In reply to Silke's post on Friday 27th - dog poo bins are extremely expensive, the two provided at Ynyslas cost £2,000 per year to be emptied - dog poo is classed as toxic waste.
And even more importantly, dog poo bins don't solve the problem of dog poo fouling paths - Ynyslas is still liberally speckled with dog poo which has to be cleared by the site staff.
Like all sites used by dog walkers Cors Caron suffers from visits by a minority of irresponsible dog owners who don't care what their dog does where. We can reduce this minority with signage encouraging responsible behaviour (somewhat surprisingly some dog owners haven't thought through the unpleasant consequences for a wheelchair user or buggy pusher of a pile of poo on the path!) but there is a hardcore of people that can't be bothered to do anything, and even if we provide dog poo bins they have to bag it and put it in the bin, which is clearly too much effort for them.
But we do very much take the view - and I'm speaking as a dog owner myself here - that "it's your dog, so what comes out of it is your responsibility to deal with", rather than wanting to spend a fair chunk of our much reduced budget providing a facility that won't solve the problem anyway. After all, we don't charge visitors anything and we provide and maintain over 10 miles of accessible walking routes as well as managing the wildlife on the reserve, so a little personal responsibility doesn't seem to much to ask.
However, we'd love to hear from visitors about where they think the problem is worst so we can target signage (and the clearing up we do on occasion) to those spots.
On the bird front, I'm doing breeding bird surveys this year and overall things look pretty much as they did in 2012) (when they were last done comprehensively). Whinchat on the up, warblers pretty much the same (whitethroats are scattered along the railway line wherever the scrub composition suits them), cuckoos perhaps up, which is nice, but sadly waders apart from lapwing down a bit - despite no changes in management, and even a bit more rush cutting, it seems difficult to hold onto redshank in particular. Ducks & geese as normal (thankfully we don't have an increasing population of Canadas, though whatever eats almost all the goslings is probably nobbling other ground nesting birds as well.)