Bardsey's Wildlife

Thursday 17 May 2018

This morning dawned sunny and clear with a light south-easterly wind and an obvious arrival of new birds on the island. A Snipe flushed from the South End where two Yellow Wagtails flew over, a Whinchat was in the Withies and a Reed Warbler was ringed in the Observatory garden with a singing Garden Warbler. However, there was little time to scour the island for 'the big one' as Billy, Ephraim and Mark set about packed up ringing equipment and survey sheets ready for a day of seabird counting on Ynys Gwylan Fawr, a small rocky island just offshore from Aberdaron inhabited by Puffins, auks, gulls and lots of wildflowers.

There's no jetty on the Gwylans (and hopefully there never will be!) which means getting onto the island involves a hard landing. After the 20 minute boat ride across the Sound, it was down to Colin the Boatman to carefully manoeuvre the boat into a position whereby we could jump off onto the thrift-cladded rocks of Ynys Gwylan-Fawr. The high tide helped make it a fairly straightforward affair, and before we knew it we'd be marooned on a tiny sun-parched rock with just seabirds for company.

Given the island's small size and large concentration of breeding seabirds, we stuck together to minimise disturbance and set about counting everything. The island has a healthy colony of Herring Gulls and Great Black-backed Gulls, and it was good to see that many nests already had chicks in.

Great Black-backed Gull chick

Shags nest all along the island's coastline and inland on grassy banks. Most of the prehistoric-looking chicks had reached a stage where they could have rings put on them.

A Rock Pipit nest - not something you see everyday!

Once we'd noted all the nests on Ynys Gwylan-Fawr and done a Puffin count, it was time to do ledge counts for everything we could see on its sister island, Ynys Gwylan-Fach.

The view from the highest point of the island. Bardsey looking distant on the horizon.

With an hour or so before Colin was due to pick us up, there was time left for us to turn our attention to the invertebrate fauna of the island. Unsurprisingly it's pretty limited, but did include a healthy population of Chrysoesthia sexgutella, a micro-moth apparently new the Gwylans and one which has yet to appear on Bardsey!

Chrysoesthia sexpunctella feeds on plants in the Goosefoot genus which carpet the coastline of the Gwylans.

The hoverfly Eristalinus sepulchralis was very common - check out those funky eyes!

Leaving the Gwylans...

We returned to Bardsey to news that we hadn't missed a mega rarity, but today's log totals were still a vast improvement on the past few days. They included three Fulmars, 27 Manx Shearwaters, 11 Gannets, a Grey Heron, two Buzzards, three Ringed Plovers, five Turnstones, nine Kittiwakes, 21 Puffins, four Collared Doves (they're multiplying!), 108 Swallows, nine House Martins, eight Pied Wagtails, a Robin, two Stonechats, nine Wheatears, three Sedge Warblers, two Whitethroats, two Garden Warblers, seven Blackcaps, 11 Chiffchaffs, five Willow Warblers, seven Spotted Flycatchers, four Chaffinch, three Goldfinches, 12 Linnets, two Lesser Redpolls.

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Click to see inside!

Edited by Mike Archer, Mark Grantham, Peter Howlett and Steve Stansfield and published by T & AD Poyser, this fabulous book describes how much has changed since the first edition of Bird Observatories in Britain and Ireland was published in 1976. There are detailed accounts of the history and work carried out at each of the 18 observatories, with personal accounts by wardens and staff of the excitement of discovering a rarity, watching thousands of migrants attracted to a lighthouse after dark, and the pleasure and experiences that working at some of the country’s most remote and beautiful locations can bring. Click the picture of the book to see inside or to buy your copy.

Migrants

Being sited on the main migration route of many species, Bardsey (or Ynys Enlli in Welsh) is a well-known site for migrant birds, turning up many scarcities and rarities, as well as large numbers of common migrants. The island’s list now stands on 326, after the recent addition of Citrine Wagtail in October 2012.

Although Bardsey’s reputation for rare birds may not quite match that of some observatories, it is almost certainly the best site in Wales for rarities. Among Bardsey’s rarer visitors are the first Summer Tanager (1957) and Yellow Warbler (1964) to have been recorded in Britain and Ireland, as well as American vagrants such American Bittern, Sora, Kildeer, Spotted Sandpiper, Grey-cheeked Thrush, American Robin, Song Sparrow, Dark-eyed Junco, Red-eyed Vireo, Black-and-white Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, Rose-breasted Grosbeak and Blackpoll Warbler. To add to this impressive list of rarities, Black-winged Stilt, Lesser Yellowlegs, Lanceolated Warbler, River Warbler, Western Orphean Warbler, Booted Warbler, Blyth’s Reed Warbler, Eyebrowed Thrush, Thrush Nightingale, Red-flanked Bluetail, Isabelline Wheatear, Black-eared Wheatear, Collared Flycatcher, Blyth’s Pipit, Pine Bunting, Rock Bunting, Yellow-breasted Bunting and White-throated Sparrow have all been recorded.

Besides the rarities, Bardsey regularly attracts large numbers of weary migrants during 'fall' conditions in Spring and Autumn, largely a consequence of the fully operational Bardsey Lighthouse. In 2011, for example, a single grounding of migrants resulted in over 1000 Willow Warblers making groundfall on the island in August. In the not-so-distant past, a single attraction of 40,000 Redwings occurred in late October at the end of the last century.

Breeding birds

Bardsey is home to some 26, 000 pairs of Manx Shearwaters, which can be heard on dark nights from mid-March to August. They breed in their excavated burrows, which are scattered all over the island. Chough is the most important species of conservation concern, with between four to eight pairs nesting around the coastal cliffs most years, and a wintering flock of up to 50 individuals. A pair of Peregrines breed on the island, and a 1-2 pair of Ravens also nest most years. There are several species which nest only occasionally, such as Sparrowhawk and Little Owl, along with Afro-Palearctic migrants like Sedge Warbler, Blackcap, Chiffchaff and Willow Warbler. Up to ten pairs of Stonechats can nest in the isolated gorse patches around the island, along with many Linnets and Meadow Pipits. Corncrakes were once a common breeder on the island, although since 1970 there have been no confirmed pairs nesting. In recent years the likes of Lapwing, Yellowhammer, House Sparrow and Starling have also all become extinct as breeding species. In contrast, Shelduck, Puffin, Long-eared Owl, Grasshopper Warbler and Goldcrest have been added to the breeding bird list since 1998.

Ringing

Ringing is a very important part of the observatory’s role on the island. Since 1953, the observatory has ringed over 315,00 birds of 198 species. The highest number ringed in a single year was 1988, with a total of 11, 301 birds ringed of 93 species. There have been many days in the observatory’s history when several hundred birds have been ringed in one day; these occasions have mostly involved breeding seabirds, although these numbers can also easily occur with migrant species.

Lepidoptera

A total of 561 species of moths have been recorded on the island. Bardsey is not an overly good location for scarce moths, although the existence of Thrift Clearwings (Nationally scarce) has been established on the Thrift plants around the coast in recent years, after first being recorded in the years 1980 and 1996. Migrant moths arrive in small numbers every year, for example the annual arrival of Hummingbird Hawkmoths in the autumn; rarer immigrants in the past have included Death’s Head Hawkmoths, Vestals, Crimson Speckled and Red-necked Footman.

In recent years, a greater emphasis has been placed on recording and identifying the so-called ‘micro-moths’, which has resulted in the finding of 41 new species for Bardsey since 2011. In 2012, the coastal subspecies of Eana penziana (E.p.colquhounana) was re-found on the island, which was the first time that this Nationally Scarce species had been recorded on Bardsey since 1966. Apotomis semifasciana is also amongst the scarcer species of micro-moths to inhibit the island (also Nationally Scarce).

Butterflies are present on the island in small numbers, with species such as Common Blue, Small Copper and Small Tortoise-shell being the most common. A scarcer breeding species is the Grayling, which can be found in small numbers on the top of the mountain. Migrant butterflies such as Painted Lady can arrive in their hundreds, although other migrants such as Clouded Yellow and Dark-green Fritillary are quite rare.

Bardsey's Wildlife

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Thursday 17 May 2018

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