We closely monitor all the birds that breed on Bardsey, but keeping tabs on the breeding success of all the 20,000 Manx Shearwater pairs on Bardsey would be mammoth job! Instead, to keep things realistic, we take a sample of 150 study plot burrows spread out around the island which Ephraim visits on a weekly basis during the summer, the resulting productivity figure of which gives us a fairly good idea of how well the colony as a whole has fared. With his last few chicks fledging during the past week, Ephraim has been able to calculate a productivity figure (the number of chicks fledged). In other words, 60% of burrows fledged a chick this year (each pair will lay only one egg), which compared to previous years is lower than the 2017 productivity of 0.65 and 11.8% below the ten year mean of 0.68. It suggests a slightly below average year for Manxies, but the data analysis is still in its very early stages, and there's still plenty to be deciphered from the 2018 breeding season.

Birdwise, there's no getting around the fact that today was slow. A Grey Plover flew south down the West Coast and the Merlin hung around for another day, but asides from that it was another September day that lacked pizzazz.

Other birds logged today included 33 Manx Shearwaters, 86 Gannets, three Teals, eight Common Scoters, a Buzzard, three Kestrels, two Peregrines, 15 Purple Sandpipers, a Dunlin, a Whimbrel, 66 Curlews, 10 Redshank, 38 Turnstones, an Arctic Skua, 21 Black-headed Gulls, a Common Gull, a Sandwich Tern, 25 Common Terns, 54 'Commic' Terns, 199 Razorbills, seven Swallows, a Grey Wagtail, a White Wagtail, three alba Wagtails, 21 Robins, eight Stonechats, nine Wheatears, a Song Thrush, two Blackcaps, eight Chiffchaffs, six Goldcrests, a Spotted Flycatcher, two Chaffinches, 15 Goldfinches and 45 Linnets.