After just one day, 'Birding in and around South Staffordshire' uproots to Anglesey as we go on our annual family vacation. On arrival, while my wife and girls do the food shopping in Holyhead's Tesco, I pull in down the road and spend an hour at Penrhos Coastal Park.
Coming from a land-locked background it's always a novelty to see certain birds on the sea and the first birds I saw on open water were four great crested grebes diving 200 metres from the shore. Adult and juvenile swallows were also feeding low over the shore and calm sea.
In the evening I had a walk around our caravan park near Llanfechell. Numeous herring gulls (pictured above) on the fields and in flight. The odd lesser black-backed gull in amongst them but no other gull species.