If you want to experience the noise and drama of a breeding seabird colony, you normally have to charter a boat and it’s pretty hard to keep your binoculars steady in a Force Eight gale.
Things are a little easier at
South Stack nature reserve on Holy Island. Here you simply climb up a few steps into clifftop
Ellins Tower and, from May to July, thousands of nesting birds will be clinging to ledges right in front of you.
The RSPB calls it a “seabird city”. Packed with guillemots and razorbills, and fulmars and puffins too – all making an almighty racket. It’s an unforgettable wildlife spectacle.
“Most seabird colonies are on offshore stacks,” says the RSPB’s Dave Bateson. “Here you've only got to walk 200 metres from the Visitor Centre to Ellins Tower to look straight out at a buttress with thousands of birds on it."
“The backdrop is massive seascape whichever way you look. If you wanted to design a visitor friendly seabird colony, it would be something like this.”
If you can’t quite see enough with the naked eye, you can borrow binoculars, peer through a telescope or watch live TV images from three different cameras. Afterwards, wandering through the largest area of maritime heathland in North Wales, you might well spot that iconic bird of Anglesey – the chough.
A type of crow with a distinctive curved red bill and a penchant for acrobatic aerial displays, the chough is one of our rarest birds. South Stack has eleven breeding pairs – a significant percentage of the entire UK population.