Spring update from Orkney

It’s been a busy year so far in Orkney for Sam and Helen – science and nature festivals, beach cleans, survey training for volunteers, and a new name for one of Orkney’s most special species. Read on to find out more…

Wader spotting and dark sky walking at North Ronaldsay Science Festival ✨

We had a fantastic time at the North Ronaldsay Science Festival in March – Orkney’s most northerly festival! Our focus this year was on winter wader species including curlew and lapwing, and we got great views of both from the comfort of the Ancum bird hide. North Ronaldsay is one of three Dark Sky Islands in Scotland – the others being the island of Coll and the town of Moffat – recognised by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) for preventing light pollution and preserving dark skies. We took the opportunity to take a Dark Skies night walk to see if we could record any common pipistrelle bats or any Nathusius’ bats, a migratory species we have recorded on the mainland of Orkney this year. No luck this time, but we enjoyed some star gazing and a glimpse of the northern lights.   

Celebrating our fabulous volunteers 👏

We had a fabulous afternoon celebrating our volunteers for all they are doing for nature in Orkney at our annual Volunteer Thank You event. This year we were at Skara Brae – part of the UNESCO Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage and the best-preserved Neolithic settlement in Western Europe.  As well as being an important archaeological site, it is a haven for wildlife and a multi-taxa site for Species on the Edge work in Orkney. Three of our volunteers shared what they are doing to record and protect three of our species here – arctic tern, great yellow bumblebee and the plantain leaf beetle.  We then heard a fascinating talk by Scott Timpany, Environmental Archaeologist from UHI Orkney, learning how neolithic pollen sampling is helping create AI images of neolithic Orkney – apparently we used to have a lot of trees!  

Helen wants to give a particular shout-out to four of our volunteers:

Claudia, Orkney SotE youth panellist and survey volunteer, completed a placement with us between February to May this year. She helped us with some vital data entry, beetle surveys, verge enhancement site surveys and attended team days with the RSPB staff team on Mainland and North Isles. 

Jean, one of our survey volunteers, has also been helping with data entry, and Kerry and Dan have been helping us and their employers with some wildflower planting at their work sites.

Thank you to all for your help!

Prescribing nature 💚

We have continued promoting the Orkney RSPB Nature Prescription at events such as the NHS Orkney Social Prescribing Day at Balfour Hospital in March, and at the weekly Stromness and Dounby GP surgery social walking groups. The Orkney RSPB Nature Prescription is a 12-month calendar of suggested activities that encourage us to connect to nature to improve our health and wellbeing and is prescribed by a health care practitioner. You can request your copy by contacting your local Orkney GP surgery. 

Boosting Orkney’s bumblebees 🐝

Orkney is buzzing once again – the bees are back but there may be even more of a buzz very soon! Helen has been working closely with Orkney Islands Council on Orkney’s Conservation Verges. Last year, on advice from Species on the Edge, Orkney Islands Council altered their verge management plan to benefit pollinators. For the last few months, University of the Highlands and Islands Orkney as well as one of our volunteers, Leslie, have been growing plug plants for us from red clover and knapweed seed collected by us last year. Very soon we will be planting these plug plants in Kirkwall, Stromness, Dounby, St Margarets Hope and Burray in wide verge sites in prominent areas within the city and towns.

We are also distributing plug plants as well as a bought-in seed mix to other landowners Helen has been working with; she has already provided them with advice and now they are about to sow their seed. 

We have already completed the first wildflower enhancements of the year: Helen and volunteer Kerry have planted some Red Clover seeds at Skara Brae with permission from Historic Environment Scotland who have kindly provided signage for us too. We have also planted a small area in the car park of Warbeth cemetery that was dug out as part of some recent site works and so Orkney Island’s Council kindly if we could sow seed there. NHS are currently growing plug plants from seed we collected at the Balfour Hospital and adjacent areas and many of the plugs from these will also be planted within their grounds too.  Other public sites we are working with include Skaill House, Happy Valley and we also supplied some seeds to Firth Primary School to help them grow their own wildflower area too. Our UHI meadow we sowed is coming on well with plants starting to come through this year and their students are looking after the meadow and planting in some additional plants too.

In March, Helen provided an online refresher training to Orkney’s Beewalkers. BeeWalk is a national citizen science recording scheme run by Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Beewalkers survey between March and September and, thanks to our work, there are now 22 active Beewalkers in Orkney – before Species on the Edge there were only two active Beewalkers in Orkney. We look forward to a visit from staff from the BeeWalk scheme later this year, and we are also hosting a Beewalker gathering and training day in July open to all Beewalkers in Orkney.

Bagging the bruck + counting terns 🚯

We took part in Greener Orkney’s ‘Bag the Bruck’ campaign in April with a beach clean to raise awareness of the impact of marine litter on our beaches, people and wildlife, removing 10 bin bags in 90 minutes! 

It’s great to have many of the beaches in Orkney covered by clean ups as migratory ground-nesting birds are now arriving in May to breed here, including arctic tern and little tern. We have been putting up signage to help reduce disturbance of these special birds on beaches where they feed and nest.  

Our tern volunteers are preparing to do annual surveys, and we hope for a successful breeding season.  For the second year running, we are working with County bird recorder Steve Dudley asking residents and visitors of Orkney to let us know if they see a Little Tern this spring and summer. Details such as date, location, number seen and activity (flying, nesting, feeding) will help us understand more about their arrival, stay and departure from Orkney, giving us information on how we can best protect this species in the future.   

Working hard for our wonderful waders 🪶

Scrape work funded by SotE was completed last year in privately owned Local Nature Conservation sites adjacent to RSPB Reserve sites which were also receiving SotE funded scrape work. Six months on we are excited to confirm that the waders are using our new scrapes, and we have already spotted a redshank nesting at one of these this year! The work at that site was completed early this year so it’s great to see it in use for nesting so soon! 

Wader surveys have started and with a lot of sites to cover it is a grand team effort to complete three surveys at each site between mid-April and mid-June. Surveying the sites are Helen, Tom Ridgeon (RSPB’s Orkney Conservation Advisor), Anne (SotEvolunteer), RSPB’s Mainland Reserves Team and Peatland Manager and also some of the RSPB Residential Volunteers in Orkney – thanks all and good luck with your 3^rd visits soon!

A busy time for the Plantain Leaf Beetle!🪲

First sightings and new survey methodologies 📋

Our first sighting of the elusive (or so we thought!) Plantain Leaf Beetle by our surveyors this year was on 28^th February by volunteers Graeme and Megan while doing their transect survey. Last year Helen and the volunteers gathered to re-think our beetle survey methodology and, with support from Buglife, we recreated a new one to be used both here and in Shetland. This circular method has proved much better for recording the beetles – we’ve seen a good increase in beetle recordings with this new methodology. Helen led a volunteer training refresher on the new methodology in March, which was a fun day as we tried the finalised method out for the first time. 

School kids champion the PLB

Our Ambassador Schools project with Dounby Primary School P5 class has been a great success. They have been working on a John Muir Award this year to learn about the Scottish Primrose and the Plantain Leaf Beetle – two of our Orkney species that are only found in Orkney and a handful of other places in the UK.  A John Muir Award is designed to help the children connect with, enjoy and care for wild places, with sessions to discover and explore species, and take actions to conserve and share their experiences.  

With Sam and local botanical artist Sarah Crowe, the class studied beetle ecology, how to draw beetles, how to recognise their foodplants, and how to use quadrats and transects to do a beetle survey. They made a classroom display, inviting parents and carers to a ‘show and tell’ afternoon to share their learning. They also launched a school competition to find an Orcadian name for the Plantain Leaf Beetle to raise awareness of this rare local beetle. They designed some fabulous competition posters to inspire others to take part and were interviewed by the local newspaper The Orcadian and Radio Orkney. Listen now on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002rjff (at 25:16) 

They finished their John Muir Award project in style by visiting our multi-taxa site Yesnaby where they found both the Plantain Leaf Beetle (AKA Peedie Reid Gablo) and Scottish Primrose with Sam and Helen! The class were amazed how tiny the Scottish Primrose is in real life – just 8mm across and 4cm high – and could see how vulnerable these plants are to disturbance. The class also visited Stromness Museum to look at herbarium specimens that were over 100 years old of Scottish Primrose as well as beetle plant foods Sea Plantain, Buckhorn Plantain and Thrift.  

Now that’s just showing off!

In other Peedie Reid Gablo news, we hosted a joint beetle walk and search event with Orkney Field Club at the end of April. We’re wanting to know more about the beetle’s population within the one stretch of coastline it’s found in Orkney, and… we recorded over 500 Plantain Leaf Beetles! That was in a portion of the beetle’s known area – a stretch of just over one mile – North of Yesnaby.

Excited from such a successful day, Orkney Field Club hosted a 2^nd walk, this time from Skara Brae in Skaill heading south to the point where we stopped at the last event so completing that stretch of coastline. Only 53 were recorded – we think there are less in this section but the weather wasn’t as good so that may have been a factor too.  We formed “police lines” where we spaced out in a line and then walked over a large area together recording the beetles.  We also found some dead beetles which we will be sending away to Buglife for analysis to determine if our beetles are the same sub-species as those in Shetland and Loch Etive – the other two confirmed sites in the UK for these species.  We also hope to find out if they have wings too. We have also been able to give a specimen to Stromness Museum for their collections too. 

Bats are back🦇

Last year Helen and Sam started a new Bat Group. We had around five meetings in late autumn last year and then stopped for the winter while the bats went into hibernation. We restarted in April with a survey of Firth Park and Heddle Road in Finstown and recorded five bats flying around us and feeding between the two areas. We were also excited to receive bat sightings from Finstown and Hoy – a first for this site!

Orkney Nature Festival 🌱

The Orkney Nature Festival week 2026 has just finished as we write this newsletter, with Sam running three well-attended and much enjoyed events – an afternoon nature art session in Kirkwall, a bat night in Finstown and a dawn walk at Brodgar.  These sunrise photos and this lovely quote from a participant sums up how wonderful it was to be out in nature this week:

“Such an incredible and inspiring walk this morning. To walk into the light as we did, hearing all those birds (special shout out to the cuckoo!) and see the extraordinary big skies of Orkney was a privilege and one I will remember for a long time.” 

So, what’s coming up next in Orkney?!