Seabirds - Castlemartin Coast and Elegug Stacks

A Friday evening visit to check the Elegug Stacks, revealed only a handful of guillemots (including a few unfledged yng) still present on the stacks. All razorbills have gone now. The declining kittiwake population seems likely to fledge some young again this year, which is encouraging. There were only 11 at 6 nests but at least some of these are nearly ready to go!

Offshore, many thousand of manxies were heading west towards Skomer etc. A large number were close inshore due to fresh S-SW winds. At this time of year, if conditions are right, the Castlemartin peninsula (particularly St Govan's Hd) can really be an excellent location to observe, at fairly reasonable range, huge westerly movements of shearwaters etc from around 1700 hrs onwards until sunset.

It seems to me that herring gulls have had a very mixed (generally reduced) breeding success along the south coast this year. At well-studied sub-colonies along the Castlemartin Coast, particularly at Stackpole, definitely fewer young than usual have fledged this summer. At one particular location infanticide was observed on more than one occasion in June. At at least two nests watched, young in the nest (constantly begging parents for food) were simply strangled and killed by one of the parents, while the other parent looked on seemingly totally unaware or disinterested in the gruesome behaviour of its mate!

I wonder if there were localised food shortages during a very warm dry weather spell? Last weekend along the north Pembs coast, observed brood-size of large near-fledged to fledged young between Fishguard and Newport seemed quite good and normal? I wonder what the well-studied Island gull populations have produced this year?