Wow! Wow! Wow! 

Regular readers will know that Island Mere Hide has always been my favourite place at Minsmere. I could easily spend a couple of hours there just sitting, watching, waiting...and chatting to visitors. Even a dull dreary day it's a special place, and I can expect to see at least one or two of our reedbed specialists. But today it was simply awesome.

I know it's easy to use words such as awesome, incredible…

We've just received a fabulous email from one of Minsmere's earliest ever RSPB volunteers, which I thought everyone would like to read. We love hearing your memories from Minsmere past, especially as we continue to celebrate 75 years of Minsmere.

Guest blog by Brian Morris, Minsmere volunteer in 1947

I have just returned from a short holiday in Suffolk. Whilst there I visited Minsmere and was surprised to find…

As regular readers will know, we've been celebrating 75 years of Minsmere as an RSPB nature reserve this year. It's also 60 years since the Scrape was first created by Bert Axell. With these two milestones in mind, two recent discoveries take on even more significance.

During the construction of the long-awaited new accessible boardwalk to East Hide, our contractors Gilleards have unearthed not one, but two pairs…

Autumn is a great time to enjoy a walk around Minsmere with a different perspective. Instead of focussing the attention on birds, it's well worth taking a wider perspective and enjoying the wonderful colours and varied fungi, especially on a beautiful sunny day like today.

Before I show you some examples of this autumn splendour, and a summary of sightings from the last few days, here's a heads up for some important…

The milder weather and southerly winds this week have delayed the arrival of winter visitors, though there was a brief brambling underneath the visitor centre feeders yesterday. In fact, there have been more late summer migrants passing through than new arrivals, with several hundred house martins and smaller numbers of swallows passing through during the week, as well as a lesser whitethroat and a few blackcaps in the…

The autumn is often a good time of year to look for one of our most popular birds, the bearded tit, and they have certainly been putting on a good show this week. Also known as bearded reedlings, or simply beardies, the name bearded tit is a real misnomer. They are neither tits, nor bearded. They are, in fact, more closely related to the parrotbills of southeast Asia, and the male's black "beard" is actually more of a…

We had great cause for celebration earlier this month as our oldest volunteer, Betty Nelson, celebrated her 102nd birthday in the cafe, and finally retired from her volunteering duties.

Betty blowing out her candles with fellow Minsmere volunteers Chris and Steve

Betty first started volunteering at Minsmere about 30 years ago, and many visitors will have met her during the 1990s and early 2000s when she regularly worked…

I love the unpredictability of birdwatching in autumn. On a calm day like today, it can be eerily quiet, apart from the mournful winter song of the robin, but if the winds swings to the northeast then birds may flood in from the continent, calling constantly as they pass overhead.

Even today, though, I was treated to some fantastic birdwatching, including spending several minutes marvelling at the flying skills of a female…

There has been a noticeable shift in the season this week, with summer coming to an abrupt end and a definite autumnal feel to the weather.  In fact, when I came in for our final moth morning of the year at 6.15 am today it was rather too chilly to still be wearing shorts! The sunrise was worth the early start though.

One of the first indicators of autumn is the first arrival of winter migrants, and today saw the discovery…

I have to start this blog by paying our respects to our patron, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 2.  As you may have read elsewhere on our website or social media, we have marked the sad news of her death by closing all our visitor facilities for the day today. We will reopen as normal tomorrow.

When the Queen visited Minsmere with Bert Axell in the early 1960s, it would have looked very different to today. There was no visitor…

With Boris Johnson visiting the site for the proposed Sizewell C reactor today, we can't understand why a Prime Minister that claims to be tackling the nature crisis wouldn't spend some of his trip visiting Minsmere to better understand the effects the development will have on this internationally recognised and critical site for nature. Due to consent being granted against the recommendations of the Examining Authority…

Earlier in the summer I was fortunate to meet one of the UK's best young birdwatchers and campaigners. Mya-Rose Craig has been birdwatching all her life - she was taken on her first twitch at just nine days old - and has already managed to spot more than half of the world's bird species, but that only tells a small part of her story.

Birdgirl is much more than a tale of Mya-Rose's birding adventures with her family…

It can hardly have escaped anyone's attention that we are in the middle of one of the worst droughts in living memory. Here at Minsmere, as in most of the rest of Suffolk, we haven't had any recordable rain since late May. Consequently, much of the reserves looks more like a desert than a wetland. Even in a "normal" year (whatever that is), average annual rainfall on the Suffolk is less than in most of Turkey, but this…

Guest blog by Minsmere volunteer, Mark Solomons

Van Gogh had his sunflowers and Wordsworth romanticised daffodils. But one of Britain's most stunning yellow flowers has consistently been overlooked: gorse.

Yet gorse, which is native to Britain, shines like the sun for most of the year, has an exotic scent and plays a vital role for our wildlife, and even human health.

Literary giants have often written about gor…

A guest blog by Education, Families and Youth Officer Emily Figgins 

Moths, for a keen nature lover and enthusiast, they are an exciting and eye-opening world of the natural world. However, they have gathered a reputation for being clothes-eating, dull and boring, pests. I am here to de-bunk those myths and convert people to the magical world of Minsmere’s moths.

My fascination, admittedly obsession, with moths…

As my last blog shows, even if our birds are not paying ball, there is still a good chance to spot something a bit more unusual on a walk around Minsmere, and the last two days have proved this, once again.

It certainly pays to look carefully in the long grass on the inland edge of the dunes, where several gorgeous wasp spiders (photo below) have emerged to hunt crickets. These large black, white and yellow striped spiders…

It was a red-letter day on Thursday for one of our regular visitors, although he didn't realise quite how eignificant his sighting was until he posted his photos late on Friday evening. I'll let Les take up the story himself.

"I had decided to spend on Thursday a day looking around Minsmere for the dragon- and damselflies, as I do this every year while the bird population is quiet. I started the day at the pond…

Apologies for the delay since my last sightings blog. It’s been a busy few weeks, with staff illness, holidays, and running workshops at the Latitude Festival meaning that I’ve struggled to find the time to complete some of our routine admin tasks, never mind write a blog.

It’s also been hard to know exactly what to write as our wildlife has come under more stress than I can remember during my 20 years at…

It’s all action on Digger Alley now, with all of the usual suspects on show: bee-wolves, ornate-tailed wasps, red-banded sand wasps, ruby-tailed (jewel) wasps, pantaloon bees, green-eyed flower-bees, pointy-bum bees, dunes chafers and much more besides. Steve and Davene, our Digger Alley experts, even think they may have discovered another new species of pointy-bum bee this week!

Ruby-tailed wasp by Steve Ever…

In the week or so since my last blog, we've been visited by several notable globetrotters of both the avian and human varieties. The latter have included representatives of conservation organisation in Denmark and Indonesia visiting Minsmere to learn more about how we manage the reserve for wildlife and people. I've also had some lovely conversations with birdwatchers from the USA, Canada and South Africa this week.…

This week is National Insect Week, and it's certainly been a great week for insect sightings at Minsmere, from butterflies to moths, bees to wasps, dragonflies to beetles.

First, the really exciting news is that Digger Alley is open for business. When I walked through on Tuesday I must have seen (and heard) at least 50 green-eyed flower-bees, their distinctive buzz filling the airwaves. As always, they were very mobile…

Visitors to Minsmere over the last few weeks may have noticed more dead birds on the Scrape than usual. We can confirm that dead birds tested by Defra for avian influenza at RSPB Minsmere last week, have tested positive for the disease. We appreciate that it is distressing, for both visitors and staff, to see dead or dying birds at our site but we ask that if visitors see any dead or unwell birds, they do not touch or…

Summer is always an exciting time for insect lovers, with a great variety of butterflies, dragonflies, bees, wasps and other species on the wing. I saw my first silver-washed fritillaries of the year along the Woodland Trail yesterday and expect the white admirals and purple hairstreaks to be active very soon. Silver-washed fritillary is a relatively recent arrival at Minsmere, and one of the UK's largest and most spectacular…