North Wales - Elegant Tern

A five hour drive is 'just up the road' for a lot of twitchers but for me, driving these kind of distances always feels like a massive effort.  Having been encouraged to go and see the elegant tern, a day-trip to Anglesey is the kind of madness that birders are quite familiar with.

But this turned out to be a belter of a day.  The elegant tern wasn't easy to connect with, hiding behind vegetation for periods particularly after the spectacular eruption of terns from the colony.

A really fantastic site though with large numbers of sandwich tern, and nice to see plenty of arctic tern with common tern there. A peregrine made an appearance late morning and a red-breasted merganser flew past.

Lunch in Holyhead late and a quick scan of the harbour revealed an adult black guillemot on the sea.

Was great revisiting Llyn Ogwen - sitting in the warm sun soaking up the scenery.

Dinner later enjoying the evening sun at Llidiart-y-parc capped off a lovely day.