Ducks Waders and the Bird Report Thursday 4th January 2018

We are lucky along the Llanelli coast to have a decent amount of wader suitable habitat, the world renowned Burry Inlet, an SPA for a range of water-birds, The Wetland and Wildfowl Trust centre at Penclacwydd, North Dock, and the Lliedi saltmarsh Llanelli Beach, Cefn Padrig, Old Pembrey harbour and of course Cefn Sidan, although the conservation protection designation is Pembrey Coast, undoubtedly many other areas such as Machynys have lost some of their attraction due to development, so much of the area has some form of designation, in fact if you plot all of the Pembrey Burrows & Saltings designations onto an ordnance survey map it's impossible to read the thing, ask if you want to try it!

This brings me to the point of the blog, it's noticeable from records of 2017 that numbers of some duck species are down, with Pintail and Wigeon being very noticeable, not only are birders telling me this but I speak to quite a lot of wildfowlers, (no matter your personal view these people are not all bad) who are noticing fewer duck numbers; I think the data provided to the Carmarthenshire bird report will prove useful in tracking this perception. What is the view out there?

Pintail

Ok that was a bit gloomy lets talk waders, in 2017 21 species of wading birds were recorded at Pembrey LNR, not bad if I tried harder we may have added a couple more, of course the beach helped. Here are a selection of photos, courtesy of Colin Dalton, Thanks Colin.

We have produced the first ever PEMBREY BURROWS & SALTINGS LNR BIRD REPORT, for 2017, I will publish on the blog? and it will be available as a hard copy if anyone wants one. It's not a fancy one but I'm often asked for a list of the birds we see so it seemed like a good idea.