Visit to Cemlyn Bay : 18th July 2013
Visit to Cemlyn Bay : 18th July 2013
Whenever we go to Anglesey we make sure to go to the North Wales Wildlife Trust’s reserve at Cemlyn Bay to see the nesting Terns. Again we were a bit late in the year so we were not sure what to expect but, sure enough, there was no shortage of Terns. As we arrived and parked up we scanned the little lake between the car park and the main lagoon and we saw a pair of Oystercatchers but also the rather grizzly sight of a Herring Gull trying hard to pull apart what appeared to be a chick of some indeterminate origin. It was pretty big and in the end it opted for swallowing it whole; a task that took it quite some time and many failed attempts before finally getting it down !
Anne walked along the shingle whilst I trailed behind having stopped to look at the gruesome scene described above. As she walked along she ran into the reserve warden who told her to be careful at the waters’s edge because – apparently unusually – some Arctic Terns had decided to feed their chicks there and, indeed, when looking at the islands they seemed to be entirely dominated by the Sandwich Terns which seemed to be doing really well this year. The stars of the show were undoubtedly the Arctic Tern chicks opening wide at the approach of any parent Tern within gape distance. We managed to get quite close without the parent birds getting upset but we still kept our distance. I did manage to get a number of digiscoped pictures using my new Swarowski ATX scope and APO adapter – the first really good pictures I have managed to get with the kit. In truth I haven’t used it as much as I meant to yet but this was very encouraging so I am determined to do more in the near future.
It is really quite hard to say how many Terns there were there but I mainly saw Sandwich Terns (at a guess about 1600 breeding pairs) followed by Arctic Terns. The Common Terns were not so easy to see however and I assume that this is because the Common Terns and many of the Arctic Terns have already fledged and are out at sea feeding for themselves leaving just the Sandwich Terns to occupy the islands. There were some Black-headed Gulls in the colony but not as many as I have seen before.
We left Cemlyn Bay quite late and set off for Beaumaris where we were staying at the Bulkely Hotel but we had one last treat for the day when we saw a Red Kite from the main road !