Paul's Blog - All comments and views are my own,

In between the showers there was an obvious passage of Skylarks moving in a NW - SE direction with the birds gaining height as they approached the estuary. A juvenile Moorhen was a new bird record for the reserve, well at least I've never recorded them before, this brings the 2017 list to 124 species. I drove into the old car park to be confronted by the sight of one of the stiles completely trashed and cattle wandering around the dunes!!!!! Closer inspection revealed the stile had been dismantled and the wire pulled open, cattle don't do that! Cattle don't "peel back" fencing This is the second incident of vandalism targeting the cattle in this field to have occurred in the last month. Luckily today the cattle were keen to follow a rattled bin bag, thinking there was food in it, so they were soon back in the field leaving the grazier to secure the fence. putting posts in the easy way !

Morfa Berwig was due a visit this morning, so I trundled along with the weather overcast but dry with some sunny spells. The first thing I noticed as I approached the entrance were two new signs, it looks like the environmental enforcement team are getting as fed up with the fly tipping at the reserve as we are, well done..... We do have some Welsh Government signs to go up to reinforce the penalties of fly tipping. A leisurely walk around the reserve accompanied by the sound of the birds in the trees and ditches, with Moorhen, Water Rail, a tit flock  and a new bird for the site a Green Woodpecker, one or two flowers are still out including Marsh Ragwort; butterflies were represented by Red Admiral and Speckled Wood. There are one or two decent sized Oaks on the reserve and I was drawn to one particular tree which seemed to have more galls than acorns. Oak Marble Galls The galls,in this case Oak marble galls, are caused by a chemically induced distortion of

A completely different day, weather wise, to yesterday with a stiff breeze blowing and an outlook of rain to come. The team took to the beach to collect up bags of litter already collected on previous litter picking days, someone had got there before us for one lot, but at the western end of Cefn Sidan the bags still waited to be collected. Then a spot of lunch in the van whilst sat watching the seascape and putting the world to rights.... There were some decent numbers of birds on the beach with a nice range of species including, Oystercatchers, Dunlin, Sanderling, three Bar-tailed Godwits, c6 Sandwich Terns and a single Ruff,  as well as the usual array of gulls Sandwich Tern Back into Pembrey Country Park where we collected Willow and Birch branches for the local primary schools' "forest school". A couple of Spindle shrubs were really showy with their fuchsia pink and deep orange seed heads, really brightening up the forest track. Spind

Ouch, I recently had an argument with a piece of wood, the wood won! Four broken ribs later and I can laugh about it just!!! This morning looked like the last settled morning for a while so despite the ribs I set up for Skylarks on the reserve. This mornings ringing site An overcast almost windless morning, with just 140ft of net set it was great to find three Skylarks in the net in the first round, on wing length a male and two females, both adult and juvenile Skylarks undergo a complete moult in the summer so at this time of year its considered difficult to age them so they are lumped as BTO code 2. Skylark Diagnostic hind claw The rest of the morning was fairly slow with good numbers of Goldfinch and Linnet flying around as well as at least two Sparrowhawks and a Merlin. Only a few birds were caught until I played the Meadow pipit call on the tape and the birds just flooded in to the area with 10 caught. A Sparrowhawk got caught in the net but by

The new name of the blog is rangernaturenotes.blogspot.com seems more appropriate Paul

I'm thinking of changing the blog name / address  native wildlife research was the name I used for an old website. I'd like a simpler name ideas welcome