A brief bird and seal report for the season on Ramsey Island so far. With the breeding season approaching an end (for birds if not seals!) here is a breakdown of some of the highs and lows:
Chough – fledged 17 young from 7 nests (2.42 per pair,  joint 3^rd highest productivity on record).
Lapwing – 2 pairs managed to fledge 1 young between them (not a bad effort!).
Wheatear – 106 pairs – surely the densest site in Wales for this species?!
Stonechat – down from 25 pairs in 2009 to 6 pairs this year.  No doubt a casualty of the cold winter.  In fact we noticed that all small passerine species that are resident in the UK and breed on Ramsey (e.g.  Meadow and rock pipit, blackbird, dunnock) were also slightly down this year too.
Seabirds – a good year generally.  No sign of food shortage although kittiwakes were down from 225 pairs in 2009 to 191 pairs (following 3 years of increase) and how low productivity at the study site (0.26 per pair, although the Cantwr site at the southern end seemed to do much better based on very helpful reports from boat operators).
A full storm petrel survey on the Bishops and Clerks revealed 149 occupied sites (the highest estimate for this site).  The few, newly discovered, birds on Ramsey continue to do well with all 5 from 2008 relocated and a new site found too.
Kestrel – 1 pair fledged 4 young.  Good news for a species that is in decline in Wales (red kites now outnumber them!).
Peregrine – 2 pairs although no young seen to fledge.
Grey seals – going well with well over 100 seal pups born so far on our 9 monitored sites so far.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 19th, 2011 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Bird Diary 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.