Jon Hudson and I (doing some CCW business) had the privilege of being allowed to visit parts of Castlemartin Range West today. Numbers of waders/waterfowl were generally unremarkable, apart from the tiny Frainslake millpond, surprisingly ice-free, with about 26 wigeon, a few tufted ducks and not less than 22 little grebes on it. It was interesting to see small, scattered flocks of lapwings and curlew feeding (where they could) in softer parts of the Brownslade and Linney dunes (mainly on the south-facing slopes).
There must have been hundreds of snipe on the Range though, judging by the numbers we frequently saw feeding out in the open but mostly snow-covered grassland. Also (as yesterday at Stackpole) quite a few woodcock were pretty obvious, and in places feeding right along-side snipe.
Song Thrushes were also quite numerous along the fore-dunes at Frainslake. They were clearly finding plenty of snails, birds occasionally flying on to the beach where there were numerous large pebble anvils along the strand-line to help them extract the food.
Other species of note included brief sightings of a merlin panicking a flock of linnets (probably about 100 or so) in the dunes and a red kite hunting over the middle part of the Range (no wing tags).
After a couple of hours we eventually came across a single pair of chough feeding in the dunes, but a lot of the coastal turf was still pretty solid and generally unsuitable for them to probe into. Viewed from the Range, the south-facing Angle peninsula coastline seemed less snowy and cattle were grazing the coastal slope in one often quite good chough area. Hopefully that is where most of the chough are feeding/surviving. If not, then I wonder where they can be, as there have been few seen on the Castlemartin peninsula recently. (BH).
0 comments:
Post a Comment