Success, a plan comes together

 Bore da pawb. ( I'm writing this Sunday morning)

An interesting week as ever with some good news stories to had.

You will hopefully recall the investment in artificial nesting rafts and island creation in the Millennium Coast Park.

I have already mentioned the Herring Gull on the raft at Sandy Water Par, well I had a phone call to ask if I was aware of the activity at Ffynnon Helyg, well of course I wasn't!!

Black-headed Gull Fledgling

A pair of Lesser Black-backed Gulls have nested and raised to fledging one chick at one end of the gravel island while at the other end a pair of Black-headed Gulls have raised two chicks which are close to fledging.

Whilst not the Terns I had hoped for I am so pleased with such success in year one! Any of my team reading this, as soon as the birds fledge safely we have some habitat management to do on the island....

A large part of my role is partnership working both internally and externally, this past week I met up with Katie Sutton the project manager for Bumblebee Conservation's Connecting the Carmarthenshire Coast project, to look for suitable areas to improve for a swathe of invertebrates, whilst we have earmarked a few nice areas, we also noticed an almost complete lack of bees of any taxa on the wing, its quite worrying- has last winters constant rain wiped out the hibernating queen bees and other inverts?

I visited a confidential site, with colleagues from Natural Resources Wales, to look for Fen Orchids, we were hopeful of finding maybe one or two, but to everyone's disappointment there was excessive lying water in all the known places, all is not lost as if the water level drops,  and the land dry sufficiently for the associated fungi to establish the Fen Orchids have been known to flower up until October time...

On a more cheery note I am a sucker for a new book especially from the "Wild-Guides "series so this dropped through my letter box this week.. At less than A5 size its very handy to take out in the  rucksack.