So, today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year; which means from now on the days will be getting longer -cause for celebration in anyone's book I would say! A day on which the sun worshipping Norsemen of old would light bonfires and gather round them to tell stories and drink sweet ale; and the Romans would light candles, deck out their houses with greenery and even indulge in a little cross dressing!
I go away for a few days holiday, leaving St Abb's Head looking like a winter wonderland, and I return just a few days later to find it all green again. And what do I see when I go up to the lighthouse - guillemots on the cliffs? Enough to make me feel like I have just woken up from a few months hibernation!
More snow, and its laying quite thick (well for us at St Abbs anyway). The lighthouse road is treacherous, white snow with a sheet of ice under it, and the Mire Loch is frozen over. Woodcock and snipe erupt from under your feet all over the place and there are also lapwing and curlew feeding where ever the snow is thinnest.
As the rest of the country is thrown into turmoil by a thick covering of snow, we at St Abbs find it quite difficult to really appreciate what all the fuss is about, especially when we have onshore winds (see picture taken earlier today, top left)!
bring this warm, salt laden air onto the land and thaws any snow that has settled. The stronger the wind, the further this maritime influence comes in land. And its quite breezy today, as the picture on the right shows, so there is no snow within about 100m of the shore (except where the cliffs are higher as this interferred with the airflow).
However, if you do decide to come to the seaside to appreciate the warm breezes, I fear you may be disappointed, its pretty parky as the wind chill is fierce. And also don't go zooming up the lighthouse road looking for the perfect vantage point, as the road is far enough from the sea only to be passable by tractors and rabbits (picture bottom left)! 
You may well be thinking that this is nothing 
surprising as much of the east side of the UK is gripped by snow. However, we seldom get it here at St Abbs because of our proximity to the sea; the warming maritime influence usually stops it from settling. In fact, the picture on the left shows quite nicely that we here on the coastal strip have less snow than just a little way further inland.
A question oft asked of us rangers, and I'm sure people think that we just sit around twiddling our thumbs - but that couldn't be further from the truth. There may not be quite so much wildlife or so many visitors around, but this means we have time to carry out all the other tasks that are involved in managing a nature reserve. Usually, the winter is over and the new season has begun long before we have got to the bottom of our "to do" lists!
As I have said in one of my earlier posts, life as a Ranger is always varied, often busy and sometimes surreal, and yesterday was a prime example!
Wildlife wise. There are plenty of migrants moving around with skeins of geese passing daily. We have had a few waxwing (picture left) sightings too, and a flock of 9 whooper swans flying about. So always worth taking the bins with you. And that's what I'm going to do now - get out there and see what's about!
I have been away on leave for a week or so, and true to form, all sorts of things have been going on in my absence. There has been a lot of activity on the migrating bird front with more sightings of great grey shrike and yellow-browed warbler as well as more common migrants such as redwings and fieldfares. However, the most exciting sighting has been of a red-flanked bluethroat (picture left) on Saturday. This beautifully colourful bird is a rare sighting in Britain, with one turning up somewhere on the east coast of Scotland or northern England every year or so. They are en route from their breeding ground in Finland to their wintering grounds in SE Asia. Also on Saturday a minke whale and 20+ bottle-nosed dolphins were spotted off the Head.
been dumped off the cliff just below the lighthouse. This was spotted by a local boat skipper on Sunday and St Abbs lifeboat went out to investigate. Thankfully there was no-one in the car, and after police investigation it turns out that the car was stolen and presumably dumped off the cliff when the thieves had finished their joyriding. There is now a lot of head scratching going on as to how to remove the wreckage which is pretty inaccessible from both land and sea (picture right).
The Trust's Regional Archaeologist, Daniel Rhodes, came for a site visit today. He has newly taken over the role and wanted to check out our archaeological sites on the ground and also chat about future management including possible survey work to try and answer some mysteries associated with the sites. 
Yesterday, we had an interesting spectacle on
the top of the cliffs, with a young couple getting married on Nunnery Point, to the north of the lighthouse. The weather was not terribly kind as it rained throughout the ceremony, but at least there wasn't a gale blowing! And the rain didn't manage to dampen the spirits of the 50 or so friends and family who joined the bride and groom on the cliff top for the occasion. In fact, the stunning array of colourful umbrellas, not to mention the jazzy wellies, added a certainly jollity to the whole thing!
and they have enjoyed many a day soaking up the quiet atmosphere and the fabulous scenery of the place. And they were keen to ensure that the wedding was in harmony with this. There were no limousines, or marquees or decorations of any sort. Just a group of people standing on a cliff top with a stunning view for a backdrop. What more could you need?!
Sticking out as it does into the North Sea, St Abb's Head is a great place for migrant birds to stop of, rest and refuel before continuing on their epic journeys. Spring and autumn are the times that you will find birders stalkng around the Mire Loch and the walled garden behind the lightouse looking for somethng out of the ordinary. Yesterday a yellow-browed warbler and a great grey shrike were spotted.
goldcrest, which breeds in Siberia and then migrates south-westwards so they are relatively regular mirgrants, but still fabulous to see. The great grey shrike (bottom picture) is a regular but scarce visitors to the UK in the autumn. They come over from Scandinavia and will often spend the winter in the UK. Shrikes are often referred to as butcher birds as they eat insects and small birds and mammals which they will store in a "larder" inpaled on a thorn in a hawthorn tree.
Earlier in the year an oil tanker, which was delivering fuel oil to the cottages at the lighthouse, managed to drop its wheels off the edge of the road. Luckily the fence prevented the tanker from ending up in the Mire Loch below (picture top left), and no one was hurt, but unfortunately the edge of the tarmac and the road embankment were damaged (picture bottom left). The road was safe for everyday vehicles to use, but access for wide vehicles (those over 2m axel width) has had to be restricted until the road is repaired. Obviously as long as no-one's safety was in jeopardy it would have 
been crazy to try and carry out the repairs during the busy summer months, but now visitor numbers have dropped off the time has come.
It's always a sign that autumn is upon us when the Seasonal Ranger leaves us, and it tends to be a little bit of a sad ocassion. This year was sadder than most as Laura has spent three seasons with us; one as a Voluntary Seasonal Ranger for the Marine Reserve and two as a Seasonal Ranger (and being paid!) for the National Nature Reserve. And with the last two years being a time of great upheaval with staff changes for both reserves, it has been especially lucky that Laura has been there with her sunny personality and enormous capability to help us all ride out the storm.
Over the last couple of weeks John, Dave and myself have been beavering away refurbishing the reserve storage shed which has had a leaking roof for some time and was rotting away before our eyes. It had got into such a state that we had to replace nearly half the roof woodwork as well as part of one of the walls and then had to completely re-felt the roof. Many thanks to John and Dave who gave us an enormous amount of their time over the last couple of weeks, to get it water tight before the autumn sets in.
Pictures: left - Dave shedding some light on the problem; middle - John more than measured up for the job; right, bottom - the finished article, beautiful!
The other day I had a visit from two volunteers from the Berwick Swan and Wildlife Trust. About a month ago they had rescued three gannets from a beach. They were all very young, all in their second year probably, and uninjured but they were exhausted and needed a little TLC. The gannets have been cared for by volunteers since the rescue and on Tuesday John and Dean brought them to St. Abb's Head to release them.
survive) were released up by the lighthouse. The first one made an immediate dash for freedom and soared off into the air, the second one needed a bit more time but eventually flew off out to sea as well.
If you have ever looked at an ordnance survey map of the Berwickshire coast you might have spotted that the National Trust for Scotland actually owns more than St Abb's Head. We also own a stretch of coastal slope to the south of Fast Castle and an area of farmland adjacent to the Rangers' Office. I will explain about the farmland in a later post, but today we went to check the boundary fence of the Lumsdaine strip, as we call it, the length of coastal grassland which runs from Dowlaw Dean near Fast Casle to Westerside Dean near Coldingham Loch. The steep sloping grassland might not be an attractive proposition for farming, but supports nationally and internationally important maritime flora and breeding seabirds not to mention being a spectacular landscape (picture left, Lumsdaine Shore). 
On the west side of the loch there are rowans with their clusters of red berries (picture left), brambles laden with blackberries and a small number of blackthorn bushes with a few sloes. The east side of the loch is the best place to see the hawthorn trees, sculpted into fabulous shapes by the salt-laden winds, and weighed down with ruby red haws (picture right).
Last Thursday I went to Coldingham Primary School and to meet some Mini Rangers, also know as P5, 6 and 7! I gave them a slide show about the Nature Reserves at St Abbs, what is special about them and how we at the Trust go about managing them. It was amazing the knowledge that the MRs (as I call them) had of all sorts of different types of wildlife, and it was great to hear the stories of encounters they have had with various creatures.
over the road from the school is a fantastic bit of woodland that they manage as their own Nature Reserve. As a group they gave me a guided tour, explained that they had designed the various information boards that were alongisde the path (pictured left) and we chatted about different types of bird boxes, and bat boxes and all sorts of other things that we came across. We were also lucky enough to hear a great spotted woodpecker and a nuthatch (pictured right). All in all, a great afternoon with all of us learning something new. 
Yesterday was AMAZING!!!!! The sea was flat and calm and perfect for looking for whales and dolphins, so I decided to peer at the sea for a bit to see what was about. Within five minutes of arriving on the clifftops I spotted two minke whales very close to shore. I was gobsmacked! I have seen minke whales before but on most occasions I only got a few brief glimpses and then they disappeared. These whales just kept coming back though, patrolling up and down St. Abb's Head for over two hours! Sometimes I could hear them exhaling and on two occasions one was so close to shore that I could see its white markings under the water. I could actually see it swimming underwater and see where it was going to surface next!!!
Today I visited Chirnside Nursery to talk to the kids about minibeasts. They are doing a project at the moment about creepy crawlies and asked if I could come in and bring some friends. I didn't bring anything fancy; just some snails, slugs, woodlice, worms and a spider.
There were lots of folk out and about enjoying themselves today - walking, running, birdwatching, picnicing, diving, fiishing, you name it. And who can blame them, a fabulous day for it, and the light today was something else, it really brought out the colour of the red cliffs today. Lucky I had mt camera on me really!
This week we have had a bat expert (is there a special word for one I wonder, a eutheriologist perhaps? This particular one was called Dr Dean Waters!) surveying the property for bats. Although the reserve is not huge, Dean only had a couple of days to do the survey and which was no mean feat as bat surveys are easier said than done. He carried out a visual inspection of all our buildings looking for signs of roosts; undertook dawn and dusk surveys of the buildings with the help of a group of Trust volunteers to try and identify any bats coming out of or going into roosts; and walked a 7 km transect around the reserve twice, identifying any bats that flew past. (Picture right: Dean checking out the Rangers' Office; picture left; the mummified corpse of a pipistrelle bat found in the roof of the Ranger's Cottage).
An important tool used in surevying bats is a bat detector; basically a box of electronic trickery that translates the near inaudible sounds bats use to "see" in the dark into sounds that we humans can hear. Different species make different sounds and/or use different frequencies so you can tell them apart from their echolocation.
Had to have a chat with a couple of people who had camped out by the Mire Loch this morning as they had had a fire. Now, I don't want to be a kill joy, and I can certainly understand why people would want to come and camp on the reserve, and indeed folk have every right to wild camp under the Scottish Outdoor Access Code but only if they do so responsibly. And there's the rub - what exactly constitutes responsible wild camping?
