Castlemartin peninsula weekend 5th/6th July

Checks on most chough nest sites have revealed a pretty good breeding success so far. Around 20 nests had young, and although some pairs may have nested a bit later than usual fledging success is looking quite reasonable. No large brood sizes, but at least 17-18 of these have fledged young.

Paddy - whilst the three nest boxes had no evidence yet of kestrel occupancy, we now know that a pair of kestrels have reared 2 yng from a natural sea cliff nest (somewhere near Pen-y-holt Bay). The nest-site was not found but on Sunday morning Peter Hughes noted 2 recently fledged yng were sitting on the cliffs with both adults in attendance nearby. I went to have a look at them later on. It is pleasing that at least one pair out of 2 or 3 on the peninsula have been successful. Unlike all the peregrines between here and Tenby that appear to have failed this year.

Dartford warblers have also fledged at least 3 yng at one site - we could not prove breeding success on the peninsula last year.

Annie and I have just recently received in the region of 14,500 or so winter tetrad records from Nov-Feb (winter Atlas records for Pembs). We will be going through these later in the summer to check them and will be in touch with Jon and Steve about these some time. A cursory look suggests that there are not too many problems, though a red grouse recorded near Fishguard by a well known local birder is almost certainly an inputting error! We will easily be able to correct we're quite sure.

Anyway, we will eventually have quite a lot of potentially useful mappable records of winter bird distribution available for local use.