​Speaker: Steve Stansfield
Reporter: Sue Gale

Steve Stansfield lives in Norfolk for the winter, but since 1998 he has lived and worked on Bardsey Island (Enlli) for the rest of each year. He is now Director of Operations and works closely with Bangor University to study the Manx Shearwaters. He started his talk with a recording of the wonderful cries of tens of thousands of Manxies, which happen all night every night from March to September. Such an evocative way to start a talk, even if it did leave us wondering how anyone got any sleep. On a clear night it would obviously be a pleasure to be awake – Bardsey is now an International Dark Sky Sanctuary, the only place in Europe to boast such a designation. It would be worth a visit just to see the Milky Way on all its glory.

We now have the final results of the January Bird count and I thought it might be
interesting to draw together the results of the last few Bird counts since we re-started
after Covid.

Year                                                                    2023          2024       2025
Number of teams                                                 5                15            10
Number of people counting                                11                35           27
Winning team total number of species              88               81           77
Total number of species recorded                      93              96           92
Total number of records                                                        850        577