"Oy, you with your wings out - get off my rock"

Anglesey is a fantastic place for any nature lover, in fact anyone who just likes being outside so while we weren’t fishing or just lazing about we did manage to go for the odd walk, more of a stroll really – didn’t want to tax ourselves after all…

You can tell spring is finally here though as a lot of our avian friends that spend the winter months somewhere a bit warmer are finally arriving.

Walking around the inland sea just to the southwest of Penrhos, on the other side of the main road there were all sorts of small birds, most of which were to far away to identify – or at least by me.

The Wheatear were very obliging though – sitting nice and still on the rocks to get their portrait taken.

There were plenty of the usual subjects, waders of all varieties and in the distance, diving for small fish we could make out a few Sandwich Terns – a beautiful bird with a voice that just doesn’t match the grace of this summer visitor.

A lot of the birds were paired up including Cormorants on almost every exposed rock and a lot of Red-breasted merganser. I’d never managed to get close enough to these sea going, fish eating ducks but on our last day, while having our final lunch on the island this pair swam right in front of us.

Yep – Spring is certainly in the air and everything is paired up – I wonder how many young these birds will produce and if we’ll see them when we go back in a couple of months.

Sandwich Tern returning to chicks with a Sandeel, Cemlyn

We arrived on Anglesey with two weeks of doing anything except work in mind and thats exactly what we did. Sea fishing, walking, photography and bird watching, Anglesey has never disappointed us and these past two weeks have been no exception.

Sunday started with blue skies and after discovering that there was a supermarket just up the road from where we have stayed for years we made some sandwiches and went for a short walk at Cemlyn Bay to see if the Sandwich Terns were still there. As you can see from the above photo not only were they still there but they were still flying backwards and forwards feeding their young.

There were hundreds of them and even when we walked around the headland you could still hear them calling and see them diving into the sea in search of Sandeels.

Cemlyn Bay, Anglesey

The bay itself is fairly steep and covered in shingle rather than sand which keeps away all but the most hardcore sunbathers so we almost had the place to ourselves. As you can see – hardly a ripple in site and we decided to come back later and have a go at fly fishing in the sea for the first time, more on that later.

Six Spot Burnet Moths on Ragwort

All along the edge of the beach and cliffs the Ragwort was flowering and covered in both the moths and caterpillars of the Six Spot Burnett (Zygaena filipendulae), the caterpillars look identical to the Cinnabar Moth ones I’d spotted in Bolton during the previous week (yellow and black stripes) but where the moths have a red stripe and a dot the Six Spot Burnett has six spots on each wing. Sometimes the simple beauty of our countryside and wildlife amazes me and this first proper day on Anglesey was turning out to be one of the best yet.

A small whiting for me

Later that evening we came back to Cemlyn for a spot of sea fishing.

The fly fishing, although not a total disaster proved a bit troublesome in the evening breeze but we’d brought our light beach / bass gear with us and as the sun set cast a couple of juicy crab baits to the ‘gutter’ formed where the shingle meets the sand which in theory is where food is washed by the tide and hence the fish are to be found.

A lad fishing down the beach from us told us his father had had a few Bass there the previous evening but as per usual this was not ‘last night’ and the Bass didn’t show for us or him.

I managed to save a blank with a greedy little Whiting then a darkness settled we made our way back to Ty Cristion.