I’ve been walking across Cardiff Bay’s Barrage and back quite frequently in the past fortnight, searching the skies and the rocks for the migrating birds that normally appear around this time: Sand martins, Wheatear, Swallows and anything else that decides to drop in for a stopover on its flight north.

And that was what I was doing around midday today when I spotted two Rock pipits grazing on the Barrage’s grassy slopes. I sat on a conveniently placed bench and watched them for a while as they pecked and poked around the low-growing grasses and wildflowers.

Both were collecting invertebrates too tiny for me to see but then one Rockit, the birders’ abbreviation for Rock pipit, found itself an earwig. Though the little insect was squirming for its life, the Rockit had it grasped firmly and, for the earwig, there was no escaping its fate. A couple of quick whacks and down the Rockit’s hatch it went, a tasty lunchtime morsel.