News had come out last night of two White Storks, found by Tony White appropriately enough, near Wylfa Nuclear Power Station on Anglesey yesterday evening. The two birds were apparently showing well, close to the road. Alan was frustrated to be in Scotland giving an optics demo; it’s not often he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, but he promised to let Ruth know if he heard more news of the birds.
On learning that the two birds were still showing well this morning, Ruth jumped in the car and headed over to Anglesey. A group of cars and birders soon showed that the birds were still around although they were a bit further away this morning, and more mobile. John Roberts was there with his scope and he was more than happy to let a local family have a good look at this mega bird that had turned up right on their doorstep. At first the birds fed in a damp grassy field showing clearly if too far away to match the photographs Steve Culley had taken yesterday. A public footpath passed closer by but nobody wanted to run the risk of being the one who flushed them. However, the birds took it upon themselves to move, circling once low overhead before disappearing out of sight behind some fir trees.
Local knowledge came into its own as the family told us of a view point just up the lane. One house on the brow of the hill, empty now having been bought out ahead of the new nuclear power plant development at Wylfa, provided an ideal lookout point on its garden terrace, and we soon picked up the distinctive birds again as they strode around and fed beside a boggy pool far below us. Views were now more distant and we debated whether to drive down to the Wylfa Visitor Centre that might provide a closer look. But again there was that thorny question of whether we’d disturb the birds if we tried. However the decision was made for us as the two storks took off and flew back towards their original field. This time however, they circled rising higher on the thermals and cruising further and further away on slow, languid flaps of their strikingly plumaged wings. We willed them to return, but sadly the birds drifted further and further away in a south westerly direction until we finally lost sight of them. Guess they’d overshot their true destination and had decided that the grounds of a nuclear power station wasn’t quite what they were looking for!