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"That's a very anoraky thing to do," I was told by a visitor as I walked down to look across the lagoon last week.  I had to confess that it was.  I was counting the number of planks in our new boardwalk.  And my boss thinks I don't have enough to do...  There was a reason for it (honest) that I won't bore you with right now, but it made me realise how much a warden's job involves counting.

I do it automatically.  When I walked round the reserve at first light today, I didn't just notice black-tailed godwits, I noted that there were eight, busy feeding in the shallows.  When I stood by the estuary last night, impressed by the swirling mass of shape-shifting starlings preparing to dive into the reedbeds, I estimated how many thousands there were.  Not just because it's useful to record, but also because I know that "How many starlings are coming into roost?" is a question that I'll be asked many times through the autumn (28 times so far, to be precise).

We judge our conservation success by the number of pairs of lapwings that breed here, our success in our education work by the number of children who come and have a quality hands-on experience of nature, the contribution that our visitors make to the RSPB's work by the number of pounds that they spend in the shop, with every penny going to our conservation work.  So, I felt the need to share some numbers with you.  Can you work out what the numbers relate to?

> Visitors to Conwy in the last 12 months
> Children who've experience nature hands-on in the last 12 months
> Bird species recorded at Conwy since we opened the gates in 1995
> Planks in the boardwalk
> % reduction in use of tap water in the last year
> Welsh mountain ponies grazing on the reserve
> Water rails calling in our reedbed this spring

The answers are 5,   8,   10,   230,   655,   2,602   95,460 - but which is which?

The lady who called me "a bit anoraky" already knows the answer to the boardwalk question - and I bet she'll remember it everytime she treads the boards.

...but in the last few days it's as though someone's opened a great big door in the Arctic and our winter visitors have started to arrive in a flood.  First came the teal, though probably from closer than the far north, dabbling carefully in the margins of the lagoons now that the water levels have dropped.  Then came the wigeons, from 10 on Monday to 110 on Tuesday, most of the males still in their brick-red eclipse plumage, not yet with the broad yellow head stripe.

I especially love walking along the estuary at high tide at the moment; with no wind, the tide ripples in to the shore, lifting seeds from the saltmarsh plants to the surface of the slowly-moving river.  This is teal heaven, and as you walk slowly along the track, careful not to disturb the birds, the only sound is the gentle splashing of their bills on the water.  It's not even really a splash, more of a constant patter as they take the seeds.

They were all much noisier last night.  We'd stayed late for a staff meeting and were closing up the reserve buildings after dark.  The night was clear but moonless, and from the lagoon came a magical mix of sound.  We picked out the short calls of teal, the long whistles of wigeons, plus the occasional intervention from mallard, shelduck, oystercatcher and redshank.  But this wasn't about night-time identification, this was about savouring a special moment and making you realise how important safe wetland roosts such as Conwy are.

As the winter birds arrive, so the summering birds leave, and that can be equally spectacular.  This morning, 60 house martins and a single swallow were in a feeding frenzy, circling tightly over the reedbeds of the Ganol Trail.  At this time of year, it's all about stuffing themselves full of protein-rich insects, building themselves up for the long journey south.  Chattering busily, then they were off, moving south as one up the valley, another kilometre closer to their African destination - they presumably know where that is, but us mere humans still have no idea where British breeding house martins winter.

You too can say hello to the arriving migrants, and wave goodbye to the departing ones, this Saturday at 1.30 pm, when you can join me on a family walk around RSPB Conwy.  I hope to see you - and them - here.

PS. A quick update from my last blog
No news yet from the BTO on the colour-ringed bird or from Defra's Wildlife Incident Investigation Scheme on the dead peregrine, but I'm pleased to report that the buzzard made a full recovery and has been released locally.

It was a fair question, I felt.

I get a bit nervous when I find supermarket bags on my desk.  If I'm lucky, someone will have bought me cake, but it's just ask likely to be something that someone's cat dragged in.  In this case, it was a the dessicated remains of a small bird.  It was so far gone that I'm hard pushed to identify it.  It may be a chaffinch, but we'll find out because it was wearing some bling.  Four coloured rings, plus an engraved BTO ring, will mean something to the big computer in Thetford which holds the details of hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of birds.  I entered the details online on behalf of the lady who found it in a Bethesda garden, and in the next few weeks, she should receive a letter that tells her more about the bird she found.  That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday morning, Angela called me from our education room.  "Julian, there's a dead raptor on the shop counter".  Blimey, I thought, that's not going to help sales of bird food.  In the Visitor Centre, a beautiful juvenile peregrine was lying on the desk.  It looked in perfect condition, but it was sad to see it motionless when peregrines should be a by-word for vigour, movement and power.  I donned some rubber gloves and checked it over.  It showed no obvious signs of injury, but it had been found in a garden along the coast the previous evening looking rather sick, and had died overnight.  2009 has been a bad year for peregrines - by the end of June, more than 50 cases of peregrines being shot, poisoned or snared had been reported to the RSPB, and there were some signs about this bird that made me worry.  So it's been packed off to the RSPB's Investigations team to get it checked out by the experts.  The man who brought it in immediately signed a pledge to end the illegal killing of birds of prey - just one of hundreds who have showed their support to this important RSPB campaign at Conwy this summer.

By mid afternoon, a visitor reported a sick-looking buzzard on the bank of the estuary just off the reserve.  "We're turning into an episode of Casualty," I thought, though without the melodrama and love interest.  It took me 15 minutes to find where she meant, but the bird was obviously unwell, hunched up on the side of the track.  It was a juvenile bird, fully fledged, with a pale head and breast and bright grey eyes.  Like the peregrine, it looked in good nick, but at least it was still breathing.  It barely reacted when I picked it up, which isn't a good sign, and carefully placed it in a box for the short drive to a local rehabilitation centre.  When I met Mark, who runs the place, I recognised him from my local pub, so I'm hoping to find out whether it's recovering next time I pop in for a pint.

So, a week of three stories to which the answers will come later.  What was the bird with the bling, and where had it come from?  Was the peregrine poisoned?  Will the buzzard survive?  To be continued (I hope).

Do you ever get that feeling?  (No, not 'that' feeling!).  That buzz when you experience something that makes your day.  It can come in many forms, but here's three from the last week.

1. It took only a second to cross the path ahead of me.  Russet-brown back, long tail, pointed wings.  It took more than the usual millisecond to twig that it was a cuckoo, simply because we seem them here so rarely.  It's one of this year's young, and it's been seen almost daily for the last week or so.  We've no idea where it hatched, but we'd secretly like to believe that it was from our reedbed.  Reed warblers are a favourite host bird, and I remember a visitor saying they'd seen a female cuckoo hanging round the reeds earlier in the summer, so perhaps, well just maybe, that's where it hatched from.  An imposter in the nest, its hungry mouth fed by hard-working reed warbler parents.  But now a red-list bird, and well worth a little rush of adrenaline.

2. Google Alert's a clever little beastie.  It's a gismo that enables me to spot when someone has posted something about RSPB Conwy on the Internet.  I can find out the good things and the not-so-good things that people say about us, and it's amazing to see the photos that people have taken of the wildlife and the scenery.  Yesterday's email from Google HQ alerted me to our appearance in a new guide produced by Little Chef, where RSPB Conwy had been voted by their customers as one of the Top 51 places for a day out with the family.  Not only are we the only place listed in North Wales, but we're the only nature reserve too.  That gave me a bit of a buzz.  Not just because it's great publicity for the reserve, but because the nominations come from visitors.    I'll try to avoid the tearful Oscar-style acceptance speech, but we are up there with Legoland, Brighton Pier and the National Forest Llama Trek...

3. I wasn't here yesterday, so I missed all the fun.  Charlie, our lead field teacher, tells me that it was our most successful children's event ever.  More than 200 people came to play.  Literally.  It was Playday 2009, one of 800 events around the UK that invited youngsters to play.  We organised activities, such as pond-dipping, face-painting and bug-hunting, but also provided a random set of materials for children to make their own fun.  Some had never played with a hula hoop before, others made mini bird hides out of old cardboard boxes.  It was simple, outdoor stuff for Generation X-box.  Families set out picnic rugs on the grass and enjoyed being together, many having never been to this reserve (perhaps any nature reserve) before.  There was, Mike emailed me halfway through the afternoon, a real buzz to the place, and we hope that many will come again and again now they've found us and enjoyed it.

My day was brightened considerably as I looked through 'Bernies View', the viewing screen on our new boardwalk.  Flying in the morning sunshine was a flock of 15 black-tailed godwits.  One was brick-orange, immaculate in summer plumage.  The other 14 were fading fast, returning to their paler winter dress code, but a fantastic sight nonethless.  Black-tailed godwits always have a special place in my heart. Perhaps it was the 15 years living and birding in Cambridgeshire, their UK breeding stronghold.  I associate their 'whickering' call with long summer evenings walking along the Nene Washes, their incessant chattering interrupted only by a drumming snipe or, thanks to an ongoing reintroduction, the rasping sound of a corncrake.  But back to Conwy, where the godwits were feeding among a growing number of redshanks on the lagoon.

The water levels are quite low right now, and it seems to be a regular topic of conversation among regular visitors: "why are the water levels so low?".  Avoiding the urge to state the obvious (it's rained here about twice in the last four months), it's because we want it that way.  As part of our work to increase the survivability of lapwing chicks, we provided more insect-rich mud in the spring by lowering the water levels to form a 'skirt' around the islands.  We have pumped water from the Afon Ganol a couple of times to prevent the lagoon drying out and from making it too easy for a fox to wander across to the islands, but given the choice, I'd rather have rain filling the lagoons than running the electric pump.  And by happy coincidence, it means that the shallow mud looks great for southbound waders returning from their Arctic breeding grounds in the next few weeks.

Last year, by contrast, I heard complaints that the water levels were too high (it rained a lot).  The RSPB has never had the ability to take water out of the lagoons at Conwy but we are working with Environment Agency Wales on plans to reinstate a sluice that was installed by the A55 tunnel contractors.  This would allow us to move water into the river and so create ideal conditions for waders to feed without having to pray to the rain gods to stop thowing water at us.

So, enjoy the sight of birds on the move, a slice of an amazing migration of millions from the northern hemisphere to the south.  And be reassured that we do monitor the water levels, and hopefully next year, we'll actually be able to do something about them.

I was woken by a cuckoo calling this morning.  I felt blessed.  'See,' you'll think, 'that's why he moved back to North Wales.  All that fantastic scenery and being woken by such special birds'.  And you'd be right, but sadly cuckoo isn't among the birds in my usual dawn chorus.  This one was calling from inside my radio, announcing the new Birds of Conservation Concern list, published this morning by the RSPB, other voluntary organisations and the government's nature conservation agencies.

In fact, I haven't seen or heard a cuckoo on the reserve or near my home on the coast in the two springs that I've been here.  When I was a kid (and it wasn't that long ago), I used to hear them regularly, but now in North Wales, you really have to go into the hills.

I was mountain biking above the Conwy Valley on Sunday and I heard one, my first this year.  Fantastic, a joy to hear. (Shortly afterwards, I went over the handlebars as part of developing the new Olympic sport of cartwheel cycling).  I added the record to BirdTrack, helping to map the abundance and distribution along with records by thousands of other birdwatchers.

So, having heard a digital cuckoo at 6.30 am, what would my morning walk around the reserve bring?  It's the best part of the day, and my personal highlight was a pair of reed buntings busy feeding young in a concealed nest deep in the reedbed.  They didn't know that they'd been moved from 'Red list' to 'Amber list' overnight, but I did, and it's encouraging news.  It shows that bird monitoring news isn't all one-way traffic, not all doom-and-gloom.  Conservation effort can work, brings rewards and puts birds back into the countryside.  Bullfinch, woodlark and stone-curlew have also moved from red to amber, a significant milestone on their road to recovery.

Conwy's most important red-list bird is the lapwing, and we still have a few pairs on eggs.  We're hoping they'll show for the many visitors to our Open Weekend, this Saturday and Sunday - the two days of the year when entry to the whole reserve is completely free.  We're gearing up for warm sunshine, lots of fun and plenty of wildlife - perhaps the first dragonflies of the summer will be on the wing.  Maybe it'll be the day that a cuckoo makes a special flypast?

The wonders of technology mean that I can blog while mobile, even on my day off.  So I'm sitting in the back garden, puppy chewing through a large stick that he's found, watching the swallows swooping low over the rooftops and catching insects on the wing after this morning's rain.  It's always good to see them back - I was telling someone yesterday about the hope that a pair of swallows nesting in the trenches gave to a group of soldiers during the Battle of Vimy Ridge in World War I.  The sight of the swallows provided a sense of 'normal' in an otherwise shattered world: Charles Raven wrote from the trenches “These birds were angels in disguise; those blessed birds brought instant relief to the nerves and tempers of the mess… we all regarded the pair with devoted affection.”

We're investing quite a lot in our nesting birds too.  We've had the first couple of lapwing broods hatch over the weekend, so we're hoping that the gods will smile on them over the next few weeks.

You can see some of the nesting birds from our new boardwalk.  It's not officially open yet (that comes on 9th May, when we're inviting everyone to Walk the Planks), but it's very useable, and we've had some great feedback from visitors, both for the experience of walking through the reedbed and the sturdy nature of its non-slip boards.  It's designed to be accessible for anyone, and we hope it will see millions of footsteps on it over the next couple of decades.

Accessibility is important to us, as we want as many people as possible to enjoy RSPB Conwy, so it was a nice surprise to read in the local paper recently that the reserve has been named in the Rough Guide to Accessible Britain as an attraction that caters for a wide range of visitors.  We didn't know about it until one of our volunteers spotted it and several people have told us that they've come face to face with nature for the first time as a result of the Rough Guide.

We saw the first swifts feeding over the lagoons during a dawn chorus walk on Saturday.  It's also good to see them back too.  Usually the last migrants to arrive (though where are our whitethroats this year?), it affirms that summer really is here.  Just as it rains for the first day in a month...

Let's face it, it's all about sex.  Any organism's goal in life is to pass on its genes, to make its mark on its species' future.  And without wanting to sound like RSPB's Conwy's chief pimp, that fact has been giving our visitors so much enjoyment over the weekend.

Stop and listen to that birdsong for a moment, all those males giving their all from the reeds, trees and bushes.  The first blackcap and sedge warbler were singing yesterday  We love to hear the chorus, but for the birds, it's all about showing to the females that you're the best catch on the block.

Hundreds of people in our Visitor Centre this weekend spied on a pair of house sparrows (well, I say a pair, but Mrs Sparrow seemed to be doing most of the work).  Building the nest in a nestbox close to the Centre, their efforts beamed onto our video screen thanks to a regular visitor, Tom Peel, who runs a CCTV company.  We were enthralled, watching her delicately place pieces of grass into the nest-cup.  But for her, it was all about preparing the right home for her chicks.

Five avocets arrived on the reserve last week and seemed quite at home on the lagoons.  Lots of people have been captivated by them, most having never before seen these elegant waders, long-symbolic of successful habitat conservation by the RSPB.  Their Welsh name - Cambig - means 'the one with the bent beak' - a perfect description.  They were settled enough to be chasing away the black-backed gulls, inspecting the islands, pairing up and mating.  Unfortunately, by Monday they'd moved on, dashing our hopes for some special Easter eggs.

Bringing up baby is, of course a risky business, and while we hope that all will be successful, we have to steel ourselves now for the ups and downs of vicarious parenthood.  Around the country, RSPB staff are doing the same: preparing to protect little terns on a beach in Norfolk, keeping the Glaslyn ospreys free from interference, managing the grassland on Wharton Crag in Lancashire to encourage violets, the food plants for the rare high-brown fritillary butterflies.  So, if you meet an RSPB warden looking tired and emotional between now and midsummer, just remember that they're probably worrying about the future of their adopted species.

Deep in the reedbed, something is stirring.  And banging.  And grinding.  It's the sound of work underway on the latest improvements to our facilities, to enable you to get closer to wildlife.

The most noticeable change so far is the removal of the bank at the far end of Cae Conwy, the open space between the two buildings and the start of the trails.  Removing the bank instantly changes the view, so from the Visitor Centre you can now see the reeds and the alder carr beyond.  It's a view that no-one has ever seen, for when the bund was created in the early 1990s, there were neither trees nor reeds there.

We've used the earth to fill a large pond that has been enjoyed by thousands of youngsters as their introduction to a wet and wiggly world, but which unfortunately had been taken over by an invasive Antipodean plant, Crassula helmsii.  At the moment, it looks exactly like what it is, a large slab of wet soil, so we'll have to keep this small area closed off for a few months - but we're keen to hear ideas about how it could be used in the future.  The reserve's Wildlife Explorers Club members have already drawn us lots of pictures with their thoughts.  It'll be the autumn before we make any changes, giving the soil and vegetation a chance to dry out and bind together.

But hidden among the reeds and the alders are even greater changes.  Volunteers have almost completed the creation of a replacement pond, and this will have a proper platform so that kids can dip their nets without dipping themselves in mud (actually most children don't notice, it's the parent who does the washing that does).  Last week, our team of field teachers previewed the pond and found the first sign of life: a solitary water beetle.  But as spring approaches, we're sure that wildlife will find this new habitat very quickly.

The final part of the jigsaw is a new boardwalk, funded by the donations of many and the hard work of volunteers in the RSPB Conwy Support Group.  It's wider, less slippery and longer than the old boardwalk, with new ponds and channels alongside that will be home to bugs, beetles and dragonflies over the next couple of years.  A winding walk through the reeds takes you to a new viewpoint looking across the lagoon and to the hills beyond.  It's going to be brilliant, but you'll have to wait just a little longer.  We hope to have the boardwalk available for use later this month and we're planning an official opening in May to thank everyone who helped raise funds for it.

Amid all the diggers, dumpers, drills and nailguns, you'd think the birds would run (or fly) a mile.  But they've been very tolerant.  In fact, I've heard the 'squealing pig' sound of water rails almost every time I've been down to check on progress.  The reeds are just starting to emerge from the soil and it will be only a few months before you'll walk the planks, warblers chittering and chuntering all around and you'd never know that we'd done a thing - except you won't get the feeling that you might fall through the boardwalk.

If you went for a walk at the reserve this weekend, you might have met my new friend.  For the last week or so, ever since the cold weather arrived, a robin has greeted me each morning when I open the Tal-y-fan Hide.  He or she is remarkably tame and has, on a couple of occasions, followed me into the hide.  In enclosed spaces, most birds panic and fly at a window trying to get out.  But not this robin, who hops onto the bench and looks expectantly for food.  It doesn't look terribly hungry - in fact, I'm becoming concerned about its impending obesity crisis.

During the winter, our resident robins are joined by migrants from Scandinavia, and these do seem especially approachable - perhaps they're just not used to people.  They hop onto the trails just in front of you, and many visitors have commented on them.

Some visitors have also commented on the falling water level on the lagoon outside the coffee shop.  For the last few days, we've been moving water between the lagoons so that work can begin to replace the boardwalk and to dig a new pond.  The old pond has become clogged with a non-native invasive weed, Crassula helmsii, and if we don't act, it could take over the lagoon.  The boardwalk has, after millions of footsteps, during the last 15 years, almost given up the ghost, so it's time for a new one.  Volunteers from the Conwy Support Group have raised over £10,000, enabling the work to get underway.  A big thank you to everyone who has generously supported this fundraising effort.  The contractors have just arrived on site.

This means that the boardwalk and pond will be closed until March, but I promise that it will be worth the wait.  By then, of course, the Tal-y-fan robin may already have begun its return eastward journey.  Its fat should see it through the rest of the winter, but I hope it can leave the ground when the time comes.

Postscript (20 Feb): our robin is getting a fanbase.  Several blog readers have now taken photos and video of him/her and shown them to us in the Visitor Centre - yesterday two little girls called Ella and Lucy showed me some video they'd taken of it hopping around the hide. The photo here was taken by Brian Anstey - thanks, Brian! 

It was all going to be so simple wasn't it?  After a few days off over the new year, visiting family in Kent and friends in Cambridgeshire, I'd get back into the swing of life on the reserve, catching up on some e-mails, planning work for 2009 and perhaps a bit of light blogging.  I'd even started to compose one as I drove down the M62, but that will have to wait for another day.

Instead, 8 am saw me gripping the steering wheel and heading for a stone wall with very little I could do about it.  Mercifully, I stopped short by inches, and then had to tread carefully towards the Visitor Centre, falling flat on my back just the once.  As anyone who lives in north Wales knows, we woke yesterday to a night of frozen rain having turned the region into an ice rink.  It's 1996 since it was last like this, and then the reserve was closed for 10 days.  This time, thanks to some drive-by gritting by a friendly man from the Council, and much shovelling of salt on our paths and steps, we were able to open the Visitor Centre and coffee shop by 11.30 am, but the trails unfortunately remain closed, as the paths are just too dangerous.  This morning, it took me 20 minutes just to thaw out the lock so that I could get into the reserve.  Then I fell over again.

Not that the birds have stuck around.  With both lagoons frozen solid, most of the waterbirds have left for somewhere they can find food.  We're giving the smaller birds a helping hand, with extra helpings of seed and supplies of fresh water, and even the water rails are foraging for excess seed from the feeders outside the coffee shop.  Times are hard for birds in weather like this.

That's why the RSPB and other conservation organisations have issued an appeal to all countryside users, including birdwatchers, to minimise disturbance to waterbirds on lakes, rivers and the coast.  Using energy unnecessarily means that birds have to work even harder to find food that is locked away under sheets of ice and frozen mud.  If we have another week of cold weather, there'll be a ban on shooting waterbirds too, to give them a chance to recover.

But the blue tits don't seem bothered.  A pair had been prospecting a nestbox before Christmas, and they were in and out of there again today.  They may be roosting in it, of course, or perhaps there are a few juicy insects tucked in the corners, but it's a reminder that for birds, the longer days are a signal that breeding starts soon.

 Summer will soon be here...

We hope you've had a good break over Christmas and New Year.  The birds have enjoyed their Christmas dinner, provided by some of the children who came to our Christmas Fayre a few weeks ago.  The tree, donated by Talgoed Nurseries, has been festooned with nuts. suet, fat-covered pine cones, fruit and coconut for several weeks, and the birds have had a field day.

They were reticent at first, of course.  Just as when you put a new feeder in your garden, it took them a little while to pluck up courage.  The blue tits were first to inspect, always a little more courageous than the other birds, but able to dart away at the first sign of trouble.  Next came the goldcrests, tiny colourful waifs perhaps from continental Europe and probably after the little insects that lie deep between the needles.  The local pigeons were next, balancing precariously on the fat-laden star that sits atop the tree.  Even the moorhens weren't going to miss out on a free lunch, walking beneath the tree, then jumping up to reach the low-hanging fat.

Alan and Audrey, who organised the tree, have had to do some refilling of the goodies, such has been its popularity with the birds.  It's also captured the imagination of the many visitors who have been here to enjoy the crisp, clear weather this week.  The tree even popped up on the BBC Radio 4 website, after Jan Miller, who is a local volunteer with Butterfly Conservation, took some photos and posted them to the their blog.

On Christmas Eve, I had the pleasure of giving prizes to the winners of our competition to design a Christmas card.  The entries have been brightening up the coffee shop over the holiday, and four of the six winners were able to join us for a little prize-giving celebration.  Well done to all of them.

This will be my last posting of 2008, as I'll be away for the New Year.  Thank you to everyone who has read my blog, left comments on the website or in person at the reserve during the year.  We appreciate your support for the RSPB and Conwy throughout the year.

Blwyddyn Newydd Dda/Happy New Year. 

In answer to my question of last week, the scraping of ice on cars each morning proves that it's certainly winter now.  This week, the lock on the front gate froze one morning, and on another the latch on one of the trail gates was frozen shut.  Thankfully a bit of heavy breathing did the trick to release each of them.

The reserve is at its finest, I think, on mornings like this.  The sun doesn't appear over the hill until after 8.30am now, but its early orange rays light up the Carneddau long before they bring any warmth to chilled bones at Conwy.  The Carneddau is the range of mountains we can see from the reserve, and includes the second and third highest peaks in England and Wales (to any Scottish readers, I know this is a bit weedy, but we're proud of our view).  This morning, the tops shone pinkish as the sun hit the overnight snow, and in the still morning air I watched a group of black-tailed godwits settle onto the islands as the crying call of curlews drifted across the lagoon.  Magic.

Appropriately enough, I enjoyed this moment from the Carneddau Hide.  Each of our hides and screens is named after one of the hills or mountains that lie across the river, the others being Foel Fras, Benarth and Tal-y-fan.  A few minutes before seeing the godwits, from Tal-y-fan hide, I'd watched a water rail thrashing a small fish - a roach, I think - on the ice, presumably to stun it before eating it.  Whether the water rail had caught it or found it stuck in the ice I don't know, but it was certainly going to make the most of its breakfast, as it carried the prize into the reedbed.

Visitors have seen water rails all over the reserve today, with especially good views from the coffee shop and along a cut of reed next to the boardwalk.  Colleagues from Lake Vyrnwy visited last week to cut a route through the reedbed that we hope will soon host a new boardwalk - many thanks to them.  Visitors to our Christmas Fayre last weekend generously donated over £1200 to volunteers from the Conwy Support Group, bringing the £10,000 target for the boardwalk a great deal closer.  Many thanks to all who have helped so far.

So, don't be put off by the cold.  Wrapped up well, the reserve is a superb place for a walk at the moment.  Though I think that last week's cowslip has withdrawn back into the soil for a few more months!

It must be winter, I thought.  The first fieldfares 'chacking' over the reserve, joining the many redwings that I've heard every morning for weeks.  A few more goldeneyes on the lagoons, the last yellowing willow leaves blowing in the breeze.  And then Julia, one of our longest-standing volunteers at Conwy, spotted a flowering cowslip outside the coffee shop.  Yes, a cowslip.  That classic flower of limestone grassland, which I normally see round here in late April, was bobbing in the wind.

A couple of days later, as I was tramping round the foothills of Snowdonia for the latest stage of the Bird Atlas project, I noticed even more plants in flower: red campion, creeping buttercup, foxglove and gorse.  Some of these do, of course, occasionally flower in the winter, but to see so many in a morning at several hundred feet altitude was a surprise, and perhaps another indication of the way that changing climate can spring surprises for nature.

But it really is winter, it must be, as our plans for next weekend's Christmas Fayre are well underway.  We'll have art and woodcarving in the coffee shop (including Tina Holley unveiling a brand new painting, Winter Light, which features a view of the reserve), Tipyn Bach chocolates in the Visitor Centre, lots of fun activities for children (face painting, design a Conwy Christmas Card and decorate our tree), as well as guided walks and all the Christmas gifts in the Visitor Centre.

We look forward to seeing you there.

We've been doing food at RSPB Conwy this week.  If Napoleon's army marched on its stomach, Team Conwy seems sometimes to march on cake, but I digress...

We spent the weekend at the Gwledd Conwy Feast, showing the birds on the estuary to visitors and telling people about RSPB Feed the Birds Day.  A sterling job by volunteers from the North Wales Local RSPB Group.  The Feast is a huge food festival that involves the whole walled town - from estuary seafood to locally brewed beer.  We talked to hundreds of visitors who were as keen to feed their garden wildlife through the winter as to fill themselves with all the goodies on offer.

Then we celebrated Wales' status as the first Fair Trade Nation in the world by welcoming the Wales Fair Trade flag to the reserve this week.  The RSPB is a proud participant, with Fair Trade products available in our coffee shop.  Lots of families came to join an afternoon of Fair Trade Fun, and hold aloft the Fair Trade and RSPB flags (while the driving hail had the decency to stop for five minutes).  We think it's right that farmers should receive a fair price for their produce (wherever they are in the world), while Fair Trade also helps to improve social welfare and education in developing countries, in tandem with farming that doesn't damage wildlife and the countryside.  The kids at our event all agreed, as they scoffed the Fair Trade gingerbread men and cola, courtesy of Kingdom Krafts and the Conwy Fair Trade Coalition.

Perhaps one of the best examples of food that benefits wildlife is honey.  Tony and Menna Griffiths brought a bee-hive and explained how bees are so important to life on earth, pollinating plants as well as producing lovely honey.  Did you know that a beehive contains 70,000 bees?  I didn't.  Tony and Menna sell their bees' finest work at our monthly Farmers Market, along with local producers of everything from bread to beef, eggs to apples and carrots to cakes.  Today was Market Day, with lots of visitors filling their bags with local food that hadn't been trucked round the country in a refrigerated lorry.  Real food, from real people.

Farming and wildlife have a lot in common.  Both have been let down by years of EU production subsidies, and farmers' skills and livestock can make a big difference in reversing the declines of once-common birds that we love to hear.  It was great that visitors to this website voted the first Nature of Farming Award to a Welsh farmer.

There may be no F in birds, but there's plenty of Feast, Fair Trade and Farmers Market at RSPB Conwy.