Mark Twain once quipped: “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
Well travelled he may have been, but he clearly never visited the Migneint in June.
Fortunately the walk a friend Rob and I undertook was mainly on the leeward side of the mountain, thus sparing us from the icy winds that greeted our arrival on the summit.
As is with this area, birds – apart from the ubiquitous Meadow Pipits – are few and far between.
Highlights on the way up were a pair of Whinchat and a female Ring Ouzel. The mountain thrush was occupying a classic area of habitat – a boulder strewn upland ravine with a couple of dead trees, although this represents the first year that I have seen this territory occupied.
Ring Ouzels – and Cuckoos for that matter – seem to be around in good numbers this year, perhaps reflecting a general upturn recently of a number of classic Welsh summer migrants.
And that was going to be pretty much that. I found no Golden Plovers on an old favoured section of the moor and I had not seen one single raptor.
Then, a couple of hundred yards away from the car a female Merlin absolutely bombed past us back up the mountain.
Superb.
Until later.
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