Still a good selection of waders present (10 species) but I couldn't locate any Lapland Buntings and few Skylarks. Perhaps they were over the back of the fields or have seen the long range weather forecast and headed elsewhere. No sign of the Black Redstart either but I had the feeling, call it 'male intuition', that interesting things could still have been lurking, unseen by me. A casual count of 40 Song Thrushes in the coastal strip fields and along the coast path suggests that a whole lot more must be about there and is in stark contrast to their virtual absence around Llangybi. 40 Red-throated Divers were offshore. There was very little of note at Llanrhystud.
I've been made aware for some time of the discrepancy between the numbers of Woodcock seen by birdwatchers and the much larger numbers accounted for by local hunters. The man who delivers my oil is one such and I've often planned to ask him( for scientific purposes) how many he shoots each winter. Unfortuneately, cowardice is my natural character trait, whilst the oil man looks like he probably wrestles grizzly bears in his leisure hours and sports a shirt with the logo "born to hunt; f*** the ban", and so the question has remained unasked. So, I was delighted to read the piece by Tony on the blog the other day about Woodcock, which shows that fascinating information about our local birds can be gathered without having to blast them to death.