As is customary this time of year, birds take a bit of a back seat and our attention is drawn to other wildlife, particularly butterflies and dragonflies. On a walk on the 9th from Tal-y-Bont to Borth we had 12 species of butterfly, including wall brown, common blue, large skipper, gatekeeper and small copper. A family of stonechat, some passing manx shearwaters and recently fledged reed bunting were the only noteworthy birds.
On the 11th we headed off to Broadwater, where the star of the show was a fishing osprey. On the lagoon around 40 goosander had gathered, and our first arctic skuas of the autumn were heading north following the few sandwich terns.
A trip back up north following a Martha Wainwright concert in mid month allowed us to retrace an old favourite walk of ours from Hornby to Wray over Roeburndale, on which redstarts featured, along with a showy kingfisher, numerous meadow pipits and a green sandpiper down by the Wenning.
Back home a good showing of odonata on the 20th at Llyn Glanmerin included an ovipositing brown hawker along with southern hawkers and lots of emerald damselfly. A couple of feeding spotted flycatchers were a welcome bonus.
Towards the end of the month reports of a showy spotted crake had us heading out to Ynys-hir, where we had excellent views of this normally shy critter, and indeed as I write it is still around and we have now seen it a couple of times. One last treat - for me anyway - came when I stepped out onto the deck one evening for some fresh air and a tawny owl flew in and landed on top of the bird feeder, turned to stare at me for 4 or 5 seconds before silently swooping off down the field.
We have also been keeping an eye on the moths attracted to our outside light and on 3/9 we discovered - much to our delight - a nationally scarce species: Cloaked Carpet. Record sent off to county recorder and was confirmed.
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