Our Orkney team have had a busy start to 2025 with events, talks and walks, helping over 700 people connect with nature and our nine target species: Arctic tern, common pipistrelle bat, curlew, great yellow bumblebee, lapwing, little tern, plantain leaf beetle, Scottish primrose and oysterplant.
Some of the team’s highlights so far this year have been:
- Attending the North Ronaldsay Science Festival and running three fantastic events – a wellbeing walk, a wildlife quiz, and a nature art session making sanderlings on the beach
- Taking part in the annual Orkney Bag the Bruck beach clean campaign with Greener Orkney
- Visiting the island of Shapinsay on a nature walk with Pride in Orkney
Let’s take a closer look at 2025 so far for our Orkney team:
Recognising our amazing volunteers
We started the year celebrating and thanking our fantastic volunteers who so generously give their time and talents to help us with species survey work and events. This thank-you event was jointly run with the Orkney Native Wildlife Project and RSPB Orkney teams and we were given a wonderful talk by Orcadian born and bred wildlife cameraman, Raymond Besant, who has worked on BBC productions including Wild Isles and Springwatch.
We are so fortunate in Orkney to have the support of our wonderful volunteers, and they are making a real difference to our nine species on the edge in Orkney by raising awareness and helping protect them. It was wonderful to see six of our volunteers receive recognition as NatureScot Nature Heroes in February 2025, volunteering over 80 hours as little tern wardens last summer to help monitor, protect and raise awareness of little terns. You can read about the experience of one of our Little Tern Wardens, Nicki, on the Species on the Edge blog: Summer in Orkney as a Little Tern Warden.
Gardening for pollinators
We’ve been continuing our Gardening for Pollinators project, helping more people in Orkney to grow wildflowers for pollinators. Stromness Community Garden, Blide Gardening Group, volunteers at Happy Valley local nature conservation site and pupils at Dounby and Evie Primary Schools have all been growing local red clover seeds using the growing kits provided by Species on the Edge. And the seeds have been growing! When the plants are a little bigger, our groups will then plant them in their gardens, sites and school grounds to enhance habitat and provide food sources for pollinators, particularly bumblebees. Well done to all you green fingered folk!
Boosting wellbeing through nature
Our popular series of wintering-well walks continued into 2025, encouraging us to get outdoors and explore wildlife, this time in Dounby and St Margaret’s Hope. These walks are linked to the Orkney RSPB Nature Prescription which is being used by NHS Orkney to prescribe nature to benefit health and wellbeing. To celebrate national Social Prescribing Day on 19 March 2025, we were invited to join the NHS Community Link Practitioner Service at Balfour Hospital, providing drop-in information about the Orkney Nature Prescription resource.
Sam has also been working with two medical students on placement at Orkney surgeries, supporting them to set up and led their own regular health walks through Paths for All. These are free one-hour gentle walks designed for all abilities, giving opportunities for people of all ages to connect to nature and with each other to improve health and wellbeing. For more details about these walks and others taking place across Orkney visit www.pathsforall.org.uk/walking-for-health/health-walks
Survey season is here!
After a winter of planning and advisory work and a talk to Orkney Field Club, our survey season has finally emerged from hibernation and is gradually starting up again! Helen and our volunteers are very excited to get back out into what appears to be a sunny start to the season (long may that continue!). This year for the first time in the project we will be carrying out surveys for all nine of our species in Orkney.
February saw a Species on the Edge Orkney volunteer push, and we are now delighted to have expanded our team – we now have 30 survey volunteers, between them covering all our target species, and we’ve also recruited some habitat management volunteers too.
In March we kicked off the first of our Bumblebee Beewalk surveys for the year, with some fantastic online training sessions from Bumblebee Conservation Trust under our belt to help with this. Suzanne Burgess from Buglife gave an online talk on Leaf Beetles and then visited Orkney to provide a practical workshop for the Orkney, Shetland and North Coast Species on the Edge teams – a great day was had by all and lots of Plantain Leaf beetles seen too!
April has seen new volunteers getting stuck into BeeWalks and lots of new routes being set up. Our Plantain Leaf beetle surveys have been set up and volunteers are getting started with these. We also held a volunteer breeding wader bird survey training session with Orkney Native Wildlife Project. Wader surveys are just starting and we will have volunteers out with us for the first time to learn how to do these.
Bat Conservation Trust also visited and delivered an Introduction to Bats session for land owners and survey training workshops. In collaboration with BCT and the Orkney County Bat Recorder Tim Dean, 10 landowners agreed to have an audiomoth (bat sound recorder) installed on their land for a few nights that week and we look forward to seeing the results soon.
Advisory work
Part of our Helen’s role as Species on the Edge Project Officer is to work with land owners and managers, visiting their sites to provide advice on managing their land for our target species whilst benefiting their own land needs too. Helen has been out over the winter visiting sites to provide advice on Great Yellow Bumblebee habitat enhancement and creation, as well as some habitat management advice for other species too.
Helen also helped advise a new verge management scheme in Orkney which has just been announced – Orkney Islands Council has just designated all of their road verges as Conservation Verges! This means all road verges in Orkney will now only get cut once a year, at the end of summer, to benefit biodiversity (verges which need cut for reasons of safety will continue to be cut when needed). This is fantastic news and we hope other councils will follow suit. Read more about the scheme here: One-cut-a-year conservation verges to offer wildlife a habitat highway.
Work for our target bird species in Orkney for this year is also firmly underway. We will be conducting more wader surveys this year, and will be providing advice to landowners on how they can support waders on their land. We have put up our protecting nesting bird signs in advance of tern nesting season with the help of some volunteers and with permission of landowners.
Particularly excitingly, we have been delighted to provide data on one of our species on the edge, the Oysterplant, to Tim Dean for his new book “The Orkney Pocket Book of the Oysterplant”. The book has just been published and we are honoured that Tim has dedicated the book to us.
Funding habitat work
Since our last update, some fantastic work for waders has been conducted at Bluebrae Reserve, RSPB Rendall Moss. Thanks to funding from Species on the Edge, open water features and hydrological control structures have been put in and ditches have been reprofiled; this will help retain higher water tables during the spring and summer period, whilst enabling the RSPB team at the reserve to release water quickly for management activities in the autumn period. These works will benefit a range of wildlife on the site, but is targeted at breeding waders such as lapwing, curlew & redshank that are present in the area.
The image below shows a lapwing’s-eye-view of the site; previously you would not have seen any open water areas. As with any land works, some adjustments may be required once the scrapes and soil mounds we have created settle down. This will be assessed over the course of the summer. Already things are looking promising for the 2025 breeding season though – we currently have seven active lapwing nests in the area, compared to four in 2024!
Coming up…
We are excited to be running three events at the upcoming Orkney Nature Festival. Find out more about that here: Species on the Edge at Orkney Nature Festival.
We are also looking forward to taking local MSP, Liam MacArthur, out to one of our sites in June to see and learn more about our work for the iconic Scottish Primrose.
UHI Orkney will be working with us on an exciting wildflower project in their grounds in June and they will also be helping us at some other sites alongside our volunteer team throughout the summer. This will involve collecting and sowing wildflower seeds at a range of sites across Orkney.
We will also be hosting some surveying workshops for landowners as well as habitat creation demonstration days later this year too. More on that coming soon.
To keep up to date with all that we’ve got going on in Orkney and to receive notifications of new events and opportunities, sign up to the Species on the Edge mailing list, keep an eye on the Species on the Edge social media channels, or get in touch with Sam: samantha.stringer@rspb.org.uk.
