02/01/2019 North Wales

Reed Bunting: Bored by sitting at home over the festive holidays day, I decided to head  join the lads (Damion Young, Iggo and Patrick) on a trip out to the North Wales coast.
Our plan was to get a head start on a year list, not something I am doing but for me it was an excuse to catch up with mates and get out birding.
Black Guillemot: We started early and headed straight for South Stack in Anglesey, one of the fisrt birds we saw when we got out of the car was a merlin, a close flyby before landing on the cliffs. Here we also had red-throated diver, guillemot and chough and Damion had a harbour porpoise.



From here we headed down to Holyhead Harbour, except for two black guillemot a few shags and great-crested grebes there was nothing in the harbour, the day before were reports of divers, perhaps the calmer weather had been too nice to push the expected divers and grebes out of the harbour.




Slavonian Grebe: Our next stop was Penrhos/Beddmanarch Bay, and the only birds of note were Brent Geese, two Slavonian Grebes and a female type long-tailed duck. But we did have a nice spot of lunch and a hot cup of tea from 'Petes Burger Van' pretty nice it was too.
Great Northern Diver: From one side of the road to the other we headed across to the Inland Sea and enjoyed lots of birds!

We had great views of a golden eye and a flock of greater scaup flock, always good to see. We had a good walk here and enjoyed checking through the mass of birds feeding in the shallow sheltered waters.
Greater Scaup: There where plenty of waders feeding in the shallows including a dunlin, black-tailed godwit and grey plover . Lots of waders and wildfowl in these sheltered area and fantastic views of Mediterranean gulls, every other gull seemed to be a med here. The best birds had to be both black-throated and great northern divers.

Red Squirrel: I've been to Penrhos/Beddmanarch Bay numerous times but never realised there was a red squirrel feeding station here.

After only getting record shots of distant birds though my swaro scope I was keen to get some stonking, frame filling shots of red squirrels.
But alas, once again the ignorance of dog walkers with their barking dogs running free, off their leads come to scare of the timid mammals and all I am left with is a tail.....


I wasn't happy!!
Black Redstart: Our last stop was Kinmal Bay in Rhyl where the black redstart gave us a bit of a runaround and we only got some brief distant views before the light went.

Still I had a top day with some top company and we ended on 74 species.