Another cutting edge conservation update coming flying your way out of nowhere....!

1 white Snow Goose and a  Greenland White-fronted Goose were spotted from the visitor centre on Monday and a female Stonechat was seen by the path to Tower Pool hide a bit later on. Fen hide proved a good bet also with 3 Water Rail and 2 Scaup seen in the afternoon.

The Snow Goose was seen again on Tuesday and has been one of the regulars…

Today was another coordinated dawn goose count, followed by a count of all wetland birds on the reserve. If you were up at half six this morning you will know the weather was not at all conduicive to accurate counting. In wet and windy weather ducks, if they are sensible, tuck themselves away in the reeds or sheltered pools, so we tend to get quite low numbers. The geese however, tend to behave themselves, so…

Strathbeg has had a brilliant week for birds. Many of our waders have moved on but the ducks and geese are out in big numbers and a number of rare and interesting birds have been reported.

Monday brought us off to a great start with a Little Egret seen from Tower Pool Hide out on the low ground along with 120 Greylag Geese and 1 Long-tailed Duck. 2 Bearded Tits were heard calling their distinctive “ping ping” although…

Hello!

I'm Matthew Smith aged 23. I have been interested in wildlife since a young age but particularly birds and now moths. I also have a good knowledge on butterflies and dragonflies and damselflies. I first started out at my local RSPB reserve at Rainham Marshes in Essex where I volunteered for best part of four years to help turn an old MOD site, which was a derelict wasteland in to a fantastic nature reserve…

Whooper swans are the wildlife spectacle of the week. It seems wherever you go on the reserve or in the local area Whooper swans can be seen or heard. We are not sure exactly how many we have, as we haven’t done a full early morning wildfowl count for a couple of weeks. However, today there were 220 on the reserve and at least the same number again are probably flying off the reserve early in the mornings. …

There's lots of ducks doing their thing on the loch and pools right now with reports of up to 1400 Teal and another 1400 Wigeon. Watch them wigeon closely though because it seems a drake American Wigeon is hiding in amongst (reported today, 20th) and can, with luck, be seen from Fen hide. Totals of over 20 Pintail and more than 50 Shoveler have been counted on the pools and loch in the past week also.

Pink-footed Goose…

We had an early morning wetland bird survey this morning, otherwise known as a “WeBS” count This is a monthly survey across the UK coordinated by the BTO. It was also an Icelandic Grey Goose count, which is a coordinated count of all the pink-footed goose (and greylag) roosts in the country. We currently have a grand total of 22,260 Pink-footed geese using the reserve. There are also at least 2000 using a small loch…

Starting with geese, we had another early morning count this week and we totted up 18,650, which to be honest is rather a low figure for Strathbeg. Hopefully our numbers will go up in time for our next count on 13th October. However, 18,000 geese is still an impressive sight especially when about half of them are milling around the wet grass in front of the Tower Pool Hide early in the morning producing an amazing…

There's lots of goose action to be seen at Strathbeg this week with the first early morning Pink-footed Goose count totting up 22600. Honking alongside them are 5 Barnacle Geese, 13 Greylag Geese, 16 Brent Geese and 2 Canada Geese. Large lifts of Pink-footed Geese can be seen even during the day at the moment and we hope to see even more arrive over the next few weeks.

In addition to all these geese there's been good…

 

Those of you who have visited the reserve over the past week may have noticed a slight change to the usual visitor centre scenery. You may also have noticed the even stranger wildlife inhabiting it, complete with bright yellow hats. Don't panic thats just  some of our trusty volunteers from Aberdeen who have spent a couple of days with us getting stuck in to a bit of good old fasioned digging (below).

 

Strathbeg…

The Geese are back! Honk Honk!

After one final blast of hot weather it looks like, and feels like Autumn is here and right on time as expected our Pink Footed chums have arrived. The current count is in the region of 150 but groups of 10 or so are dropping in regular like.

The Pink Footed Geese can most likely be seen from Tower pool hide or the visitor centre on the rear most pools and rough grazing. It's all been going…

Gone a bit nuts?!

Residential volunteers Susannah Fleiss and Sarah Harris blog about their experience ‘badgering’ the locals...

On arrival if you had asked what we wanted to see or experience during the stay here the answer would have been ‘everything’! One of the special encounters experienced is with the badgers who live in a large sett close to the Starnafin cottage.

Having tried several…

For regular visitors to Strathbeg, you may feel ‘something’ is missing next time you are scanning the reserve from the visitor centre.   Your feeling would be correct, for the time being there will no Konik ponies on the pools in front of the centre.  It looks a bit bare without them, but don’t worry, they will be back soon.

The four ponies who are usually there have been temporarily moved onto the Mosstown…

It’s been a couple of grey, wet, misty, rainy, dreich days around Strathbeg this weekend. Like the typical contrary birders that we are, this is the kind of weather to get excited about in late summer as it brings lots of migrant birds that would otherwise fly past, down on to the reserve.

We’ve not been that lucky with little birds (we’re maybe the only site on the east coast that hasn’t seen at least one Greenish…

It's confusing passage wader week at Strathbeg this week. The pools and the low ground are full of waders of all shapes and sizes, almost all of which on closer inspection turn out to be Dunlin (the small ones) or Ruff (the bigger ones). We're not losing hope though, with this many birds passing through at least one of them's going to be something new and exciting!

We have also got at least 10 Greenshank…

Along with lots of other RSPB sites (and people in their gardens), we took part in the Big Wild Sleepout this weekend. Luckily, Saturday evening was bright and dry and 12 intrepid people joined us for the walk out into the dunes. Amy and Laura, one of our volunteers, led the hike along the beach while I helped transport some of the bigger tents down to the site in the truck.

 After setting up we had a long walk along…

Our summer trail to Fen & Bay Hides is now closed for the season. The summer trail will re-open in March 2014, until then the car access via the airfield will be open as normal.

Huge thanks to the neighbouring farmer who let us use his land for most of the trail.

The spell of good weather has well and truly broken this weekend with a whole day of endless and occasionally torrential rain since I arrived on the reserve this morning.

This means that although there have been birds around, they’ve not always been that easy to see over the past couple of days. The lagoon yesterday was just about typical- heaving with waders, around 50 Dunlin and maybe 20 Ringed Plover- all of…

Minor bird confusion to start the day today, with Terry one of our volunteers sure that he'd found a Wood Sandpiper on the pools.  I went over to have a look and was fairly sure it was the more common Green Sandpiper, a few of which have moved to the pools now that their favourite wet patch in the cattle field has dried up. Turns out we had (typically) been looking at two separate birds, with them both popping up again…

It was the second of our summer Wild Kids days today, and it was all about finding mammals - or more precisely how you find you've got mammals without actually seeing them...

Firstly we had planned to find a suitable patch of mud and do some plaster casts of animal tracks. Unfortunately (and this may be the only time I'll ever say this) it was too dry for us to find any mud at all so we bought out the backup plastic…

The highlight of the past week at Strathbeg has been the increasing number of waders turning up on the pools and the low ground. Our highest Black-tailed Godwit count is now up to about 75, although there aren't many around in the heat of the day (not often I get to type that!) they generally start appearing from about mid-afternoon.

This week they've been joined by am incredibly pale Ruff (which looks confusingly…

We've made the most of two glorious days of sun and warm weather this weekend, with another guided walk along the beach on Sunday and a trip out to Bullers of Buchan on Saturday morning. 

Our wander to the lagoon on Sunday afternoon was another brilliant walk, and it's great to introduce people to a part of the reserve that very few others ever visit. Depending who you ask, the highlight was either the incredibly close…

We're allegedly heading into summer now and it's still the small birds that are giving us the most excitment at Loch of Strathbeg at the moment.

The family of Bearded Tits are still regular around Fen Hide. Visitors have reported groups of up to 5 although sometimes there's just the odd single bird passing by. They were even spotted by some eagle eyed visitors from the centre at Starnafin last week. Quiet, windless…

The Moray coast has recently been listed by National Geographic as one the top costal destinations to visit. Nestled along this beautiful stretch of coast, between Banff and Cullen and about 20 miles from RSPB Troup Head, is the picturesque harbour town of Portsoy.

Each year Portsoy, with its two historic harbours, plays host to the Scottish Traditional Boat Festival. The festival is a blend of Scotland's rich maritime…

After a very productive end to May on the reserve - including Spoonbill a few Garganey, a Little Tern on the lagoon and Little Egret -  June has been equally exciting, with an array of birds sustaining more than enough interest.

Just after the time of writing, myself, Iain and Ellie were out on Mosstown and had an adult Turtle Dove. Flushed out of one of the cottages in the fields, it flew southwest towards Savoch Farm…