Autumn officially began this week, at least according to astronomical terms! In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the earth’s equator faced the sun and day and night were roughly equal in length. From here on, those of us in the northern hemisphere start to tilt away from the sun and our nights become longer than our days. The weather seemed to be paying attention to this, as Tuesday felt like a warm, calm summer’s day while Wednesday brought chillier winds in time for me to start the week!

I hope that I don’t sound too glum about the changing season though, for I love the nostalgic feeling and contrasting colours that autumn brings. On the reserve I have noticed this in the loss of the bright purple heather blooms as the flowers go to seed, turning the heath russet-brown and making the frosty green reindeer moss stand out (this ‘moss’ is actually a lichen). I also appreciate that dawn and dusk are at more reasonable hours, as it means that I am more likely to be surrounded by a chorus of birds and soft light to start and end the day.

The autumn equinox, combined with Saturday night’s full harvest moon brought particularly big spring tides this week. During a full or new moon, the Sun, Earth and Moon align, combining their gravitational pull and producing a greater effect on the tides – meaning lower low tides and higher high tides.

With high tide falling in the middle of the day this week, the wader count focused on eiders and red-breasted mergansers as they are easier to count when the high water forces them closer to the shore and into groups. Plus, deeper water means less diving for food and more time spent floating or resting, making counting much easier for me! These counts are part of the Ythan Estuary’s site condition monitoring, with non-breeding waterfowl one of the important designated features of the site.

Though the highest count was usurpingly at the estuary mouth where hundreds of eiders had congregated on the shore, I enjoy that the wader count takes you on a journey further up the Ythan Estuary through different habitats. From the gaping and shifting estuary mouth to the lesser-visited rustling reedbeds at Logie Buchan – with plenty to see along the way!

While walking the main paths of the reserve this week, most of the conversations I had with people centred around the abundance of chunky fox moth caterpillars that have us all watching where we step. So, I thought I should find out a bit more about them and how they plan to spend the winter!

These caterpillars hatched earlier in the year, around July, and have spent the summer gorging themselves on their food plants, including heather, willow, and meadowsweet, found in plentiful supply across the reserve. By now they’re reaching their full size, up to an impressive 7cm long, and will soon be hunkering down in the leaf litter to overwinter in a dormant state. They will reappear in spring (like us, looking to get some warm sunshine), before pupating and emerging as adult fox moths, which are seen flying in May and June.

Not all moths and butterflies overwinter as fully grown caterpillars, so the fact that fox moths do might help to explain why we’re seeing so many of them at the moment.

In contrast, unfortunately no butterflies were sighted during the last butterfly transect of the year carried out by our dedicated volunteer who has walked the dunes and heath come sunshine or rain each week over the season. We are extremely appreciative of all their efforts and sightings reported! Perhaps the butterflies have taken heed of autumn and started moving south or looking for somewhere to overwinter.

An unusual sight this week was a boat out on the Sand Loch. Boating isn’t normally allowed here to avoid disturbing the wildlife on and in the loch, but this was permitted to repeat a freshwater survey first carried out ~50 years ago. This work looked at the water chemistry, depth, and vegetation found in the Sand Loch and should give us an insight into how it has changed over time.

I now at least have the answers to two questions that I’ve been asked before about the Sand Loch: it is about 1.2 metres deep and it does contain fish! I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes from the survey results and am grateful to have learnt far more about the Sand Loch this week than I knew before.

My week concluded with a pop-up seal watch at Newburgh Beach as part of Climate Week North East. Despite the winds picking up again, plenty of passers-by were excited to get a closer look at the seals through the scope (predominantly grey seals at the haul-out site). Doing the weekly seal counts means that I sometimes take seeing the seals for granted, but other people’s joy and excitement at witnessing these impressive animals is infectious.

And that excitement is justified. Grey seals are among the world’s rarer seal species, yet Britain supports approximately 40% of the global population, after bouncing back from extremely low numbers in the early 1900s. The growth of the Ythan estuary grey seal colony is much more recent, with almost no seals being sighted towards the end of the 20^th century to a peak of more than 3000 reported in 2023! So there is still a lot to learn from these seals. Why has the colony grown so quickly and what might its future hold? This makes continuing our seal monitoring all the more important.

Next week I’ll be swapping back out of blog duty with Daryl and Cat and going on holiday myself instead, perhaps following some of our migratory birds south.

There has probably been a whole host of exciting things happening on the reserve this week that have gone unseen by the Forvie staff. I (Emma) have been away for most of it, Cat and Daryl are on a well-deserved holiday, and for Joe, our seasonal warden, Wednesday was his last day working at Forvie NNR after three seasons in a row!

I know I don’t just speak for myself when I say that Joe will be sorely missed by everyone here – for his helpfulness, knowledge, and enthusiasm – which helped to ring a record number of terns this year! I couldn’t have had a better mentor showing me the ropes at weekends. We wish him thanks, and all the very best as he takes on his PhD.

So, instead of a report of this week’s events, for today’s blog, I have delved into the murky waters of how the muddy, marshy habitats here at Forvie NNR contribute to carbon capture and storage. This topic is inspired by Climate Week North East, which began yesterday and is running a whole host of climate change-related events until October 4^th. However, I feel I have opened a can of lugworms with this one, as carbon is more complex than it appears at surface level…

Looking out over the Ythan Estuary from Waterside at low tide, you can see extensive mudflats edged by vegetated saltmarsh, woven with creeks, and scattered with the discarded shells of munched mussels and other molluscs.

The importance of these coastal wetland habitats has often been overlooked. Viewed as unproductive and uninspiring, many wetlands have been ‘reclaimed’ and put to use for our own activities. Thankfully, the lower Ythan estuary has largely escaped this and is one of the most important ‘natural’ estuarine and tidal environments in North-east Scotland.

For those living or working near to an estuary like the Ythan, it is difficult to remain ignorant to its beauty and value. The most obvious sign of this is that the estuary is teeming with life. Especially at this time of year, when migratory wading birds are arriving from their breeding grounds in the arctic to overwinter here and take advantage of the plentiful food found lurking within the mud.

At first glance, the expansive estuary can seem quiet, but last week’s wader count taught me to look closer. As I squinted into the sun, the mud started moving and revealed that it was, in fact, covered in over one thousand golden plover!

The fact that these muddy, marshy habitats provide food, resting places, and nesting sites for different bird species hints at their deeper importance. They harbour a great diversity of life beneath the water and mud too, like bivalve molluscs (mussels, cockles and clams), snails, shrimps, worms, and crabs. Then not forgetting the fish supported by these smaller creatures or even starting on the microscopic life forms!

Wetlands also act as a buffer between the sea, land and river, somehow thriving in the harsh, salty, changeable conditions. They help to protect the land from coastal flooding and extreme weather, while filtering some of the pollutants washing off the land. The pressures of development, coastal change, and sea-level rise push wetlands to the limit of what even these remarkably resilient places can handle.

Though this gives us plenty of reasons to cherish our swirling mudflats and vibrant saltmarsh already, it turns out that they also store considerable amounts of carbon!

Recent research and policy are trying to shed light on the potential for ‘blue carbon’ habitats to help us adapt to and limit climate change. This summer’s heatwaves and wildfires have been a stark reminder of why this is important.

We are familiar with hearing about woodlands and peatlands as habitats that capture and store carbon. ‘Blue carbon’ essentially refers to marine, coastal, and estuarine habitats that do the same. ‘Blue carbon’ can be absorbed from the air or water and stored in vegetation, sediment and marine animals – like the shells of mussels, which, when there is enough of them, form a habitat of their own known as mussel beds.

Of the carbon-capturing habitats found at Forvie NNR, saltmarsh seems to have the most potential for locking away carbon directly from the atmosphere, and at an impressive rate! Saltmarsh plants (like those pictured below) absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, storing carbon in their tissues and roots. Some of this carbon becomes trapped in the waterlogged soils of the marsh, alongside carbon from other sources in the estuary.

There are claims that saltmarsh in the UK captures carbon 40 times faster than woodland. However, the rates of carbon capture seem to be extremely variable, so I think the main takeaway is that although saltmarsh makes up a relatively small area in the UK, it is an important carbon store well worth our protection.

Intertidal mud and sandflats capture carbon a little differently. While algae living on the surface can capture carbon through photosynthesis (like plants do), the sediments themselves mainly store carbon that has come from the land, sea or river, including the remains of decaying plants and animals. The magic of the mud is the sheer amount of carbon it stores, but more research is needed to understand how fast it is added or lost.

As the shells of mussels contain carbon, it follows that the mussel beds in the Ythan Estuary could be carbon stores too. However, the process of developing the shell, made largely of calcium carbonate, releases carbon dioxide. So, mussel beds may actually release more carbon than they store overall!

Nevertheless, we are still very grateful to the mussel beds for feeding the eider population, among many other bird species, found here at Forvie!

There is an estimate from N.H. Trewin (in his guide to the geology of the Aberdeen area, 1987) that around 38 tonnes of shell fragments from eider poo were produced each year in the Ythan Estuary. I’m not sure how this figure was calculated, but it is quite a contribution!

The main concern with organic carbon stored within mud and sand is that it could be disturbed by development, erosion, or other coastal changes, and released back into the water or atmosphere. Fortunately, the Ythan estuary is protected by multiple nature conservation designations that recognise its important habitats and wildlife. That being said, some changes remain beyond our immediate influence.

When I look at the estuary, the mudflats, the saltmarsh, the shingle and shells, I see the marks left by coastal processes that shape this place, and I see the wildlife that relies on them. I admit, I don’t tend to think about the carbon locked quietly in the unassuming habitats, a foundation for life. When I wonder how changes in the future will impact the estuary, and how we can support these crucial habitats, maybe I need to consider the carbon stored there too. Another reason to value this remarkable place, and another way in which it connects us to everything else.

Early last week, my duties on the Reserve took me down to South Forvie for a morning. The reasons for this excursion were two-fold: to take a water level reading from a monitoring station in the dunes south of Rockend, and to carry out the obligatory monthly check of the visitor infrastructure. The latter chore is a necessary one in such a dynamic landscape as Forvie’s, where waymarkers and signs routinely erode out and fall over, or simply disappear under wind-drifted sand as the landscape shifts around them. So it was that I set off southwards from Rockend, for an uneventful stroll along the beach in the bright early-autumn sun.

In the event, though, this was anything but an uneventful stroll. As if I needed reminding after twenty-odd years on the Reserve, life here is seldom uneventful, and there’s almost always something going on – the trick is simply tuning into it all. Take the time to notice, and an uneventful walk turns into a kaleidoscope of interest.

The first thing to catch my eye in the sunshine was the mauve-pink blush of Sea Rocket flowers on the upper shore. This particular plant was a latecomer to the party: the main flowering season for Sea Rocket is now well behind us, and all the other patches of it that I could see had already set seed. This species is a relative of domesticated brassicas such as cabbages and mustards, and in the seed-heads there’s an obvious family resemblance to the ubiquitous oilseed rape which is such a familiar sight in our neighbours’ arable fields.

Nearby on the strand line, this little fish gawped at me with an astonished expression. My knowledge of fish is admittedly poor, but I think this one was a juvenile Whiting. As always, though, I am happy to be corrected if necessary by any fish biologists or sea anglers who might happen to be reading these pages!

Pondering my lack of fish ID skills, I wandered onwards and noted a number of other items recently washed ashore. A selection of empty shells included those of various bivalves, winkles and limpets, with their former owners long gone; some perhaps the victims of predatory shorebirds or crows, others having simply come to the end of their long lives.

The broken and sand-smoothed remains of this Common Whelk shell must have housed an impressively large inhabitant before it met its end. These ‘sea snails’ are predators of other shellfish, but are preyed upon in turn by various marine fish; all part of the complex food web beneath the waves off Forvie’s coast.

Other shells on the strand line aren’t necessarily indicative of their inhabitants’ demise. This shell of a prawn (please don’t ask me which species!) was one of several I found along the quarter-mile of beach south of Rockend, and is most likely the result of the prawn having moulted its shell in order to grow – a strategy shared with fellow crustaceans such as lobsters and crabs.

I wasn’t the only one perusing the strand line on this particular morning. At Rockend, a little group of Sanderlings were feeding busily, chasing the waves in and out and picking up tiny morsels of food in the process. These dinky and lively waders remind me irresistibly of clockwork toys in the way that they motor along.

Closer inspection showed that the flock was comprised entirely of juvenile birds, on their first migration south from their High Arctic birthplace. This itself raised more questions – how do they navigate without any experienced adults for company? And having got this far, will they decide to stop here for the winter, or continue southwards? In which case, how many hundreds or thousands of miles have they yet to travel? Impossible to say, of course, but fascinating to wonder.

Other birds, meanwhile, were ploughing southwards into a stiff and stubborn headwind. Various waders dashed determinedly past me as I walked along the strand, sometimes calling as if for reassurance: here the soft ‘coo-eep‘ of a Ringed Plover, there the squeezed trill of a Dunlin. Others said nothing but forged onwards. A little flock of Knot and Turnstone passed by so close that I could almost see them acknowledging me with a look and a nod, in the manner of an old countryman cycling past on his pushbike.

All the while, ragged groups of Common Gulls arrived obliquely off the sea, perhaps from distant breeding grounds on the Continent, or maybe our own Northern Isles. Some of these were yet to complete their wing moult, and with their primary feathers only partially-grown they were obviously lacking in thrust and lift. One or two of them were really labouring, like a Heinkel bomber on one engine, and I liked to imagine them cursing the headwind as they slogged onwards.

Making things look a lot easier were the hirundines (swallows and martins) as they too made headway southwards. All three regular species – Swallow, House Martin and Sand Martin – were in evidence, and like the waders, the passing flocks appeared to contain a high proportion of youngsters. I found myself wondering how many of them would survive the perilous journey, the winter in Africa, and the return trip next spring – it’s a big ask for a delicate creature within the first year of its life.

As we’ve often pointed out before, it’s not only birds that migrate south in autumn. During the course of my walk down the beach, I was overtaken by single Peacock and Painted Lady butterflies, seemingly defying the laws of physics by making progress against the wind.

Returning shortly to Rockend and taking my leave of the beach, I found myself reflecting on what an uneventful stroll it hadn’t been. And thank goodness for mundane tasks such as infrastructure checks and water-level readings to get us out amongst it all!

On that note, I’m also going to take my leave of these pages for a while, and leave you in Emma’s very capable hands in the meantime. Before I go though, one last thing to mention. Our friends and neighbours at Newburgh & Ythan Community Trust have been nominated for a Nature of Scotland award, in acknowledgement of the splendid boardwalk and viewing facilities they’ve installed overlooking the Grey Seal haul-out. These awards are decided by public vote, and voting is now open – you can cast yours here.

So here’s wishing the best of luck to N&YCT – and I’ll see you again in three weeks’ time!

We’re undeniably fortunate here at Forvie to be blessed with a richly diverse landscape. Far from being one-dimensional, our beloved Reserve is composed of several distinct zones of habitat, each of them quite remarkable in its own right. The shifting dunes of South Forvie, uniquely wild and ever-changing, shaped by winds and tides. The beautiful Persian carpet of the coastal heath, excruciatingly rare in a global context. And not least of all, the salty and muddy expanse of the Ythan Estuary, a kind of wetland Serengeti, winding its way from freshwater river in the town of Ellon to North Sea shore by the village of Newburgh.

My apologies if you think this sounds a bit like some sort of tourist brochure, but every now and then you’re reminded how lucky you are to be where you are. This past week has been a case in point: gentle early-autumn days spent among a profusion of wildlife, and a chance to fall in love with the local patch all over again. And at the centre of it all this week has been the wetland wonderland of the estuary.

The estuary is itself comprised of several distinct elements. Extensive shimmering mudflats dominate the scene at low tide, interspersed with rough scalps of mussel-bed. The low-water channel of the River Ythan itself, haunted by Sea Trout and the occasional Salmon, is supplemented by inflows from the Forvie and Foveran Burns among others. Meanwhile, at the uppermost reach of the tide, plant-rich saltmarsh can be found. Fair to say there’s a lot going on down there.

On the face of it, the estuary landscape might appear bleak and barren to our eyes. But don’t be fooled by appearances. In reality, all that lifeless-looking mud is churning with life: shrimps, worms, snails, tiny crabs and the like. The oft-quoted metric is that a cubic metre of estuarine mud contains as many calories as sixteen Mars bars (other usefully-comparative items of confectionery are of course available). Strangely, the manufacturers of said chocolate-and-caramel treat have never gone with the advertising patter “As nutritious as 62.5 litres of wet mud”. Equally strangely, my own career in marketing never took off, for whatever reason.

All those tiny critters support a diverse food chain of higher predators, from fish to mammals. But most prominent of all, to our eyes at least, are the birds. Indeed, the Ythan Estuary is recognised as being of both national and international importance for its birdlife, and there are several major legal designations which apply to the estuary in order to protect its feathered inhabitants. Consequently, one of our duties on the Reserve is to monitor the numbers of birds using the estuary throughout the year.

Censuses of waders and wildfowl take place here roughly every second week, to coincide with a low tide on the estuary. This way we catch up with the birds whilst they’re feeding on the open mudflats; by contrast, at high tide they’re flooded off the estuary and many roost in neighbouring fields and saltmarsh where we can’t see (or indeed count) them. These counts can take anything between two and five hours, depending on the number of birds present and the prevailing weather and lighting conditions. In the middle of winter, especially on a day with a north or east wind, it can be a bitterly cold way to spend the working day. But in early September, with a gentle breeze and the sun at your back, it’s a different ball game altogether.

These counts are two-fold in their purpose. Firstly, they allow us to gauge the health of the estuary: wading birds are a good barometer of the richness of the environment, and if the estuary is supporting large numbers of waders, this likely indicates a healthy and resilient food chain. Secondly, they provide an insight into the fortunes of the individual bird species themselves. This is particularly important during the current era wherein many species are in alarming decline.

Curlew and Lapwing are two excellent examples. Neither could really be considered rare (our wader count on Wednesday this week, the first of the autumn, produced 241 and 1,206 of them respectively), but both have suffered severe declines in recent years. In order to assess the health of bird populations, we compare our count data with an historical baseline, and this can be a real eye-opener. 1,206 Lapwings may sound like a lot, but the baseline for comparison is 3,000-6,000 birds. Sadly, this isn’t unique to the Ythan Estuary, with the species showing similar declines across its range. But it does serve to highlight the importance of the Ythan Estuary for those birds that remain.

Others seem to be holding their own to a greater degree. Redshank is another common wader which occurs at Forvie in internationally important numbers, and this week’s count of 1,902 compares favourably with the historical baseline of 1,000-1,300.

Each species has its own story to tell, and some of these stories are scarcely believable. For instance, the unassuming-looking and jauntily-named Bar-tailed Godwit, a species which occurs on the estuary in small numbers throughout the year, holds the world record for non-stop flight. An individual Bar-tailed Godwit was tracked in flight from its breeding grounds in Alaska to its winter quarters in Tasmania, a journey of just under 8,500 miles, which it completed in a single non-stop flight lasting just over eleven days. If you don’t believe me, look it up: you really couldn’t make this stuff up.

The estuary also tells us tales of the times. The increasing frequency with which we’re seeing Little Egrets, for example, speaks of a warming climate, and the addition of this species to Forvie’s roll-call of breeding birds this year wasn’t completely surprising. At the same time, we’re seeing fewer and fewer of certain other species which used to be commonplace – Long-tailed Duck being one such example – as their ranges shift northward too.

Of course, as in any time of great change, there’ll be winners and losers. But I certainly hope there will always be wading birds to grace the Ythan Estuary. The Reserve, and the lives of those of us who live and work here, would be that much poorer without them.

Even setting aside the science for a moment, the aesthetics of water, wet mud, big skies, reflections and throngs of birds make for a marvellous spectacle. There are many reasons for conserving, and being concerned for, wetlands and their inhabitants. But for me at least, their intrinsic beauty alone is reason enough to save them.

So as the sun sets over the estuary at the end of a fine autumn’s day, here’s raising a glass to all things muddy, salty and wonderful in this world. Long may they survive with us.

There are many brilliant things about being interested in the natural world. But to my mind at least, one of the most brilliant aspects of all is the limitless scope for learning and discovering new things. There’s such a vast variety of life out there – so many different species, shapes, forms, colours, sounds, smells – that it’s impossible to do much more than scratch the surface of it during the course of a human lifetime. But if you’re always seeking novelty and new horizons, then nature is the drug for you. Best of all, you don’t even need to travel beyond the boundaries of your own patch in order to jam in.

The first stage in learning, of course, is to get to grips with the common and familiar species on your patch, wherever that may be. Even this is a continuing voyage of discovery, as the range of species that you’ll see in any one place changes throughout the year. Thus at Forvie, a typical insect/plant combo in June (for instance) might be Six-spot Burnet moth nectaring on Northern Marsh Orchid. But in this last week of August, the recurring theme has been Peacock butterfly on Devil’s-bit Scabious – and thankfully neither is difficult to identify.

Also conspicuous in their abundance lately have been Silver Y moths, which like the aforementioned Peacock butterflies are immigrants from the south. August is peak time for insect migration at our latitude – of which more in just a moment…

We don’t often get the chance to mention Odonata – dragonflies and damselflies – in these pages, for two main reasons. Firstly, only a handful of species typically occur here at Forvie, and most of these are scarce and hard to find at the best of times. Secondly, on the occasions when you are lucky enough to find them, they don’t normally oblige for a photograph. So it was a refreshing change this week to find an uncharacteristically obliging, if rather faded, Emerald Damselfly on the Heath Trail.

While Emerald Damselfly is a known resident of Forvie, this next species came straight out of left field. On Friday I was approached by my neighbour Craig, who had found a large dragonfly dead in the road outside his house in Collieston. He had done a quick Google Lens-type investigation himself, and had been puzzled when the electronic oracle had declared this wasn’t a species that belonged in the UK. Sure enough, upon seeing the unfortunate insect for myself, I immediately reckoned it must be either a Lesser or Vagrant Emperor, two species I’ve only ever seen in the Mediterranean region. A bit of further research confirmed the ID as a Vagrant Emperor – an excruciatingly rare species in Scotland, and an extraordinary discovery!

While some new discoveries are due to the species in question being genuinely rare, others are simply overlooked until somebody with a suitably enquiring mind takes up the challenge. This was certainly the case this week, when I was lucky to bump into travelling naturalists Chris and Lizzy, who were investigating some of the more cryptic invertebrates that often get neglected by other observers (ourselves included, I’m ashamed to say). Anyway, during the course of a morning, they discovered three new species for the Reserve and vice-county (!), all captured on camera using a USB pocket microscope linked to a phone. The first of these, a fly named Phytomyza rostrata, is so tiny that its larvae live inside the stems of Yellow Rattle, a familiar plant here at Forvie.

The next was the wonderfully-named Cricket Bat Orb-weaver, a tiny spider whose abdomen bears a set of dark markings in the shape of a cricket bat (or at least that’s what I’m guessing lends it the name!). As a cricket fan in both the entomological and the sporting sense, I strongly approve.

Lastly, another species with a wonderful name and a cute countenance: the Broad Damsel Bug. We owe our thanks to Chris and Lizzy for both the discoveries and the photos!

Conforming neatly to both parts of this week’s title, one of our bigger bits of news this week was the successful fledging of four Little Egret chicks from the heronry at Waterside. Little Egrets are a relatively recent arrival here in the north-east, and have been seen increasingly frequently on the estuary in recent years. Even so, it was a surprise to discover a nest containing chicks during July, this being the northernmost breeding ever recorded in the UK. Once the chicks had successfully fledged, we published a press release with the news, which garnered considerable interest and resulted in a live BBC radio interview with reserve manager Catriona – at 0620 in the morning, to her great delight!

Downstream at the mouth of the Ythan, friend of Forvie and photographer par excellence Ron Macdonald captured some wonderful shots this week of Arctic Skuas – those dashing pirates of the high seas – working over the few remaining Sandwich Terns. This neat sequence showcases the breathtaking high-speed chase, during which the unlucky tern drops its hard-won catch of fish, this being snapped up by one of the marauding skuas before it even hits the water. Some seriously impressive flying skills by the skuas here – ably matched by Ron’s skill with the camera!

Towards the end of the week, easterly winds and a good deal of rain produced ideal conditions for an arrival of migrant songbirds from the Continent. With the week’s chores having been wrapped up, there was nothing for it but to don waterproofs and optics and get out there – this was a rare opportunity to potentially make some rare discoveries!

An excellent, if extremely soggy, morning’s spotting produced a fine selection of species grounded by the inclement weather. These included some regular migrants (Whitethroat and Willow Warbler), some scarcer ones (Pied and Spotted Flycatchers, Whinchat and Garden Warbler) and, as hoped, a couple of local rarities too (Icterine Warbler and Wryneck). Well worth the comprehensive soaking, for my money!

What started out as a ‘quick walk round the block’ eventually turned out to be a three-hour marathon, but opportunities like this come along so seldom that you’ve simply got to make the best of it. Prior to this, the last really good August ‘fall’ of migrants was as long ago as 2015. It could be long enough until the next one. So never mind the soaking – when these rare events do happen, it’s cashing-in time!

On that note I’ll sign off, having enjoyed a week packed full of discoveries. All that’s now required to make it perfect is a hot cuppa, and some dry clothes. See you again soon!

Please don’t shoot the messenger here, but the summer on the Reserve is now officially over and done. Maybe not in the strictest sense – meteorological autumn doesn’t actually begin until 1^st September, after all – but as far as the Forvie calendar is concerned, it’s a wrap. The milepost was passed on Tuesday of the past week (the 18^th of August, as it happened), when the barrier fence was dismantled and brought in for the season, thus heralding the end of the bird breeding season and its associated workload. Phew!

Having spent much of the previous week taking down and packing up the ternery electric fence, what we all really needed was a couple more days of hard labour. I mean who doesn’t love lugging mountains of fencing equipment over miles of soft and sinky sand, in 100% humidity? So after last week’s marathon of mesh, steel wires and fence posts, this week it was wooden signs, plastic tubes and rusty scaffolding poles, not to mention 150 metres of rope encrusted with barnacles and various other forms of seafood, all smelling highly in the warm temperatures. The very duff that screams are made of.

As was the case in the early spring when the whole kit and caboodle was put up, we had no vehicle access to the beach, due to the shifting sands having cut off the track at Rockend. So everything from the seaward end of the fence – three big wooden signs, 17 scaffolding poles full of wet sand, several floats and flags, and a massive hank of that honking rope – had to be carried the entire length of the fence across to the estuary, and into the waiting pickup truck. No wonder Catriona looks so happy in the photo below.

Duty staffers Catriona, Daryl and Emma were grateful (as ever) for the assistance of regular volunteer Richard, and of colleague Anne-Marie from our regional office in Aberdeen. With the right people, and copious application of caffeine and biscuits, a job such as this is made considerably lighter. Thanks folks.

As the barrier fence was taken in for the season, so too were the various notices around the Reserve advising of the sensitivities of the bird breeding season. Most of our visitors are quite respectful of these seasonal notices (although those who don’t are a constant source of stress for us – not to mention the wildlife – each summer), and we’ve tried hard over the years to promote responsible access on the Reserve, especially when it comes to dogs. So we’re really grateful to everyone who takes this on board and acts responsibly, allowing Forvie’s wildlife the space and peace to raise their young each year.

The down side of this campaign, though, is the perception that come the end of the summer, it’s a free-for-all as soon as the signs and fences come down: that it’s fine to let your dog(s) charge all over the Reserve, because the birds have stopped nesting. However, the old line that I’ve used a thousand times before is that Forvie doesn’t stop being a nature reserve at the end of the bird breeding season. It remains a sensitive place, of both national and international importance for wildlife, throughout the year – and as such it needs to be treated with a bit more care and consideration than the average park or urban green space (not that these should be taken for granted either, of course!).

The advice that we dispense during the breeding season holds true throughout the year: enjoy your visit to Forvie, but please take care not to disturb or damage its wildlife and landscape. And definitely please don’t fall into the trap of “Well, it’s OK if it’s just me / my dog doing it” – these days Forvie has over 75,000 human visitors a year (plus how many dogs?!), and if everyone took this view, there’d be no nature left on the Reserve! So in short, please be respectful of nature when you’re on the Reserve – and spread the word to others too!

With the barrier fence down and the ternery season over, and South Forvie open to the public once again, the chief area of sensitivity is now the Grey Seal haul-out at the mouth of the estuary. The seals’ own breeding season is approaching fast (we usually expect a few pups here each year, starting in mid-autumn), and consequently we had to make sure the advisory signage was in good order. One such sign is located on the beach to the east of the ternery, where it receives a fearful sandblasting every time the wind gets up (i.e. about two days out of three at Forvie). As a result, one of this week’s jobs was to replace the worn-out facing with a fresh one. Feel free to place your bets on how long it’ll last, but I’m not a gambling man!

Anyway, never mind all this housekeeping talk. The onset of autumn on the Reserve means an exciting time ahead for the naturalist, not least because it’s the season where more often than not, the wildlife comes looking for you rather than the other way around. This even applies when the working day is over, you’re back home enjoying a quiet brew after supper, and a bit of movement catches your eye. Early autumn is the season when the male Giant House Spider goes a-roving after the ladies, and this one required a full-sized pint glass for the old catch-and-release-outside routine.

Another sign of the times this week was the appearance of the attractive Grass-of-Parnassus alongside the Dune Trail footpath – a classic wild flower of early autumn…

…while another was the colourful traffic-light sequence of Bittersweet berries, ripening to red after having changed from green through amber.

Meanwhile, I was lucky enough to capture this remarkable sequence of a Field Digger Wasp capturing an unfortunate Marmalade Hoverfly along the estuary-side footpath. Field Diggers are solitary wasps which, as their name suggests, excavate little tunnels in the earth. In a chamber at the end of each tunnel, they lay a single egg, and provision the chamber with food – fresh meat, in fact – in the form of other insects such as flies. Rather than killing the flies outright, the wasp’s sting causes them to enter a state of suspended animation, thus keeping them fresh for the wasp larva when it hatches. A little macabre perhaps, but an effective life strategy it remains. Don’t have nightmares!

If you’re still not sold on this whole autumn thing yet, then consider the fact that sunrise and sunset are beginning to occur at sensible times of the day now, when you can actually get out and enjoy them. Just one more benefit to what I strongly believe is the best season of the year!

No need, then, to mourn the end of the summer at Forvie. Autumn is just about upon us, and there’s much to look forward to in the coming weeks. See you out there!

As the calendar ticks over into the second half of August, so a major landmark in Forvie’s year is reached. For those of us who work on the Reserve, six months of hard graft, hair-tearing and head-pecking has at last come to and end, as the ternery season finally draws to a close.

Having now worked through twenty (yes, 20) seasons of looking after the ternery and its inhabitants, the recurring feeling at the end of each one – for me at least – is that of overwhelming relief. After all, the season is a long slog, starting out in mid-February and reaching its crescendo in June and July; by the time August rolls around each year, we’re physically worn and mentally frazzled. But at the same time, after a season as successful as 2026, we’re enjoying the satisfying afterglow too. It’s a bit like the feeling you get the morning after a mad but exhilarating party – you might be a bit sore, but it was totally worth it!

While this year’s results have been excellent, with all the key species enjoying a highly successful and productive season (of which more at a later date), there’s no time for resting on our laurels. Instead, there’s the mammoth task of dismantling and removing all the electric fencing and its accoutrements, all of which must be recovered to the workshop at the Forvie Centre for safe keeping until next spring. So with the hard graft not quite over for the season just yet, we took advantage of a largely dry and settled week to get the work done.

This time around, there was more equipment than ever to dismantle and recover. As the landscape of South Forvie constantly changes according to the influences of wind and tide, so the distribution of tern nesting habitat changes too. And it’s up to us to enclose as much of it as possible within the protective fence. Thus in 2026 the fence stretched to a total length of 1,100 metres – up from 1,000 in the previous year – in order for us to protect the key areas of habitat. So that’s 22 rolls of mesh netting as opposed to 20 last year, and 550 fence posts as opposed to 500, and so on. Without the help of our superhuman volunteers Richard, Vikki, Jim and Elaine, all of whom put in a magnificent shift, we’d still be out there now.

Probably the most loathsome job of all is transporting the electric fence batteries back to the pick-up point on the estuary foreshore. With vehicle access to much of the ternery area impossible, a quarter-mile trek through soft sand is required to get the batteries on and off site. And at 33 kg each, they take a bit of lifting too. In order to make our lives a bit easier, reserve manager Catriona recently sourced a foldaway sledge-type contraption that allows us to haul the batteries over the dunes rather than carrying them, and this was duly pressed into service. With this not being a job we’d wish upon anyone else, Catriona and I got ourselves yoked up and hauled away, and soon had the job done – and unlike a mid-season battery change, we didn’t have an entourage of furious Arctic Terns trying to kill us as we slogged through the sand. Small mercies eh!

We started out on Monday morning with the fence still fully operational, but by the close of play on Thursday we had everything dismantled, lashed up and tripped back to the pickup point on the estuary, ready for uplift on Friday morning’s low tide. As Richie Benaud would have said, “a maaarvellous effort that”.

On the Friday morning, when we collected all the fencing gear from the estuary side, we took advantage of having the pickup truck on-site and carried out a bijou beach clean. This involved lifting a quantity of vintage marine litter that had been exposed by the eroding sand just to the north of the ternery, having probably originally washed ashore there several decades previously. And you know what happens when you find the end of a wee bit of rope, and start pulling it out from the sand…

It was something of a heads-down-working sort of week, such that we didn’t have much time for wildlife spotting. Sometimes, however, the wildlife comes to you whether you’re looking for it or not, and this was certainly the case with this Red-legged Shieldbug which was perched proudly atop one of the fence posts. As a species that lives on various deciduous trees, it was something of a mystery as to what it was doing in the wide open landscape of the ternery.

Meanwhile, it was actually a good job we had our heads down while working, as we narrowly avoided treading on this tardy Common Tern fledgling along the fence line. Although fully grown and feathered, and apparently in excellent condition, it chose to hide in the grass under our feet rather than take flight. My theory was that it was so well-fed that it had entered a sort of post-Sunday-lunch food coma, though it did in fact try to eat Joe as he was giving it the once-over.

Most of our terns are now long gone, setting out on their long and leisurely southward migration. We actually got a small insight into this during the week when a flock of some 70 Arctic Terns appeared high from the north-west over our house in Collieston. If you know our area, you’ll know that north-west of Collieston means inland, so presumably these birds had completed an overland crossing of North-east Scotland from a starting point somewhere in the Moray Firth. This is just one early stage of a journey that will eventually take them to the Antarctic Ocean.

The high-altitude tern flock was considerably more impressive than the solar eclipse that took place the same evening. Or apparently took place anyway – at home here in Collieston we were treated to a stubborn overcast at the crucial time. Typical!

In between fencing duties this week, we crammed in the last public event of the 2026 summer season. Ever popular, our Moth Morning attracted visitors of all ages, and showcased the wonderful world of Lepidoptera to an audience of beginners and experienced observers alike.

Speaking of Lepidoptera, this week also brought a welcome splash of colour in the form of an influx of Peacock butterflies. Surely one of the most striking and attractive of all insects to occur in northern Europe, there seemed barely a patch of thistle or scabious this week that didn’t have at least one of these beauties in attendance.

So on that colourful note I’ll finish up for the week, before heading off for a couple of headache pills and a lie-down in a darkened room. The ternery season is over and done for the year – and it was some party indeed.

Our thanks are owed to Scottish rockers Travis for the title of this week’s piece. Just like them, I can’t really answer this eternal question either. I may well have lied when I was seventeen (probably to get into the pub), but that was a long time ago, and I should hope to think the weather gods might have forgiven me by now. Nevertheless – and I didn’t think I’d ever be saying this – we’ve been rather grateful to have been rained on lately. The Reserve and wider region were each in need of a good drink of water, and we’ve certainly had that during the course of this past week. Friends and relatives further south, roasting in 30-plus degrees of heat and in the grip of a fierce drought, were positively green with envy.

The sudden spate of dampness brought about a mass emergence and dispersal of baby amphibians on the Reserve, taking advantage of the favourable conditions for travelling. When you’re as dinky as a newly-metamorphosed Common Toad, you’re at grave risk of dehydration during the sort of warm and windy days we’ve experienced over the past month. So a cool and rainy day offers the perfect opportunity to break cover, leave your natal wetland, and take your first tiny steps into the world.

These wayfarers-in-miniature often follow the footpaths, where the short-cropped vegetation and crushed-stone surface makes for easier and faster progress than the long grass either side. But it’s a hazardous business. Mid-week, it was impossible for us to traverse the footpaths in North Forvie without dancing the ‘tiny toadlet two-step’, as we endeavoured not to tread on any of them.

Hardly any larger was this juvenile Palmate Newt, which was on the same sort of mission as its toadish cousins: take advantage of the wet conditions for travelling, and find somewhere safe to see out the rest of the year. Newts look rather more incongruous out of water than toads or frogs, and as such it’s easy to see how they often get mistaken for lizards. In terms of size and shape, if not colour, they superficially resemble the little geckos that are often found sharing human dwellings around the Mediterranean region.

A walk down the coast path to Hackley Bay on Wednesday resulted in the most comprehensive soaking I’ve received for a long while. Having set off from Collieston in sunshine, there was soon a darkening of the sky, accompanied by some ominous rumbles of thunder to the west. While the electrical storm never reached us on the coast, the rain certainly did, and I literally couldn’t have been any wetter even if I’d waded into the North Sea for a quick douk. Actually, it was all quite enjoyable in a masochistic sort of way; many of us spend so much of our lives hiding from the weather that we sometimes forget how refreshing it feels to be out in the elements.

Down on the shore, numerous jellyfish were in evidence this week. A neighbour of ours who regularly swims in Collieston harbour recently described the water there as being “like jellyfish soup”. A rare onshore blow of wind early in the week served to beach many of these free-floating jellies, depositing them on the strand-line like a collection of glass paperweights. Forvie volunteer Richard took the following photo on Forvie beach, depicting two of the commoner jellyfish species to occur in our waters: the Moon Jellyfish and the Compass Jellyfish. Richard’s photo shows to good effect the distinctive and diagnostic blue markings of each species – an excellent ‘compare and contrast’ exercise.

Ever eagle-eyed, Richard also spotted and photographed this Antler Moth feeding on the flowers of Ragwort alongside the Dune Trail footpath. So named for the whitish antler-shaped markings on each forewing, this is a species that’s active by both day and night. This no-sleep-till-Hammersmith lifestyle means that we often see Antler Moths nectaring at flowers by day, viz. Richard’s photo, while also regularly catching them in our light-trap overnight.

Also busily nectaring at path-side flowers were these Marmalade Hoverflies, perhaps freshly arrived from a North Sea crossing. Although almost any nectar-rich plant will do, they seem particularly drawn to the ragged, bright yellow flowers of Sow-thistles, where at times they blend in remarkably well.

With this week having been rather cooler than the preceding month, many of the flying insects were a good deal drowsier and more approachable than usual. Not least among these were the currently-abundant Dark Green Fritillary butterflies, and on this particular individual it was possible to get a good view of the rarely-glimpsed underside of the wings for once. This is what lends the species the ‘dark green’ bit of its common name, a title that makes no sense when you only see the orange-and-black upperside!

All these flying insects at least have plenty to eat just now, with an abundance of nectar-bearing flowers forming a richly colourful tapestry on the heath.

August is heather season at Forvie, and it’s possible just now to see all three species of heather – Ling, Bell Heather and Cross-leaved Heath – in flower at the same time. Indeed, in certain spots you can find all three growing in the same place. Like our jellyfish earlier on, this provides a great opportunity to learn the differences between the three kinds of heather.

In the bird world, the latter part of the summer and the early part of the autumn blend seamlessly into one another, and that’s where we currently find ourselves. Sure enough, John Keats’ twittering Swallows are gathering on the lines at the Collieston end of the Reserve just now.

Much to the Swallows’ consternation, they were joined this week by a juvenile Cuckoo, another species ultimately bound for Africa in the coming weeks. The Cuckoo’s superficial resemblance to a bird of prey – possibly a deliberate tactic for frightening songbirds away for just long enough to lay an egg in their unattended nests – means they tend to get short shrift from most other birds. But in reality, the only things that really need beware of a juvenile Cuckoo in August are hairy caterpillars – the Cuckoo’s favourite food.

Our neighbour Laura captured this lovely photo of what we initially thought was the same bird near the Reserve office – though it later transpired there were at least two, possibly three, Cuckoos doing the rounds. It’s likely that these each fledged from Meadow Pipit nests (a favourite ‘host species’) on the Reserve, representing a successful season at Forvie for this declining summer visitor.

Lastly, a vote of thanks to everyone who turned out for our Beach Clean on Tuesday, in partnership with East Grampian Coastal Partnership, on what turned out to be a properly dreich old day. It’s always good to get marine litter lifted off the Reserve, and we were very grateful for everyone who put in a shift – especially given the soggy working conditions. Good effort that!

So in conclusion, that was an enjoyably wet week on the Reserve, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. See you again next week – come rain or shine!

As the dust settles on a breathless and action-packed month of July, and the calendar duly ticks over into August, we find ourselves now entering the final, and most enjoyable, chapter of the northern summer. For much of Forvie’s wildlife, the season’s hard work is over and done: plants have flowered and are setting seed, insects are advancing through their rapid life-cycles, most of our birds have fledged their young, and this year’s cohort of tiny juvenile amphibians, freshly-emerged, are on the march. The Reserve and wider world are teeming with new life; this is a time for us to take stock, and to enjoy the fruits of the spring and summer’s labours, while hopefully basking in some late-summer sunshine – if the fates be willing, of course!

Another largely dry and warm week was dominated, as so often here, by a frequent strong breeze from the westerly quarter. Early in the week, this brought with it an acrid smell of smoke from the colossal wildfire which has devastated a large area of the Cairngorms National Park, some sixty miles to the west of us. This was a sobering reminder of the dangers of fire in the natural environment, and with our summers increasingly featuring high temperatures and long periods of drought, it’s an issue that is unlikely to go away.

Here at Forvie, with its dry coastal heathland and grassy dunes, the risk of fire is always at the forefront of our minds these days. Our advice to any would-be visitors is much the same as that given out by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service: don’t light barbeques or camp fires, and be exceptionally careful when disposing of cigarette ends. Please don’t let Forvie feature on the news as the next unfolding disaster.

It was with mixed feelings, then, that we found this disposable barbeque at our Waterside car park in the week. Whoever had left it had clearly tried to do the right thing, and had left it on the concrete slabs by the bins, rather than dumping the hot coals in the bin itself (or worse still, in the undergrowth beyond). But at the present time, with the fire risk in the region remaining exceptionally high, and the emergency services already stretched, why would you even take the risk of lighting one of these things in the countryside? Do us all a favour, and pack some sandwiches for a picnic instead – thereby eliminating the risk altogether. Personally, I love a good bonfire or BBQ as much as anyone – but now really isn’t the time!

We’re lucky at Forvie to have a lot of good neighbours in our local communities of Collieston and Newburgh, with many local residents going out of their way to help maintain and improve their local environment. Among these unsung heroes are some neighbours of ours from the High Town in Collieston, who for many years have done yeoman work in clearing marine litter off the beaches and coves of Forvie’s coast. This leaves the Reserve staff with the relatively minor job of tripping the rubbish down to the collection point in the pickup truck, where it is subsequently uplifted by our counterparts in Aberdeenshire Council. A true team effort, and something that wouldn’t be possible without the community-spirited residents of Collieston and Newburgh – we owe you a debt of gratitude.

Speaking of teamwork, on Monday we teamed up with Robert, Lewis and Nicole from Scottish Invasive Species Initiative for our annual Himalayan Balsam-bashing expedition along the Foveran Burn. We were grateful to Forvie volunteers Vikki, Richard and Jim for their respective contributions, and the company and craic helped to offset the inevitable nettle stings, and the attentions of the biting insects! This year we tackled the task a little earlier than in 2025, and hopefully this will result in less Balsam seed having been set this year. But only time will tell of course!

Summer at Forvie means, among other things, the staging of our annual programme of public events. We’re well through these now, with just a Moth Morning and a Beach Clean left to go. This past week, our evening talk at the Forvie Centre (entitled ‘Fluffy Chicks and Whitewash’, as per last week’s blog!) was well attended, with some excellent, intelligent lines of questioning in the Q&A that followed the talk. At times like these, my wavering faith in humanity is restored somewhat, and I am almost tempted to think that the future of nature conservation might yet be in good hands!

The subject of the talk was the Forvie ternery, and by Thursday, the slide show contained substantially more birds than the actual ternery itself. A real clear-out had taken place since the previous week, with the colony site now assuming a desolate, ghost-town sort of feel. But what a season it’s been – in my twenty summers at Forvie, this year’s results from the ternery would comfortably make it into the top five.

Even the insects down at the ternery are packing it in for the season. This year’s batch of Cinnabar moth caterpillars, stuffed to bursting point with Ragwort leaves, are now perambulating in all directions looking for somewhere to pupate. We’ll not then see them again until late spring in 2027, when they will emerge as newly-minted adult moths.

In the meantime, their chosen Ragwort foodplants have been stripped to the bare bones by the hungry catties, and you’d be hard-pressed to identify the plant from what remains. Only the shrapnel of yellow petals beneath the skeleton of the plant, and the attendant caterpillars themselves, offer any clues as to the stricken plant’s identity.

Another floral feature of the ternery just now is Sea Rocket, which is abundant on the shingle areas at the north end of the enclosure.

The dense growth of Sea Rocket provides useful cover for the few remaining chicks of Arctic and Little Terns, all of which will likely be fledged and gone within a few days of this piece going to press.

On the bird front across the wider Reserve, migrant warblers have been very prominent this past few days. Willow and Sedge Warblers are the most plentiful of the various species that pass through our area in late summer, and most of these will be young birds setting out on their very first southward migration. While watching a svelte little Sedgie bathing at the garden pond, or admiring the lithe agility of the tiny Willow Warblers flycatching in the trees overhead, it’s a marvel to think that these diminutive birds will be crossing the mighty Sahara in a few short weeks’ time.

Ahead of them lies an epic journey, and likewise ahead of us lies arguably the most exciting season of the year for those of us with an interest in migrant birds. Hopefully we’ll have much more on which to report in the coming weeks, as we advance through August – be sure and watch this space!