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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