Anglesey

Choughs, South Stack

I've been putting off a trip out to Anglesey for three weeks, the weather looked okay for it today so off I went. I'm a couple of months late for the nesting seabirds but my intention was to get choughs onto the year list, do a little seawatching, have a walk and do a bit of birdwatching from the train along the beaches and salt marshes of North Wales.

I got the Holyhead train from Oxford Road and settled in for a two and a half hour journey, making sure I was on the North side of the train so I'd be facing the coast. The wind had blown some of the leaves away from the trackside trees, making it easier to see some of the woodpigeons and corvids that had been playing peek-a-boo all Summer. A flock of stock doves in a field near Godscroft reminded me that for some unaccountable reason I've been neglecting Frodsham this year, something I must amend.

As we moved up the Flintshire coast the salt marshes were peppered with starlings, carrion crows and black-headed gulls. Little egrets started appearing on the approach to Mostyn, ones or twos at first then groups of a dozen. Shelducks dabbled in the mud and a flock of a hundred or more dunlins (and who knows what else) rose from the beach as the train passed. The train also flushed a snipe from the trackside embankment as we passed through Ffrith, not something I was expecting on today's list. Kimmel Bay was heaving with black-headed gulls, little egrets, tufted ducks and a pile of other stuff we zoomed by too fast for me to identify. It was black-headed gulls, herring gulls and carrion crows all the way to Bangor with cameo appearances by oystercatchers, cormorants and woodpigeons. On Anglesey the gulls and crows were mostly accompanied by jackdaws.

By South Stack Road

I walked out of Holyhead town centre and down South Stack Road. Halfway down the road, in the field by the small reservoirs, a few dozen greylags grazed and honked in the company of a flock of jackdaws. A dozen herring gulls and a mallard dozed in the next field but the only bird actually on the reservoirs was a sleeping heron.

By South Stack Road 

I reminded myself that the first stretch of the minor road up to South Stack would be steeper than I'd expect but it still came as a shock. I was whispering soothing words to my knees when I realised that not all the flock of jackdaws were jackdaws, there were a couple of choughs in there, too. They were quite close and didn't mind me taking photographs of them so long as they were pictures of their rear ends or their suddenly lunging into a tussock of grass chasing some tidbit or other. 

I noticed a smaller bird further up the field when it rose and fell then flew off into the hedgerow. It was a big, but not chunky, bunting with a pale chest and belly. Not a yellowhammer or corn bunting, not yet a reed bunting (and definitely not a cirl bunting!). It must be a Lapland bunting but I was only getting underwing views and getting no sense of chestnut wing coverts. Then it called. A strange wader-like cheep. I looked up some flight calls and yes, it was a Lapland bunting. Here's an example. Sadly it was too quick into the cover of brambles for me to get a photo.

South Stack Lighthouse

The wind was fierce so I decided not to do the clifftop walk, choosing the path a hundred yards in instead. Mind you, it felt like anyone throwing themselves off the cliff would safely find themselves in the garden of one of the holiday homes down the hill. The choughs and jackdaws bounced about in the breeze but everything else kept its head down. A flock of sparrows sat at the base of a stone wall and chirruped at passersby.

Gannet, South Stack

I settled down for half an hour or so's seawatching. I tried to find a spot in the lee of the wind but whichever side of Ellis Tower I went the wind was blowing a hooley. In the end I went and sat down on a bench in the open, I could at least use it to steady my binoculars. Seawatching is a very Zen thing, like as not you're looking at nothing but waves. There was a lot of looking at nothing but waves then a passing gannet demonstrated I had the scale of the waves all wrong: they were huge. This seemed to help and soon I'd found a few gannets, a couple of great black-backs and a possible Manx shearwater (couldn't be sure, it was flying the troughs of the waves so I only got tantalising glimpses of a dark bird). It took a while to work out that the dark shape breaking the water was a harbour porpoise, especially as I was having problems with the scale of things at the time.

I made my way back whence I came, stopping to admire a buzzard wind hovering by the cliffs. A kestrel was hunting over the fields by the road and a couple of choughs had joined the greylags in the field.

Chough and greylag, South Stack Road

I considered having a nosy round the harbour but my feet and knees were making representations about the effects of all that road walking along steeply inclined planes so I wandered over to wait for the train back. It was getting on so most of the bird life on the way back was corvids and gulls with a few egrets showing up in the gloom. There were a few pairs of oystercatchers in the fields and beaches round Llanfairfechan, the egrets on the Conwy Estuary included a great white and there was a large flock of redshanks roosting at Kimmel Bay. The light was too dim to see much by the time we passed Shotton and the only bird I saw in England on my way home was a pigeon waiting for a tram at Manchester Victoria.

It had been a long day but a very productive one. And I do need to go and visit Frodsham.