Scotland Visit Day 5 : Montrose Basin : 12th September 2011
On Monday we had to return to Manchester but we still had a couple of interesting places to visit on our way back. Firstly we wanted to go to Montrose Basin Local Nature Reserve and then to break up the journey a bit we planned to stay the night in Dumfries so that we could fit in a visit to WWT Caerlaverock before making the final leg of our round trip. On our way to Montrose Basin from New Deer we encountered large flocks of Lapwing in the fields as well as lots of Swallows and House Martins. Montrose Basin itself is on the East coast and is tidal so best views are obtained relative to the high and low tides. The habitat consists of different zones ranging from mud banks, fresh water, sea water, brackish water, saltmarsh, reedbed, unimproved grassland and arable land. This means that an huge variety of birds can be present at any given time. They also have an artificial sand bank wall for Sand Martins which we saw the last time we visited but this time they had all gone by the time we got there. There are also a number of hides at other sites around the visitor centre that are well worth visiting but we didn’t really walk around, partly because we had so little time but also because the leftover weather from an American Hurricane Katia was due in so the weather conditions were deteriorating and we had to get to Stirling before the storms came. Fortunately, it is a really interesting visitor centre in itself with big windows overlooking feeders, lakes and the basin itself so there was lots to look at regardless.