RSPB Scotland has been managing RSPB Lochwinnoch nature reserve since 1973 when we first purchased parcels of the land or entered into long term leases for other sections. Since that time, with the addition of pathways, viewing facilities, visitor centre and car park along with large scale habitat management and continuous maintenance of the site, we have transformed it into the popular visitor attraction and home for wildlife that it has now become. But what hasn’t changed over that time is our desire to engage with the public, to provide people with opportunities to view wildlife, allowing them to experience it first hand and develop their own connections with nature.
As so many of us are acutely aware, connecting with nature and experiencing the outdoors has never been more important. Not only does it benefit our own mental and physical health, but it is also the single most important first step in a journey that has the potential to deliver real action for the environment.
Helping solve the current biodiversity and climate crises demands real action, but first people need to be engaged and inspired by the natural world. RSPB Scotland Lochwinnoch is well placed to do this, receiving approximately 25,000 visitors a year and keen to attract more.
With our proximity to the train station, bus routes, national cycle routes and long-distance footpaths, we are keen to widen our audience and encourage more visitors that arrive by green travel. Our ambition is to develop the reserve as a highly accessible, high-quality visitor destination in the Renfrewshire and wider surrounding areas but keep the carbon footprint as low as feasibly possible. With this in mind, we aim to encourage visitors to use green transport and improve accessibility by moving away from charging for entry to a car parking charge for non-members visiting the trails from the 1 December.
We wish to make RSPB Scotland Lochwinnoch accessible to all and feel that a switch from entry fees to a car parking charge will create a higher value for money visit, encouraging more visitors, more often. By growing our visitor footfall, we hope to reach a wider, more diverse audience and provide them with an excellent, inspiring, and engaging day out, ultimately leading to increased levels of public support for nature conservation and allowing our visitors to be inspired through connecting to nature up close.
We have in the last few years improved our visitor offer with new additions to the trails, new viewpoints and infrastructure to help visitors easily spot more wildlife and developed brand new habitat, increasing the abundance and diversity of wildlife that can be viewed all year round, with plans to do far more.
By changing from an entry fee to a car parking charge we will be offering an overall better value for money experience, for example a family of four non-members may pay £7.50 for entry fees which will be reduced to only £3 for car parking or free if arriving via green travel.
The income generated through our charges not only supports the vital conservation work we carry out here to help wildlife, but it also contributes to the ongoing cost of running the facilities visitors use at the reserve, including the picnic areas, toilets, trails, hides and the car parking area.
RSPB members will of course receive free use of our facilities as a thank you for regularly supporting our nature conservation work and shop customers will be allowed up to 30 minutes free parking. Thanks to RSPB members we have been able to plan, design and source funding for the new scrapes which have seen an increase in the abundance and diversity of waders using the site including only the 13th ever record in Scotland of a black-winged stilt