As January rolls around the bend into February, I think all of us here in the North-east are feeling a bit like Johnny Cash in his classic Folsom Prison Blues – “I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when”. We’re now into our fourth week of unbroken high winds, perpetual rain and permanently overcast skies, and at the time of writing the medium-range forecast is for no change until at least mid-month. We might not be stuck in Folsom Prison, but at the moment we do feel stuck in a bit of a rut, the same dreich and dreary groundhog day being replayed over and over and over. In Johnny’s immortal words, time keeps draggin’ on…

During a particularly violent period of gales early in the week, Catriona headed over to the north-eastern boundary of the Reserve at Perthudden with the hand-held anemometer, to try and get an idea of the windspeed. The 61.6 mph she recorded wasn’t actually the strongest gust, but it was the strongest gust in which she could operate the anemometer in one hand and the phone camera in the other, while actually remaining on her feet.

At the opposite end of the Reserve, wind-lashed estuary and beach have been undergoing a good deal of, er, ‘re-modelling’. Seen from the high dunes south of the Ythan mouth, the landscape appeared raw and barren, with wind-drifted sand covering much of the lower-lying grassland.

On the estuary foreshore, the windward-facing dunes bordering the golf course at Newburgh had endured some considerable erosion, with an eight-foot sand cliff having formed in places where the dunes had been undercut. Strong onshore winds allied to high spring tides tend to generate powerful wave action on the shore, invariably leading to erosion on such a dynamic and soft coastline as ours.

The eroded dunes provide an unusual opportunity to see how Marram Grass ‘works’. We often refer to this plant as one of the building-blocks of Forvie, due to its ability to colonise, and thence stabilise, windblown sand. Marram Grass spreads by rhizomes – subterranean stems – which extend outwards in all directions, periodically pushing shoots upwards through the loose sand, each of which then develops into a new tussock. This network of rhizomes knits together the loose substrate, while the tussocks above trap further windblown sand, forming dunes of ever-increasing height. As the sand accumulates, the grass continues growing upwards towards the light, and the eventual result can be dunes of prodigious height – and rhizomes of prodigious length!

As we’re fond of saying here, the powerful forces of wind and tide take with one hand, and give back with the other – meaning that when there’s erosion going on, there’ll be deposition happening somewhere else. While the windward dunes and shores are currently giving up material, so the leeward hollows are accumulating it. Unfortunately, one of the major ‘beneficiaries’, for want of a better word, has been the dune slack which carries the boardwalk to the seal viewpoint at Newburgh beach.

The low-level viewpoint lies immediately north-west of some high and open dunes, and following three weeks of relentless and powerful south-easterly winds, those dunes have marched down to meet it. By Wednesday there must have been between upwards of ten tons of sand smothering the viewpoint, and when (or indeed if?!) these winds finally abate, it’ll be a monumental job to get it all cleared.

The Newburgh & Ythan Community Trust, who own and maintain the boardwalk and viewpoint, have our sympathies – we know all too well the difficulties of maintaining infrastructure in the dynamic landscape of South Forvie – and when the time comes, we’ll be there to help out and do our share of the shovelling. With the excesses of the Christmas break not far behind us, I for one could to with the extra exercise!

All the while, the Grey Seals at the adjacent haul-out have appeared not in the least bit perturbed – even if they were beginning to form dunes of their own as the windblown sand accumulated on the leeward side of their bodies.

In another frustrating week of odd-jobbing and catching up on some reading (some of it obligatory, and some of it actually interesting), I was pleased at least to get the ‘new’ windsurfing information sign installed. This is located at the end of Inch Road, Newburgh, a spot which gives a panoramic view of the lower estuary for our regular waterfowl counts, as well as being a popular launch site for watersports enthusiasts. For the Reserve staff, meeting the needs of both wildlife and human visitors on the Reserve is a perennial balancing act; providing information to visitors about responsible access is a key part of this.

The end of Inch Road was formerly a natural island in the estuary, and it has a long history of use and modification by people. The present-day road causeway is man-made, and the former island itself (now the parking area at the end of the road) carries the remains of various stone walls and structures. This means it’s a very difficult place to dig a decent post-hole for a sign, so I was forced to use some of the random bits of masonry littering the shoreline to form a stone ‘cairn’ around the base of the sign, lending it some extra stability. On lifting one particular stone from the top of the shore, a convention of tiny Shore Crabs scattered in all directions – see how many you can spot in the following photo…

I reckon a minimum of 14 – see the photo below. But even then, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d missed one or two!

This was a vivid illustration of the richness of life in the Ythan Estuary. If there were that many Shore Crabs under one rock, how many must there be on the whole estuary? And that’s just one species: what about all the others – the multitude of molluscs, worms, shrimps, fish and so on? The numbers must be almost incomprehensible. Hardly surprising, then, that the estuary is both nationally and internationally important for the birds that feed upon this smorgasbord of life. All that mud, shingle, sand and water, though it may appear to our eyes a barren wasteland, is actually a precious and irreplaceable natural asset.

It’s no bad thing to be reminded every now and then – as if we needed a reminder – what an awesome local patch we have here at Forvie, even in the dull and dank days of winter. It’s a place simply bursting with life – whatever the weather!

January 2026: picture the scene. First there was the snow. Then some more snow on top of that. Then the thaw, and the inevitable flooding. Then the rain, plenty of rain, just to keep things topped up. So, prior to this week, about the only thing we hadn’t yet had was a raging gale. Hold my beer…

Here at Forvie, an onshore gale set in last weekend, and at the time of writing it’s still lashing our eastward-facing coast. Winter storms are, of course, a fact of life here in the North-east, and on the Reserve it’s a case of adjusting our work to fit the prevailing conditions. There are certain tasks that are rendered impracticable, impossible or just plain dangerous in such conditions, but there’s always a list of jobs kept on the proverbial back burner for times like these. Unfortunately, these jobs tend to be piecemeal, mundane and frequently downright dull – not great ingredients for a thrilling read in the end-of-week blog. But please bear with me, and I’ll try and make up the deficit with some photos and video of the dramatic scenes along the coast during this week’s Stormageddon.

Here’s how things looked from a couple of vantage points around Collieston village, just to the north of the Reserve; these short snippets serve to give an indication of the ferocity of both wind and sea throughout much of the past week.

With outdoor activities somewhat restricted this week – and with an attendant risk of cabin fever setting in – I found myself holed up in the workshop for a couple of days, catching up with some maintenance tasks. As I say, this stuff doesn’t exactly make for great copy, but it is nevertheless essential work in the running of the Reserve, and it all contributes to keeping Forvie at its best for both wildlife and visitors.

Note in the photo below the red kneeling mat, kindly provided by former reserve manager Annabel, which is the sole reason that I still have functioning knee joints after nineteen years of servicing machinery on a cold concrete floor in the middle of winter!

One of the ‘cabin’ jobs was to resurrect the windsurfing sign, which had gone missing last year only to turn up in a lay-by on Loch Ness-side. While the story of how it ended up there remains a complete mystery, it was at least returned to us more or less undamaged, and could be re-used. What it lacked was a wooden frame; the special person who removed the sign in the first place had apparently used the previous frame for their camp-fire. Takes all sorts, apparently.

Thankfully this was a straightforward piece of construction (“We’re not cabinet-making here” is my constant refrain to Forvie’s seasonal staff / volunteers / apprentices when approaching a basic joinery task), and the new sign was soon ready to be returned to its rightful place beside the estuary at Inch Road in Newburgh.

With this week’s weather proving trying for us humans, how must it be for Forvie’s wildlife? The simple answer is that some species are far better adapted to deal with storm conditions than others. Our Grey Seals, for instance, are super tough, and are able to take the high winds, high seas and vicious sand-blow in their stride. The most they’ll have to do is to adjust their choice of haul-out site: often in an easterly wind, the seals tend to congregate in the mouth of the Ythan, in the lee of the dunes. In calm conditions or an offshore wind, by contrast, they favour the more open beach on the seaward side of the Forvie peninsula.

While marine mammals make light work of stormy conditions, life must be a good deal harder for some of our terrestrial mammals. Predators such as Foxes and Badgers rely heavily on their sense of smell for navigation and locating food, and detecting any scent is likely to be much more difficult in high winds than in calm weather. Like me in my workshop, they might be just as well to remain indoors, in their earths or setts respectively, and wait for better foraging conditions before venturing out.

Birds are a mixed bag in terms of their reaction to the storm too. Passing by Sand Loch, we noticed a hint of waterfowl movement this week, with a fine drake Goldeneye and several Red-breasted Mergansers dropping in at various points. Both of these species are diving ducks, obtaining their food beneath the choppy surface of the loch, so they’re able to carry on feeding quite happily despite the storm raging above.

It’s a far tougher gig for seabirds though. Even though most of our winter seabirds, such as auks (Guillemots, Razorbills and the like), also dive for food, the sea is a much less hospitable environment than the lochs favoured by the aforementioned ducks. Apart from having to contend with the sheer physical power of the swell, the birds are also faced with churned-up, turbid (cloudy) water, preventing them from seeing their favoured fish prey. The fish themselves, meanwhile may even retreat to the more sheltered depths, out of range of the birds. This all adds up to poor feeding, and if the rough conditions persist for more than a few days, the spectre of starvation looms large.

Shags, of which a tiny handful of pairs breed at Forvie each summer, are particularly susceptible to winter storms. Our friends at the Grampian Ringing Group reckoned that the Shag population in North-east Scotland was reduced by more than 80% following a recent stormy winter; we’ll have to wait until summer to see how they’ve fared this time around.

Speaking of seabirds and fish, we recently found this little fellow washed up on the beach just south of Rockend. I initially took this to be a Sprat, a common ‘bait fish’ in our waters and a favoured food of many seabirds, but a bit of research indicated that it’s more likely a European Anchovy – note the pointed little snout, and the gape of the mouth extending well behind the eye.

Anchovies are known to be present in the northern North Sea in various isolated locations, and are thought to be increasing in both range and numbers as our sea temperatures steadily rise. Who knows, Forvie’s terns may be dining on Anchovies rather than Sand-eels in future seasons!

This is, however, just speculation, and the way a certain species will react to climate change is about as unpredictable as the weather itself. But if current predictions hold true, we’re likely to experience a lot more stormy weather as time goes on.

As I type this the gale is still raging outside, but I can’t bear to be stuck indoors a minute longer. Fetch my boots and coat, I’m away out. See you again next week!

Following Danny’s farewell to Forvie at the end of 2025, the second week of the new year saw the remaining Reserve staff back in the saddle once again. The first half of the week in question was cool rather than cold, with a major thaw having taken place since the last posting on these pages, and the Reserve was unrecognisable from just seven days previously. Even so, a few stubborn patches of snow remained in sheltered spots and shady hollows, prompting one or two local old-timers to suggest that “it’s wytin’ for mair” (=waiting for more). I suppose only time will tell!

On Monday we divided our staff resources (i.e. one of us to each half of the Reserve) in order to carry out a check of all the footpaths and infrastructure following the festive lay-off. While water levels were predictably high following the melting of a foot of snow – never mind the rain we’ve since received – the Heath Trail footpath remains passable even in ordinary footwear. This serves as a vindication for our re-routing of the trail last winter: in stark contrast to the dry ‘new’ route, negotiating the ‘old’ trail this week would have required either chest-waders or a small boat.

The real up side of this is that we can now leave the wetlands on this part of the heath to continue developing naturally, creating lots of habitat for a wide variety of water-loving wildlife. On the Reserve, as in life, we try to avoid fighting against nature as far as we possibly can, preferring instead to work with the natural changes taking place around us. Ultimately, it’s up to us to adapt to our environment, rather than forcing the environment to accommodate us!

While walking the ‘new’ section of Heath Trail past the seaward side of the Coastguard’s Pool, I spied a sorry collection of feathers among the tangled grasses. Closer inspection revealed them to have belonged to a Woodcock, possibly a cold-weather refugee who had fallen foul of some predator or another (and hopefully not just an off-lead dog, but it can and does happen).

Later in the week we saw a live Woodcock near Cotehill Loch, being pursued in flight by three Carrion Crows. One of the crows managed to catch the hapless Woodcock by the foot, at which point we thought ‘game over’, but somehow it wriggled free and the chase continued. As the birds dipped over the horizon, we were left wondering about the final outcome, though we were of course rooting for the Woodcock.

Carrion Crows are generalist predators and scavengers, and aren’t finely tuned for catching and killing smaller birds. Other more specialised predators tend to make a ‘cleaner’ job of it: the powerful talons of a falcon, for example, tend to result in a quick kill, while perhaps the ultimate in ‘humane dispatch’ is a shrike, whose sharp bill delivers a swift and terminal nip to the back of its victim’s neck. Crow predation, however, somehow has an air of gangland violence about it, especially when multiple assailants are involved; as such we were relieved not to witness the probable demise of the poor old Woodcock.

All of this was a vivid demonstration of the vulnerability of slow-flying birds like Woodcock in open environments during daylight, which is precisely where they find themselves when frozen out of their usual woodland haunts by hard weather. This is why they generally operate at night, and spend the daylight hours snuggled down in the leaf litter, relying on their beautiful camouflage for protection from predatory crows and the like.

Contrary to forecast, Tuesday started wet, and continued wetter still. Just what we needed on top of all that snow-melt. What’s more, we had a wretched wader count to do, which always seems to coincide with a downpour and/or a gale.

As so often happens, the rain cleared at the tail-end of the job, leaving an annoyingly beautiful evening following our earlier soaking. C’est la vie!

Our most unusual ‘spot’ during the account was actually a bit of flotsam washed up on the shores of the estuary. In common use worldwide, plastic 45-gallon drums wash up fairly regularly here, and the clean and intact ones can be recycled into useful things like water-butts for the garden. With this in mind, we recovered the drum in question, but noticed that it was lettered with the address of a house… in Malvern, Jamaica! Whether it had floated the 5,000 or so miles across the Atlantic, or been ‘ship-assisted’ in the manner of various American birds to reach western Europe, we’ll never know. While this discovery was handy in giving me an excuse for this week’s title, the only minor disappointment was that it wasn’t full of Caribbean rum!

On Thursday we headed down to the ternery (aaaaaaarrrrrgghhh – surely not that time already?!) to check out the lie of the land following recent high winds, and to case the upcoming strimming job wherein we clear away all the previous season’s dead vegetation. This was a particularly fine afternoon to be out and about, and South Forvie looked splendid in the winter sun.

This was also an opportunity to inspect and maintain the infrastructure in that part of the Reserve, including the seasonal signage pertaining to the Grey Seal haul-out at the Ythan mouth.

The highlight of our trip to the ternery was undoubtedly the little flock of Twite, comprising about 60 individuals (plus a couple of Linnets for company), which were frequenting the vacant Sandwich Tern colony. I’m sure this was nothing to do with the delicious seed bait laid down by Grampian Ringing Group members in an attempt to capture them for an ongoing ringing study! Nothing at all…

In any case, it was a delight to see (and hear) them going about their business. Twite are in my opinion underrated little birds, with subtly attractive plumage and a gentle gregarious nature. Their common name is basically an onomatopoeic rendering of their call, while the specific part of their scientific name Linaria flavirostris literally means ‘yellow-nosed’, a reference to the yellow beak – which also makes for a handy fieldmark to distinguish your Twite from your Linnet.

Thereafter the working week ended with a sharp frost on Friday morning, which persisted through the day. At Waulkmill, miniature ice-floes could be seen making their way serenely down a becalmed River Ythan, while Logie Buchan reedbed looked pretty as a picture under the evening sky.

An agreeable end, then, to a productive week back at work – it was like we’d never been away!

The start of 2026 will long be remembered for the massive dump of snow we had from the 2nd January onwards. The reserve staff haven’t seen this much snow in their time here, and the fluffy, powdery, drifty snow cut off the reserve and village of Collieston from the outside world for several days. Local heroes were those folks with 4x4s that ran to and from shops, keeping the villagers’ kitchens stocked, and local farmer Andy, who bulldozed the road clear to the crossroads. Like many small rural communities, we’re really lucky in the folk around us here at Forvie.

The drifts made walking on the reserve very difficult, but lots of people did go out from the village, to appreciate the beauty of the fresh snowfall. Snow makes the world look pristine and covers up so many of mankind’s scars on the landscape, it’s like seeing the world renewed. Yes, it’s a pain if you want to go anywhere, but at the same time it is also strikingly and undeniably beautiful.

In the event, it was a few days until we could reliably get up and down the short distance between the village and the reserve. Both the track from the village and the road itself were waist deep in snow in places! At the Forvie Centre car park, some impressive cornices had formed where the windblown snow had found its way through gaps in the hedge.

But, immediately after the snow, we had a sudden and rapid – in fact very rapid – thaw. It rained for 14 hours, and much of the snow disappeared overnight. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that the roads were clear now… and so were the shelves in the local supermarket! Big waves replaced the snow as the weather spectacle in our area. Here’s Collieston pier taking a pounding on Wednesday.

Cold and/or stormy weather is bad news for wildlife but, for us, often a chance to see birds that might otherwise be shy and retiring, Hunger makes birds desperate, and they can be incredibly confiding in harsh conditions, giving exciting and rare glimpses of all sorts of wildlife. For instance, fieldfares – so often wild and wary – will take fruit in gardens, throwing their usual caution to the north wind.

Or, in the fields around the reserve, you might see grey partridge, standing out against the snow. Normally, they will huddle down, camouflaged in the stubbles, and you never see them. But, in the snow, you can easily pick out their plump shapes as the try to find bare ground to forage in. We’re very lucky to still be able to see this much-declined species around the reserve and village in good numbers, as they have already disappeared from huge swathes of our countryside, squeezed out by ever-more-intensive and efficient agricultural practices. Spilt grain and weed-rich stubble fields are manna from heaven for partridges, but are becoming harder and harder to find in our modern rural landscapes.

And bird tables may attract unusual visitors, too. This woodpigeon was joining the sparrows and chaffinches for a hand-out of seeds in our back garden in Collieston, just over the fence from the reserve.

if you’re really lucky, you may also bag something more exotic, like a brambling or redwing…a bit of Scandi chic in the snow.

But, ironically, our most exotic ‘sighting’ of the midwinter period wasn’t a bird, but another creature washed up on the beach. Initially reported as a pufferfish, this blue lumpsucker was a new species for us. And it does look exotic, an amazing blueish colour that the camera doesn’t really do justice to. They occur fairly commonly round our coasts but, like so many other marine creatures, they’re just not something you ever see… unless the tides deliver one onto the beach!

After an eventful first week to the year, we do wonder what 2026 might bring! One thing is for sure, our only constant is change – and whatever the year brings, we’re incredibly lucky to have the reserve and its wildlife on our doorstep to give us so much pleasure. We’re not ones for new year’s resolutions, but we can always recommend getting out and about – you never know what you’ll see, and just being in the outdoors is good for the soul.

Just remind me that I said that, when the next lot of weather is landing on our heads!

In the meantime, stay safe and keep warm, and we’ll see you out and about on the reserve as the new year marches on.

Given it’s that time of year, we thought we should perhaps create our own version of a well-known Christmas carol. Feel free to sing along…

On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…A partridge in the Ternery

Although the ternery is rightly famous for… well, its terns… another little-known but much-valued resident is the grey partridge. These are a bird we’re lucky still to have in the north-east of Scotland, as they’ve disappeared in a lot of places due to changes in agricultural practices. Turns out, they also seem to like the undisturbed habitat and long marram grass of the ternery area, and we often see at least two different families of chicks that have been hatched there.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Two cushie doos

‘Cushie doo’ is the local Scots term for woodpigeon. In recent years, one or two of the scrubby willow bushes on the reserve have gotten tall enough to support woodpigeons nesting. Well, when we say ‘nesting’ we use the term in the loosest possible sense…woodpigeons are contenders for the ‘Most Rubbish Nest’ award, cobbling together a flimsy platform of sticks that the eggs sometimes fall through. Sheesh.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Three ditching spades

Life’s a ditch. It’s one of those jobs that you’d never notice unless it wasn’t done. Then, quite suddenly, your paths are knee-deep in water. We’re pretty democratic about it…everyone gets their fair share of mud!

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Four fallen trees

We don’t – as we’ve often remarked – have that many trees at Forvie. But the ones at Waterside do occasionally make work for us after a big storm. And we’re always willing to help our sister reserves –  most often at Muir of Dinnet, where more than half the reserve is covered in trees, that do occasionally blow onto paths. We’ll soon have that cleared up, though!

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Five Yoldrins

This one may have actually been the true origin of the ‘five gold rings’ in the Christmas song – which, let’s face it, is the only bit everybody remembers to sing. A ‘yoldrin’ is an old name for a yellowhammer – a familiar and attractive species which breeds here in the gorse along the estuary side.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

….Six-teen hundred terns a-laying

By the time we totted up all the terns nesting in our colony this summer, we had over 1,600 pairs. The scores on the doors were 1,010 pairs of Sandwich terns, 509 of Arctic terns, 112 of Common terns and 9 pairs of Little terns. That’s a lot of eggs, and hopefully a net export of terns to the North Sea. It’s easy to forget, as we watch them fishing in the estuary over the summer, that ‘our’ colony is of both national and international importance.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

….Seven-arm octopus a-swimming

As regular followers of our social media will know, a positive media feeding frenzy resulted when the remains of a deep-sea seven-arm octopus washed up on the beach here. First reported by Paul on local FB pages, the reserve staff and marine biologist Lauren from EGCP collected the pieces a couple of days later. The media interest took us all by surprise, with Catriona and Lauren being interviewed by news outlets worldwide. It was also a reminder to keep your eyes peeled when you’re out and about – you never know what might turn up. Maybe even a mini-kraken from the deep!

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Eight flowers blooming

At this time of year, in the darkest days of winter, it’s easy to forget how colourful Forvie is in spring and summer. If we had to pick the eight flowers the most typical of the reserve they might be, in no particular order: scurvy grass, red campion, primrose, cowslip, wild pansy, bird’s foot trefoil, northern marsh orchid and heather. Yes, there are lots of others… but these are some of the commonest and prettiest.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Nine puddocks hopping

An old boy once said to me ‘Ere’s twa kins o’ puddocks. Ere’s the een ‘at hops an the een ‘at craaawls…’ Which is a nice summary of the different habits of frogs and toads, both of which are common here at Forvie. With its large breeding population of common toads, the Coastguard’s Pool is known a the ‘Frog Pond’ to many of the locals and, on a damp, mild morning in April, you have to do the ‘Dance of the Toad’ to avoid stepping on them beside the Sand Loch as well.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Ten deer a-leaping

Roe deer are common throughout the reserve but are not always seen, generally being fairly shy. They can jump impressively and it’s always a pleasure watching them clearing fences between the reserve and the local fields. Or dashing around in the sand dunes.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Eleven insects dancing

One of the sure signs of spring is when you look out over the loch in the low sun of a morning and can see a cloud of gnats or bibionid flies dancing in the light. We’re often asked about ‘the big black flies’ in late April time, and these are St Mark’s Fly… which emerge around St Mark’s Day (25^th April). These are also food for swallows and house martins, newly returned from Africa.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…

…Twelve hundred seals a-singing

While our seal numbers can peak at over 3,000 in late February-early March, there’s often just over 1,000 hanging around the Ythan mouth over the winter months. They make a great noise and their  ‘ooOOOoooOOOoo’ noises can carry over a mile with a following wind. From the Newburgh boardwalk and beach you can easily hear them ‘singing’ to each other, with a whole range of noises that gave rise to the old myth of selkie song.

So, there you have it… the Forvie take on a Christmas classic! Hope you have a happy and peaceful festive season, and we look forward to seeing you on the reserve next year.

By the time this article goes to (electronic) press, the sun will have set on the shortest day of 2025. Tomorrow, we’ll have a barely-perceptible extra couple of minutes of daylight, and a couple more the following day, and so it goes on. It seems unbelievable, here at the tail-end of the year, that we’ve now commenced the long climb to the summit of 2026, when it’ll be all terns and butterflies and sunburn (well, hopefully anyway). But that’s the truth: it all starts here!

This past week was our last full working week before the festive break, and as is always the case, it involved a lot of tying-up of loose ends prior to the holidays. We’ve always found that we enjoy our leave from work a lot more if we’ve successfully ‘cleared the decks’ before knocking off, and not left a mountain of unfinished tasks to be tackled upon our return. Or maybe it’s just down to my utter loathing of half-done work!

With this in mind, I set off on an exceptionally mild and grey Monday morning to Cotehill Loch, to complete the last piece of drainage work of the 2025 season. The job involved maintaining a drain coming onto the Reserve from our neighbours’ property – another fine example of the glamour of our working lives – but a nice straightforward task nonetheless. And after the chaos of last week, straightforward was just what the doctor ordered.

The only exceptional thing about the job was the temperature, which was well into double figures, and just felt a bit wrong for December. Having removed several layers of clothing and hung them on the nearby fence, I was soon into my work, not forgetting to take the obligatory ‘before and after’ photies.

Regular readers could be forgiven for thinking that we’re a wee bit fixated with ditches and spades here during the autumn and winter (Really? Moi?? Surely not). Right enough, we do disproportionately enjoy this sort of work; perhaps it’s the fact you can actually see a result in real time, or maybe it’s just the child in us all coming out (I mean who didn’t like splashing around in the mud as a bairn?). But in truth, we don’t like to do any more drainage work than we absolutely have to – simply because wildlife loves wet places.

As a neat case in point, the ditch that I was working in flows into a soakaway pool, which we unofficially refer to as the ‘duck pond’. This dries out completely in summer, but holds water during the winter after prolonged periods of rain.

The ‘duck pond’ is small, barely the size of a tennis court (though I’m not sure how it compares to that SI unit of water volume, the Olympic swimming pool). However, upon my arrival, up rose a pair of Mallards, eight Teal and a Snipe, all of whom were enjoying the delights of this tiny piece of flooded land. And that’s why we do as little draining as we can get away with!

During the course of the job, I was overflown by a couple of noisy, lively skeins of Pink-footed Geese tracking southwards parallel with the coast. Little movements like this are sometimes (but not always) associated with the onset of colder weather…

…and sure enough, the following day dawned bright, sharp and frosty.

What a transformation a little frost can bring to a landscape. From the grey and dank scene of the previous day, the overnight freeze turned the Reserve into a giant Christmas card. Season’s greetings indeed!

The pre-holiday period is when a lot of the Reserve’s infrastructure, machines and tools get a bit of TLC. We do most of this ourselves – the straightforward stuff like sharpening saws and blades, doing the oil change on the mowers, and cleaning and greasing everything that moves (yes, including the staff) – yet more of the mundane but essential work that keeps the Reserve functioning.

While at the bench vice sharpening a brushcutter blade, I was startled by a sudden whirr of wings, and my hair was parted by a House Sparrow which had popped under the roofing slates and into the workshop. After a few choice words on my part, the trespasser was gently evicted through the door, and the wisdom of the Venerable Bede was brought to mind. According to the sage, life is like the sparrow, briefly coming in from the cold of winter, only to be booted out again immediately by the warden. Or something along those lines anyway – look it up for yourselves!

There are other jobs, however, that are beyond the skill set and pay grade of either Reserve staff or sparrows. Such as carrying out the annual service on the wind turbine at the Forvie Centre, which took place on Tuesday afternoon. As part of this process, the turbine is lowered to the ground by hydraulic ram to allow access to the moving bits, and for that short while on Tuesday evening the skyline at the Forvie Centre looked oddly featureless.

With both dawn and dusk occurring during working hours on these short December days, we are able to jam in on the morning and evening ‘commute’ of some of our wildlife. Gulls are some of the more obvious ‘commuters’; many thousands spend the night roosting on the safe inshore waters of Aberdeen Bay, then heading inland at dawn in wavering, ragged flocks to feed on ploughed fields, flood-meadows and pasture. In the evening they can be seen making the return journey, often against a colourful sky, and represent an evocative reminder of the rhythm of life in the natural world.

On the dark mornings we may even bump into nocturnal species who are yet to turn in for the day, and on my way to the Cotehill ditches on Monday I was lucky to cross paths with a splendid dog Fox. Although this species is one of my nemeses in the summer, when we’re sweating blood on the Reserve in trying to protect our precious ground-nesting birds, I must admit it’s always a thrill to see a Fox at the other end of the year.

Any readers who frequent the Forvie Facebook page might already be aware of a campaign being run by the Shark Trust – the Great Eggcase Hunt – wherein they are appealing to beachgoers to look for the egg cases of the Flapper Skate. This large member of the ray family is classed as Critically Endangered by IUCN, having been driven to extinction in parts of its range by overfishing. The species became legally protected from commercial fishing in 2009, though they are still popular quarry for sport-anglers on a catch-and-release basis. While keen anglers are realistically the only folk likely to come into contact with an actual Flapper Skate, ordinary beachgoers like you and I can still look out for the large, leathery egg-cases washed up on the shore, and report them via the link above. Something to think about while you’re out on the beach walking down the Christmas dinner!

So with the working year all but done, it remains only for me to raise a glass and wish all our readers a happy and restful festive period, as we begin to look ahead to a hopeful, peaceful and wildlife-filled new year. Cheers and good health!

‘Start as you mean to go on’, so my old folks used to tell me. In other words, if you set about a task with a positive attitude and a determined mindset, you’ll be able to see it through with relative ease. Experience has since shown that the same can apply in reverse, whereby a bad start can set the tone for an ongoing litany of disaster. In a minor way, this past week was a bit of a case in point, though I won’t bore you here with all the things that have gone awry. But you just know that a great working week lies ahead when you’re already soaked to the skiddies by ten o’clock on a Monday morning.

As it turned out, Monday morning was the only available time slot to carry out the fortnightly waterfowl census on the estuary, so it was a bit unfortunate that it coincided precisely with a band of heavy rain arriving from the south. This was the sort of rain from which no amount of waterproof gear can totally save you. Our works-issue jackets and overtrousers usually perform pretty well for the most part, but on Monday they were found wanting, and by mid-morning we were already in need of a complete – and I mean complete – change of clothing. But, as Frank famously sang, that’s life.

Seriously wet conditions aren’t at all helpful for these waterfowl counts. Firstly, all the floodwater in neighbouring fields creates lots of lovely temporary habitat for ducks and waders, thus tempting the birds off the estuary and onto places where we can’t see (or count) them. Indeed, in some places it was hard to tell where the estuary ended and the ‘dry land’ started. And secondly, all that rain renders your optical equipment practically unusable. By the midway point of the count, I wasn’t sure if it was the telescope or my actual eyeballs steaming up.

What little wildlife we were able to see included some lovely fresh-plumaged ducks, notably the Wigeon and Teal which frequent the creeks and saltmarshes bordering the estuary. These are chiefly winter visitors to our shores, though small numbers of both species do breed in Scotland, with Teal having done so on the Reserve in the past. Teal are the smallest of our ducks, and arguably among the most attractive too. That said, the drake Wigeon is similarly handsome, and both species are at their very best just now, having recently moulted into fresh breeding plumage in preparation for the new year.

By the end of the count, a somewhat insulting glimmer of sunshine had appeared, heralding the passing of the rain and a clearance into a fine afternoon. At least a second change of clothes wouldn’t be required today!

Later in the week, on the Thursday afternoon, I had the pleasure of delivering an illustrated talk to the Banchory and Deeside U3A, a lovely group of interested and interesting people, on the subject of migration at Forvie and beyond. This was due to kick off at 1330 hours, so the preceding morning offered a good chance (or so I thought) of completing a minor piece of estate work in South Forvie.

In late October, Storm Amy had damaged the ‘Black Tern’ waymarker on the Dune Trail, which had to be recovered to the workshop for repair. With the necessary repairs having been completed earlier in the week, reinstating the Black Tern would be a nice easy job (or so I thought) to fill in an hour or two (or so I thought) prior to my excursion to Banchory. So off I went in the pickup truck – but on arrival at Rockend, where the track across the Reserve pops out onto the beach, I rather irritably discovered that Storm Bram (presumably Amy’s cousin) had done a fine job on Tuesday night of rearranging the scenery.

My attempts to navigate the most suitable-looking route down onto the beach soon landed me in trouble. The wind-drifted sand was extremely soft in places, and as quick as you can say “bottomed out”, the truck was sitting squarely on its transmission with all four wheels spinning. A good half-hour of digging, sweating and cursing later, and still it was going nowhere – and the 1330 start was looming ever nearer. For only the third time in 20-odd years of off-road driving, I was forced to swallow both my personal and professional pride, and call for assistance.

To my eternal gratitude, neighbouring farmer Andy answered the SOS call, and was soon on the scene to give me a helping tow. Red-faced but relieved, I set out on the road to Banchory, and arrived at my destination with approximately a minute and a half to spare before the start of my talk, whereupon I had to apologise for my last-minute arrival and somewhat dishevelled appearance. The U3A folks were very understanding, and kindly remarked that it at least added a bit of authenticity to proceedings. Amen to that!

Anyway, after all that excitement(!), the wretched Black Tern still hadn’t been returned to its rightful place. Having stowed it safely in the dunes at Rockend prior to my rescue by Andy, I returned the following morning to complete the job. With vehicle access to the beach now known to be impossible, there was nothing for it but ‘pick up thy tern and walk’. This provided the bonus of a couple of amusing conversations with nonplussed visitors, with me trying to make out that taking a giant tern on a ten-foot pole for a walk along the beach was the most natural thing in the world.

Thankfully the job itself was, as hoped, quick and easy, and the Black Tern flies again – at least until the next destructive storm anyway. Fingers crossed.

On the long walk down the beach and back, I was kept company by a flock of Sanderlings, busily working the strand-line like little clockwork toys, dashing in and out between the waves to snatch morsels of food deposited by the sea.

Even at noon – the high point of the day – the shadows fell long across the beach. This is a reminder that the winter solstice is just around the corner, and from this lowest ebb of the year, those shadows will soon be shortening once again.

The final noteworthy event upon which to report this week was the Vols’ Bash – that is to say, a festive end-of-season lunch for our volunteers and colleagues, and a chance for us to offer a vote of thanks for all their efforts through the year. Some lovely fare was on offer, including home-made caramel shortbread, tea loaf and even a Guinness cake. Unlike the bird count earlier in the week, there were no soggy bottoms here!

And so an eventful week has come to an end. I’m not one to complain, but can I have a boring week next time around please?…

Last week started off in much the same manner as any other working week at Forvie. A hurried cuppa, a check of the list of jobs to be done, a quick appraisal of weather forecast and tide tables, then boots and coat on, and out the door. With Monday having been the first day of the month, my list of duties contained such thrills as submitting the utility meter readings (yawn) and checking the visitor counters (two out of three broken down, sigh). However, just after 0900 I received a telephone call from a local resident and stalwart of the Grampian Ringing Group; this would at least guarantee some craic, so I gladly picked up. As it turned out, he was out for a walk along the estuary, and had found something odd washed ashore.

The description over the phone contained such intriguing nuggets of information as ‘weird cephalopod’ and ‘tentacles as thick as your arms’, and certainly warranted further investigation. As it happened, we were due to visit that part of the Reserve that very morning, to continue with the fence dismantling work we had commenced two weeks previously. The finder agreed to meet us on site. Our interest was piqued for sure. Unbeknownst to us, has been reported on the 28th via another local wildlife FB page so had been lurking on the estuary for at least a couple of days- as testified to by the second-hand-seafood smell!

Catriona and I were the duty staff on Monday, and being jacks-of-all trades, neither of us has a background in marine biology. However, as luck would have it, we know someone who does! Dr Lauren Smith from East Grampian Coastal Partnership is a marine biologist by trade, and was able to come out to the Reserve for a look. By the time we met up on site, Lauren and our local stalwart had located two substantial tentacles washed up on the beach. Whatever this was, it wasn’t anything that any of us had crossed paths with before.

By this time, we were speculating as to whether this might be the remains of a Giant Squid, with one having apparently previously been found washed up at Newburgh in 1998. However, and viz. the photo above, the absence of ‘teeth’ in the suckers allowed that species to be ruled out. Thanks to Lauren’s network of contacts, including some outstanding marine biologists, we received confirmation that this was in fact a Seven-arm Octopus, a rarely-observed deep-sea species, and a truly remarkable find. How it had ended up here was anybody’s guess.

If, like me, you consider an octopus with seven arms to be a contradiction in terms, then you’d be right. It does actually have eight arms; on males of the species, the eighth arm is much reduced in size, and specialised for reproductive use (honest – look it up). Alternative names for this species include Septopus (understandable, but biologically inaccurate), Blob Octopus (urrrrrgh), and my personal favourite, Giant Gelatinous Octopus (yum).

What was even more remarkable than the discovery itself was the media brouhaha that followed. Admittedly, this story is a blog-writer’s dream, and allows me to quite legitimately use all those old lines about the story growing arms and legs, and the media being suckers for it, and how it made for kraken good copy, etc etc etc. But I still can’t really explain why everyone went so bonkers for it – I mean we quite often find cool stuff on the Reserve, but we’re never sure what will capture people’s imagination. In any case, by the end of the working week, Lauren and Catriona had each been interviewed and quoted extensively, with Catriona having even spoken to ABC in Australia (!) – I guess it’s a change from their usual news diet of pummelling the Poms in the cricket.

In other news this week (see, they’ll make a journalist of me yet), we continued with the off-road trials of the on-loan electric pickup truck. The critical element of this was to see how it performed on the soft sand of Forvie beach, an exercise undertaken with no small degree of trepidation – get badly stuck, and it could be you having to phone HQ and explain why the new toy is up to its roof at high tide. So as a backup, we also took the old diesel truck and a stout tow-rope, just in case. Then it was a case of fastening seat-belts and crossing fingers.

I won’t bore you with the details here, but suffice to say we really put it through its paces. I have been driving diesel pickups on Forvie beach for nearly nineteen years, so I’ve got a good idea of what you can and can’t get away with. With this in mind, I deliberately pulled a series of manoeuvres that would be best described as ‘strongly unadvisable’ in a diesel truck, just to see what happened. And for the most part, it coped admirably, achieving things that would never have been possible in a diesel – very promising indeed!

In fact its only Achilles’ heel was when we put it into reverse, when it went from super-capable to utter liability at a stroke – presumably something to do with the weight distribution, or the balance of power between front and rear axles. Anyway, this was all very useful experience: testing new vehicles in real-life situations like this enables us to feed back to our colleagues at HQ, and thence to the manufacturers themselves, hopefully leading to further development and improvement as time goes on.

Now I’m not someone who enjoys off-road driving (quite why people pay good money, on their days off, to be clattered around inside a vehicle remains a mystery to me), but the sunset behind Forvie beach made this week’s exercise all the more enjoyable.

Forget the 4×4, give me a heavy rake and a muddy ditch any day. Thursday saw another chunk of the annual drainage works ticked off, this time along the coastal path between the Coastguard’s Pool and Hackley Bay. The worst bit (or most enjoyable bit, depending on your viewpoint) is the Mealy Burn, where the ochre-rich outflow from the Coastguard’s Pool passes under the long wooden footbridge. The idea here is to keep the water off the deck of the bridge; with the water level having been rising steadily lately, half an hour’s work saw it lowered by more than a foot – check the rusty tide-marks on the bridge supports in the paired photos below. Now that’s my sort of work…

Lastly, the end of the week saw another ‘super moon’ (observation: is it just me, or are they all ‘super moons’ these days – a bit like all new houses being ‘luxury’ or ‘executive’, and all household items being ‘packed with the latest tech’?) – this one apparently being the Cold Moon. In a moody sky with a broken overcast, this made for some atmospheric scenes over the Reserve at dusk.

Righto, that’s about all for this week. I’m away for my supper now – think I’m fancying some calamari…

It’s never the best start to the working week when you’re soaked walking TO the office on a Monday morning. But it was a continuation on last week’s theme of soggy socks and (as we’d say in the local dialect) “sipin’ weet” staff – and that was before 9am! Still, time, tide and weather waits for no man – or indeed reserve staff – and we just had to get cracked on with continuing dismantling the old eider fence. Still, at least the sleet had turned to rain….got to look on the bright side!

While we were doing some of the work on the fence, we were accompanied by a cracking male stonechat, who spent much of the morning following us along the fenceline. It’s likely that pulling up wire was disturbing small insects hidden in the vegetation, which the ‘chat was gratefully snatching up.

We often only half-jokingly say a lot of reserve work consists of cutting something down, digging it up or, in extreme cases, setting fire to it. These can be oddly satisfying jobs but it’s always nicer doing something constructive, building or repairing something. Consequently, we jumped at the chance to help repair a bridge at our sister reserve Muir of Dinnet during the week. While the decking is sound, the handrail had seen better days and, for safety reasons, needed replaced.

Another thing we only say half-jokingly is that we’re jacks of all trades and masters of none. And it’s true of reserve work – you have to turn your hand to a bit of amateur joinery one day, then be a professional field biologist the next. While some people might struggle with the lack of consistency, it’s often the very thing that reserve staff enjoy – the sheer variety in our work. One minute it’s clearing out drains….

….the next it’s counting seals. There’s been anywhere between 150- 700 around the Ythan mouth lately, thought the number varies greatly from day-to-day. The seals here can go on fishing trips for weeks at a time, ranging as far as the coast of Denmark or Holland. It’s tempting to think of animals we see locally as ‘ours’ but it’s easy to forget that nature knows few boundaries, and animals will go wherever food, mates or undisturbed resting places (like the haul-out here) are available.

Our fortnightly low-tide bird counts are another reminder of nature without boundaries. Many of the birds we see here are fleeing colder weather elsewhere, be it from up in the Arctic circle or from hill tops closer to home. We know from rings that there’s a Finnish-hatched curlew holding a winter territory near the end of Inches Road and many of ‘our’ other wading birds will also have come from a long way north.

They may even overwinter here one year, and choose somewhere completely different the next year. A couple of years ago we saw these black-tailed godwits, which had been ringed in a previous winter in Ireland.

While heading down Inches Road to do our bird count, we noticed several smashed cockle and mussel shells on the road. No, Molly Malone hadn’t been pushing her barrow through Newburgh instead of Dublin, the culprit was a bit closer to home. Both gulls and crows have learned to pick up shellfish and drop them onto a hard surface to smash them open. And the bonus of dropping them onto tarmac is you can’t miss, whereas if you drop them on the beach there’s a chance they’ll hit a sandy or muddy bit and won’t break.

Away from the estuary, while out clearing drains, we took the opportunity to check in on the dead whale at North Broadhaven. While it’s always sad to see such a magnificent creature dead, it’s also interesting to see how it has decomposed over the past couple of years. This natural process helps put nutrients back into the marine environment and the carcass of the whale has fed a lot of creatures as it beaks down. Quite a change!

In fact, change is one of the few constants in the universe. And we certainly see that, with the changing seasons, the weather and the constant throughput of wildlife. Especially the weather – we’ve had a bit of everything this week, for a soaking most days, to clear nights and overnight frosts.

Still, this isn’t a bad view to open the door to in a morning. But, as they say, ‘red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning’… I’m off to light the fire and boil the kettle before the next lot of rain arrives!