Inlet and Estuary - Gower - page 194

The Burry Inlet qualifies as a wetland of international importance due to the sheer number of birds
present during the winter. It regularly holds more than 20,000 birds, with a total average count in the late
1980s of nearly 47,000 (Table 9). The inlet is also of international importance for the wintering popula-
tionsofpintail Anas acuta andoystercatcher,with1.7percentand3percentrespectivelyoftheEuropean
population (Fig.108).Oystercatchers wintering ontheinlet originate mainly frommainland Scotland, the
Faeroes and Iceland, as well as more local birds from the Pembrokeshire islands, and these patterns have
remained unchanged since monitoring started in the 1960s. Once settled in the estuary birds probably
winter there for life, and some initially ringed during the 1960s were still present in the 1990s.
TABLE 9. Waders and wildfowl on the Burry Inlet. Average peak winter counts 1983/4-1987/8. (Data ab-
stracted from Prys-Jones, 1989)
The area is also of national importance for three species of wildfowl, brent goose Branta bernicla ,
shelduck Tadorna tadorna (Fig. 109) and shoveler Anas clypeata . Five species of waders also meet
the same criteria: curlew, bar-tailed godwit, grey plover, dunlin and knot Calidris canutus . Vast densely
packed flocks of thousands of knot are often a distinctive feature of the south shore. There are a small
number of resident eider duck Somateria mollissima , which was adopted as the symbol of the Glamorgan
Wildlife Trust. The eider duck is one of the enigmas of Gower ornithology. Although both males and fe-
males are present all year round and some prebreeding behaviour has been observed there is no evidence
that successful breeding has occurred in the whole period from about 1900, when they were first recor-
ded, until today. The population has fluctuated in number, rising from 30 birds in the 1950s to over 200