Update December 2024: The Bridge of Dun is closed as it is still being repaired.
Montrose Basin is an enclosed estuary of the river South Esk covering 750 hectares of tidal mudflats offering feeding and roosting ground to a plethora of bird species.
In autumn and winter, the Basin is home to over 100,000 migratory birds including pink-footed geese, wigeon and a variety of other waterfowl and waders, while during the spring and summer months the estuary supports various breeding colonies including sand martins, common terns and eider.
Our four-star visitor centre offers a great day out for all the family in Angus.
Join today to get free access to all our visitor centres and help protect Scotland’s wildlife for the future.
The visitor centre is open daily, 10:30am-5pm. There are no walks that take place from the visitor centre car park.
Please note that dogs are allowed on the reserve walks, but not inside the visitor centre itself.
Why visit?
The Montrose Basin Visitor Centre offers panoramic views across the reserve. Telescopes and binoculars will be available for you to see the wildlife up close.
We serve hot drinks, and we have a small wildlife-themed gift shop with a variety of products for all ages.
A range of children’s activities are always available in the centre.
Best time to visit?
- May to Sept for fishing osprey
- Oct to Feb for wintering geese
- Sept to Feb for kingfisher
- Any time for seals, wildfowl and waders
Visit for:
- birdwatching
- coasts
- geology
- scenery
- mammals
Other information
You can find out more about Montrose Basin in episode five of our Words of the Wild podcast series.
Events
Please keep an eye on the events page or our Facebook page for upcoming events.
Discover the Basin with one of our self-guided audio tours
If you would like to learn more about the Basin, our audio tours are a great place to start. Choose from four tours available through izi.TRAVEL. These tours can be accessed online or through the izi.TRAVEL mobile app available for iPhone and Android.
Montrose Basin attracts tens of thousands of pink-footed geese every year, with numbers sometimes peaking at over 80,000 in Autumn. Now that we’re into the Winter season, many of these geese have headed further south in the UK, but over 10,000 are still roosting on the Basin every night. But occasionally (like right now!), other – rarer – species can be seen on the Basin, hanging around with the thousands of pinkies. At the visitor centre when we’re telling people…
We’re incredibly lucky at Montrose Basin to be able to see kingfishers on a daily basis outside of their breeding season. A healthy population of kingfishers breed up the River South Esk, and then venture off to find nearby wintering territories from late July onwards. In fact, we’ve seen a kingfisher from the visitor centre windows 28 out of 30 days this past month! So when people visit us at this time of year, not only are we able to…
Every year, a number of students volunteer with the Scottish Wildlife Trust during the summer, often as part of their studies, to get practical experience to help their future career. In this blog we hear from Marie Morel who recently spent the summer volunteering at our Montrose Basin Visitor Centre. My name is Marie, I am 21 years old, from France and currently studying project management. This summer, as part of my course, I spent 3 months volunteering for the…
If you have visited Montrose Basin Visitor Centre recently, you may have spotted a strange contraption in the tree, or one of our members of staff bending over a black bucket. This is all part of a mosquito monitoring program called ‘Mosquito Scotland’. The ‘One Health’ project led by the University of Glasgow, along with the Centre for Virus Research, Centre of Ecology and Hydrology and the UK Healthy Security Agency, aims to assess the risk of mosquito-borne diseases in…
Angus Council’s Direct Award of the Nature Restoration Fund has supported the restoration of reedbed habitat at Montrose Basin Wildlife Reserve which is designated as a Local Nature Reserve (LNR). © Anna Cowie, Millburn Reedbed, Montrose Basin Once common throughout the UK, reedbeds form marginal habitat; occupying the transitional zone between water and land. As reedbeds age, the plant litter that dies off each year builds up and causes the habitat to become degraded as the…
At the beginning of this year, we were excited to share some interesting results we had gotten from the dissection of a kingfisher pellet found at Montrose Basin. You can read that blog here to learn more about the story. We wanted to do an updated blog post because of how much wonderful feedback we got from our original kingfisher pellet analysis! Our article was shared to Scottish Wildlife Trust members through our email newsletter, and was also posted on…
Many people will be familiar with owl pellets; grey-brown plum sized masses of fur, feathers and other indigestible material. You may have even had to dissect a few in biology class. What may not be as well-known is the fact that owls are not the only birds who produce regurgitated packets of glandular stomach contents. Other species such as herons, cormorants, gulls, corvids, shrikes and swallows, amongst others, produce pellets. Common kingfishers (Alcedo atthis) also cough up, or ‘cast’, a…
Now that we’re trying our best to keep warm in the winter months, we thought this would be the perfect time to reflect on this year’s pink-footed goose season. Montrose Basin is one of the best reserves in the country to watch the magical sight of tens of thousands of geese taking off or descending together (best seen at dawn and dusk). What has 2023’s pink-footed goose season been like? 2023’s pink-footed goose season has been a difficult one…