are shit.

Drown'd, drown'd

Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelibear,
And therefore I forbid my tears...


Millais ain't got nuffin' on me.

Weea-choo!

Whilst out bagging Cetti's at Uskmouth, I snuck up on a randy group of Pochard doing their thing (well who wouldn't?), surely the most acoustically entertaining Aythya in the world. If all you expect of Pochard is the 'grrr-grrr-grrr' flight call, click on the snippet below and prepare for 'wi-wi-wi' whistles and nasal wheezes (with and without 'ricochets') courtesy of displaying males; and the odd soft cluck or two (not sure which sex is emitting this, answers on a postcard/comment). As if that's not enough, there is also a pretty picture to show you what you're hearing from roughly second 17 to 20. PS. Apologies for the wind/anthropogenic background rumble, I had to leave it in or lose some low frequency elements of Poch.

Identification pitfalls (part 2)

The second installment of this regular feature (click here for part 1) includes a moth that won't be seen until the summer but, given the trickiness of the identification challenge, I thought I'd bring it up now. First off, you can tell it is a moth because it has six legs, most birds have two. However, quite how you discriminate the pretty little critter from the spherical glass object (shown here on the left) is beyond me.

Cetti's-tastic

The Uskmouth lagoons and grasslands produced a rather impressive count of 50+ singing male Cetti's Warblers this morning. This represents more birds than the entire county population estimate as presented in the just published 'Birds of Gwent',... oops. It's the birds' fault, pesky little exponentially-exploding climate change loving critters. Very little in the way of migrants mind, bordering on the square root of bugger all actually.

Did they sterilise the nails?

Last weekend I spent most of my time dodging the wind, rain, chocolate eggs, hoi polloi and images of a bearded, nappy wearing bloke nailed to a cross,... and my prize? The songs of 27 Cetti's Warblers in the bag; or rather, the songs of 27 Cetti's Warblers eased into a microphone, squeezed down a wire, popped into a recorder and dumped onto a 8GB flash card before being jettisoned via a card reader, shoe-horned onto a hard drive, sloshed through some software and pished out the far end in the form of a spectrogram. And one of them (my favourite so far) looked a bit like this...



Please note the bands of noise between 0 and 1.5 kHz, a mellifluous combination of wind and the goings on at the Uskmouth Power Station, music to anyone's ears I'm sure you'll agree.

No post today

I'm not going to post today as I'd only go into an interminable rant about the recent activity down at Uskmouth. However, if you have any queries regarding the RSPB's objectives/activities and whether these conflict with the primary aim of the reserve (to provide compensatory habitat for the debacle at Cardiff Bay) you should write to the RSPB offices in Cardiff (Sutherland House, Castlebridge, Cowbridge Road East, Cardiff, CF11 9AB) or Sandy (The Lodge, Potton Road, Sandy, Bedfordshire, SG19 2DL).