Gull food (with a Celtic flavour!)

If anyone walking the Stackpole coastline recently has pondered about piles of small blackish dead beetles along the route, these are likely to be the disgorged remains (inedible parts?) of the Welsh Chafer beetle (left-over Herring gull food).

Stackpole is an incredibly important invertebrate site and we have several chafer beetle species here, but currently (helped by the warm spell?) we are experiencing huge numbers of these small plump flying/swarming insects (a bit like a very mini-cockchafer). They have been hatching over the last couple of weeks or so from the sandy grassland turf. There are literally thousands or them! Personally I have never seen anything quite like it at Stackpole before.

The herring gulls are going for them big time (is there a shortage of their "normal" food or, being opportunists, maybe they just cannot resist them as a starter before picnic sandwich left-overs? At first I thought they were feeding on ants (which they regularly take usually a bit later in summer) but it is the Welsh Chafer they are going for. Large numbers of this insect have also been recorded recently on dunes in North Wales according to a CCW colleague.