On The Up...

While the nights getting lighter are generally a good thing, it does mean that the early goose counts is steadily getting earlier... It was a six am start today for the spring Icelandic Grey Goose Census. We were hoping that our numbers of Pink-Footed Geese would have risen a bit since the previous count of 17,300 as birds start to head north in preparation for their migration up to Iceland and we weren't disappointed. We managed to count a total of just over 27,000 geese this morning-one of our highest official counts of the season. Hopefully this number will continue to rise as more geese head our way from their wintering sites in Lancashire and Norfolk.

With feeding conditions not as good as they were in the summer the geese are usually in a hurry to leave the reserve in the morning and the best time to see them is currently around 7am. If you do want to visit and see the geese Tower Pool hide is open and we can open the centre for small groups if you give us a call and arrange it in advance.

Away from the geese, we're starting to see a few interesting waders arrive. Pick of the bunch was a very early Ruff spotted by a visitor (a mammal twitcher who'd driven up from Hampshire to see our ermine stoat!), and there has been around 50 Dunlin and several hundred Curlew scattered across the low ground. A couple of our volunteers walked from St Combs today and had good views of Black-tailed Godwit and Turnstone on the rocky section of beach just north of the reserve. We have also managed to hit bird number 100 on our year list- although we did realise that no one had listed Gannet yet despite them being regular offshore for a few weeks now, so there's a bit of a stewards' enquiry going on as to what the 100th bird chronologically actually is! The highlights from the centre continue to be superb views of the Short Eared Owl and young male Hen Harrier, and daily appearances (including, thankfully, in front of our visiting twitcher) by the ermine stoat.