We were hoping for a good turnout for our Stargazing evening at Loch of Strathbeg last night and we certainly weren't disappointed! It was by far the largest event we've had on the reserve for some years and in the end around 350 people turned out to come and learn all about the night sky. Experts from the Aberdeen Astronomical Society were kept busy showing people planets, stars and nebulae, with up to 80 people queueing to look through their telescopes at any one time! The whole night also played out to a very noisy soundtrack of roosting pink-footed geese who were still calling and chattering amongst themselves as we packed up and went home at about 10.30pm.
Huge thanks to everyone at the Aberdeen Astronomical Society for providing all the expertise and their brilliant optics and for making sure everyone had such a great time. Also thanks to our two new volunteers who thought they'd just be on standby in case we needed an extra hand and ended up doing pretty much a full night's work!
We're really hoping we can run another of these events in the future so if you were one of the people we had to turn away because the car park (and the entrance track, and quite a bit of the roadside) was already full of cars, hopefully you'll be able to join us again soon.
It's been a slightly calmer day today, giving us a chance to spend an hour doing our Big Garden Birdwatch. It's a bit unfair to include the whole reserve, so we've restricted our count to the Wildlife Garden and the feeders outside the office window. We had a pretty respectable 11 species with the largest single count being 27 chaffinchs, although typically lots of regulars decided to turn up just outside the hour. If you've done a Big Garden Birdwatch this year (if you've forgotten, there's just time before it gets dark!) then don't forget to upload your sightings at http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/ so we can get a picture of how the whole country's garden birds are doing.