Your favourite RSPB nature reserve

I've just been looking through the proofs of our annual nature reserves review and it's a lovely document which will be available at the Bird Fair in August, and on our website around the same time.

Over the next few weeks I'll summarise some of the stories that are in that report but it got me thinking about the RSPB's 200+ nature reserves.  They are such diverse sites, from Ramna Stacks to Marazion and from Belfast Harbour to Minsmere.  I like all of them of course, although I reckon I've only visited about 120 so far, but I do have some favourites.

As a school boy I volunteered at Arne, in the summer of 1975 - in fact the warden at the time, Brian Pickess, handed me the envelope with my A-Level results!  I spent time counting cars driving past (I forget why!), doing bird counts and clearing litter.  At least that's what I remember.  But I also remember seeing Dartford warblers, Sika deer, sand lizards, adders, smooth snakes and getting to love the heathland habitat that supports them all.

A few months later, I was volunteering again, this time at Minsmere, in my gap year before university.  Minsmere in February and March 1976 was a much smaller and less busy nature reserve than the present set-up with its visitor centre and cafe. Then there was a small green hut (was it green - again that's how I remember it?) perched above the sand martin colony where visitors had their permits checked and validated.

Minsmere is still a marvellous place with a variety of habitats that mean that its wildlife is amazingly diverse. On a visit this year I saw a barn owl hunting, heard bitterns booming and began to learn the difference between the cries of black-headed and Mediterranean gulls nesting on the Scrape. 

My first job with the RSPB was working in the Flow Country in Caithness and Sutherland - where we now have our largest nature reserve at Forsinard.  Although there is, like at Arne, plenty of heather the wildlife is quite different of course.  The Flow Country has dunlins and greenshanks, common scoters and black-throated divers, merlins and golden eagles, Arctic skuas and common gulls nesting across its wide open watery heaths,  And you'll hardly see a person all day however far you walk.  It's a bit like a small piece of Scandinavia hidden away at the top of the UK mainland. 

The Dinas is another favourite of mine - a Welsh oakwood which, again, I used to visit as a child.  Here in the spring the characteristic birds of western oak woods return - the pied flycatcher, tree pipit, restart and wood warbler.  It's a lovely wallk around the conical hill of the Dinas by the River Tywi and it was here, last spring, that I took my friend the journalist Mike McCarthy of the Independent newspaper to introduce him to the wood warbler and the places it lives as he was writing his excellent book 'say Goodbye to the Cuckoo'.  Mike's book captures the beauty of the place far better than I could.

The danger is that I could keep writing for another few thousand words about RSPB nature reserves and what they mean to me.  I suppose that there is a mixture of head and heart involved here.  Each site represents a continuing financial and emotional commitment by the RSPB - owning and managing land isn't cheap - and so we have to manage them carefully to try to deliver their full wildlife potential.  A lot of effort goes into management planning and delivery.  But they are also, all of them (?), just wonderful places, each with its own character and personality.

Tell me which is your favourite RSPB nature reserve, and why.