What are your favourite places to spot nature?

[RainOnTins]

I travel around the UK a fair bit, so thought it might be fun to start a thread about your favourite places to spot nature. What do you like about them? What can you find there?

I’ll start:

My absolute favourite nature reserve is RSPB Frampton Marsh. Not just for the amazing wildlife, but also for the friendly staff and volunteers. I usually get my first “good” sighting before I’ve even left the car park. I easily spot 50+ different birds there per visit and I’m not a particularly good birdwatcher.

RSPB Bempton Cliffs is worth a mention. I adore gannets and there’s plenty of those around for a large part of the year. But there’s so much else to see - seals, dolphins, all sorts of sea birds and a large colony of the most adorable tree sparrows. Most visitors to the reserve walk straight past them, but they’re so fun to watch.

Sadly, both reserves are on the opposite side of the country to where I live…

I think it's got to be my own village for me. We live on the edge of the village and our garden backs onto farmland and open meadows with areas of woodland dotted around. We get a multitude of birds in the garden, hedgehogs and the occasional squirrel. I've also found a young grass snake on the front path!

I work in the village as a dog walker so get to use the many local footpaths and woods and love regularly seeing muntjac, roe deer, kestrels, buzzards and red kites. I've also been lucky enough to glimpse a kingfisher and, on two occasions, stoats.

I was down a woodland path last week with two border collies and we'd stopped for 5 minutes. I was sitting on a log and the girls were laying quietly when two young roe deer appeared from the undergrowth about 20 yards away. They were quite inquisitive and started to cautiously come nearer but then thought better of it and continued on their way. Thankfully the dogs were oblivious and I was able to get a video.

Ah, I get so excited at these little encounters I'm so glad we've got this board so I can share them with people who'll understand

@AramintaBottersnike that sounds like heaven, to have that on your doorstep. Roughly what part of the country you are in?

My current favourite place is Lundy, a little island in the Bristol Channel. It's like stepping into such a tranquil environment and you don't have to look far to see all sorts of birds and other wildlife. It tends to attract other wildlife lovers and they are always keen to share their knowledge.

Tbh - my garden. I’ve really tried to make it a haven for nature in a desert of paved/astroturfed gardens.
This year we’ve had wrens & pigeons nesting for the first time; had a slow worm visit, lots of birds, insects (my favourites are bumblebees, the Elephant Hawk Moth & Hummingbird Hawk Moth), bats, dragonflies & damselflies. Our next project is a pond & hoping that’ll encourage more.

Staveley, part of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, for the birds, stoats, otters and rabbits.

Bempton Cliffs for puffins, gannets, kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, fulmars, skylarks, flocks of linnets, and all the rest.

Oh, and the Farne Islands, but only if you wear a VERY strong hat. The terns will peck you fiercely on the top of your head until it bleeds if they can.

I love the sea birds and seals there.

Lovely to see RSPB Bempton Cliffs getting a few mentions - I only discovered this place recently, but it's great. The gannets are amazing - they can have a 6 foot wingspan. We saw some puffins when we visited recently. I'm mildly obsessed with puffins at the moment actually.

@DiggoryVenn the Suffolk/Norfolk border. I do feel really lucky to live here, especially when I can look out of my bedroom window at dusk and see a barn owl gliding just above my hedge.

For me, where I live, but that is more due to seeing the changing seasons in familiar places. I am close to the New Forest and the coast, so feel really lucky. I don't get to travel much outside my local area, but when we are passing through local places we will divert to take a walk along a river or a park and still get to see things.

I have only seen a seal once and would love to go somewhere where I could really get to see them.

I’m down south so Arne and Ham Wall (RSPB) are probably my favourite but I visit nature reserves all over the uk. I also have a few secret spots that are close to home.

Impossible to choose one favourite! I suppose my top place because it’s got just about everything in a lovely location would be Mull. But there’s lots closer to home from the garden onwards. I’m in Lancashire and we’ve a wonderful range of habitats - coastal, estuarine, moorlands, farmland and wetlands.

Local countryside nearby for me. Nothing like taking a flask and a sandwich and heading out. I live in Winchester so am lucky enough to have South Downs, New Forest and Salisbury Plain/Wessex Downs all close by. Last month I saw so many Hares whilst up on Salisbury Plain. Most I’ve ever seen.

For me I would say on beaches, it's a habitat where I always gets my most exciting wildlife sightings. I also love Bempton Cliffs but if you are up in that area I find the beaches around there along the flamborough coastline can give you better views of the birds as you're below them looking up at the cliffs rather than looking down from above. Definitely take the 2 hour boat trip on the Yorkshire Belle if you can, we saw the black browed albatross last year and a pod of dolphins. We've just been to the flamborough coastline again and we saw loads of puffins and razorbills in the water while the DC were just paddling in the sea on our most recent visit to Flamborough, they don't seem bothered by people at all. I also spot a lot in our local park which has a reservoir, it's always worth taking your binoculars with you. I watched a sparrowhawk chasing a nuthatch round and round a tree trunk while DD swung on the swings unaware of the drama. It's like a secret world watching wildlife 😊

I don't travel an awful lot due to pain and disability, but I'm lucky enough to live in an area where I have coast and countryside on my doorstep.

St Mary's nature reserve in Whitley Bay is my usual haunt. We have seals on the rocks around the island and in the nature reserve itself we have exmoor ponies grazing. So many birds to spot here, and the beauty is that I see the residents (e.g. the herons) weekly and also get to see lot of other species come and go at various times of the year. My favourites are the Northern Lapwing. If anyone doesn't already know this useless fact a group of Lapwings is known as a deceit. This is because they were thought to be deceitful and treacherous.

Here's one of my favourite bird hide spots.

I remember the terns on the Farne Islands. They are fierce.

RSPB Loch Lomond is a special place for me- many woodland song birds as well as Snipe and Osprey, it’s magic. RSPB Geltsdale for Curlew, Lapwing and Hen Harriers 🥰
I sadly don’t live in the UK any longer but visit my family every year and will always make time these. Bempton is definitely a target this year !

In the past few minutes in my little inner London garden I've had a fleeting glimpse of a small fox with a very bushy tail, a robin, and a pesky grey squirrel digging away in my pots!

I'd love to visit the Farne islands - I'm hoping to do during the summer holidays. I think I read that you can walk around a walkway on one of the islands.

I forgot I started this thread! Oops 😂

It’s so nice to see many of us appreciating our local areas. I have Snowdonia as my back garden, so have nothing to complain about in that respect!

Lots of “votes” for the Farne Isles too. I visited a few years ago, late in the season just before the puffins were leaving. I remember looking up in the boat and EVERY bird circling above me was a puffin. The skipper said we couldn’t have timed our trip better. It felt so special 🥰

Isle of Mull (as luck would have it we have family up there). Over the years I have seen eagles, otters, seals ,and basking sharks.

We had a holiday there years ago and it was so beautiful and the wildlife was amazing.

@Summerskylarks I was lucky enough to see 5 eagles at once. My BIL had a piping event at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. We went along for the ride and as he was tuning up outside the building the noise caused the eagles to leave their nests in the nearby woods and soar above us.

Lush to see so much love for the Farne Islands. It's on my doorstep, so I sort of take it for granted. We used to have a power boat (still have a fishing boat) and would go over every weekend.

I also filmed a Northumberland tourist board ad on a boat one February and we had to wear t shirts and pretend it was summer. We also needed a lot of anti sickness pills as the sea was so rough. In the final ad, there's only about a second shown of the 'Farne islands pleasure boat trip' The rest is all horses on beaches and castles.

My son and I live Low Barns nature reserve run by Durham Wildlife Trust. Loads of hides to see birds.

Glencoe gave us our only Golden Eagle spot and we are fairly confident we saw White Tailed eagles on Skye.

But really, as we live rurally, we look out of our windows. We see deer, stoat, birds of prey, owls, foxes, hares, rabbits, and loads of birds without leaving our home. We also have bats nearby.

There is a rewilded site near us that has recently been bought by the Beds, Cambs and Northants Wildlife Trust. I do a bit of volunteering there and I love it. Nothing dramatic like gannets etc but there are so many birds singing whenever I'm there. So many warblers as well as nightingales and turtle doves and now Black Hairstreak butterflies have been found. It's lovely being part of the process to find out what is there I used to ride the bridleways through there 20 years ago and it's amazing to see the change since then.

I visited RSPB Bempton today - I love it so much there.

It was great to see lots of gannet chicks, and we also saw puffins on the sea and cliffs, and flying as well.

Puffins really are beautiful, but I think gannets are my favourite.

We also saw one seal 🙂💛.