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.
From November 1st, the Montrose Basin Visitor Centre will be on its winter hours: open Friday-Monday, 10:30am-4pm. Please note the visitor centre may close from 1pm to 1:30pm for lunch. All walks and hides around the Basin remain open at all times, but these start from different car parks. There are no walks that take place from the visitor centre car park.
The visitor centre no longer has a timeslot system. We will now be accepting on-the-door admissions as usual. We are working on a new and improved optional online booking system for the new year.
We’re Good to Go
“We’re Good To Go” is the official UK mark to signal that a tourism and hospitality business has worked hard to follow government and industry COVID-19 guidelines and has a process in place to maintain cleanliness and aid social distancing.
Please make sure you’re following the latest Scottish Government COVID-19 guidelines before planning your visit. This includes the recommendation to ‘Flow Before You Go‘ – please consider taking a lateral flow test before visiting.
Whether you live in Scotland or you’re just visiting, please download the ‘Check In Scotland’ app from Google Play or the Apple app store before you visit. This will speed up our Test and Protect procedure.
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
- Any time for wildfowl and waders
Visit for:
- birdwatching
- coasts
- geology
- scenery
- mammals
Other information
Join today and help support our conservation work, with free access to all our visitor centres and around 120 reserves. Your support will protect Scotland’s Wildlife for the Future. Join in the centre, and you’ll receive a free gift!
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.
Autumn at Montrose Basin is always an exciting thing to experience. Wading birds return to the reserve after breeding season, kingfisher sightings increase, and by the end of September, the Basin becomes home to tens of thousands of pink-footed geese. Pink-footed geese migrate from Iceland and Greenland to Scotland in early to mid September, and by the middle of October, Montrose Basin can hold over 10% of the entire Icelandic population at one time! They roost on the reserve every…
Only a few months ago, I became an employee for the Scottish Wildlife Trust here at Montrose Basin Visitor Centre. I am on a six-month placement Kickstart scheme until December. Within this post, I would like to recap on my time here at the Basin so far and my most memorable moments. For my first memorable moment, I want to talk about my first working day here, as we had a very interesting visitor fly into the centre. A juvenile…
Montrose Basin has now entered that unclear divide between seasons: the swifts have already departed for Africa, and our common terns are definitely gathering together in preparation for their journey south. But one of our favourite Summer visitors is the osprey, and we’re still seeing them fishing for flatfish on the Basin every day from the visitor centre. Autumn came into our minds earlier than usual this year as hundreds of Canada and greylag geese began appearing on the Basin…
Summer is officially here, and for the past few weeks we’ve been enjoying seeing a whole variety of recently fledged birds around the visitor centre. So many, in fact, that we’ve been keeping a list! Juvenile birds cause a lot of confusion at this time of year. They often look very different to their adult counterparts, sometimes even sporting different colours, patterns, and bird calls. We’ve found that visitors are sometimes perplexed by fledgling birds looking, if anything, bigger than…
The Spring equinox is on March 20th, and the arrival of this new season is both exciting and bittersweet. The emphasis is perhaps more on ‘bittersweet’ this year, with lockdown meaning we’re unable to share the excitement with volunteers and visitors to Montrose Basin. But even in a normal year, March always brings with it a strange lull in the wildlife on the reserve. Winter is one of the best times to visit the Basin – kingfisher sightings could almost…
It’s almost been an entire year since the world came to a halt. The UK’s first lockdown came into effect on March 16th 2020, but the visitor centres had already been closed by this point. “The world came to a halt” is a phrase that is often used when we look back on the beginning of 2020, but there’s comfort to be found in the fact that, actually, it didn’t. Our usual routines may have been put on hold, but…
It’s a question we’re often asked at Montrose Basin Visitor Centre and not one that’s easy to answer – it’s affected by the passage of time, the location, and seasons. The answer is also, invariably, subject to personal bias and opinion. (Everyone has his or her favourite!). For example, many people would consider kingfishers rare, but that’s more because they’re generally so elusive. We wouldn’t describe them as ‘rare’ here, with our regular sightings throughout autumn and winter. So, we…
The magpies of Montrose have always been a bit of a mystery – despite being widespread across the UK, it was only recently that we started recording them on the Montrose Basin reserve. Magpie sightings are so unusual from our visitor centre, in fact, that they go under our ‘less common’ section on our sightings board (accompanied by exotic birds like spoonbills and cranes). Magpies are members of the corvid family, so are closely related to crows, jackdaws, and ravens.…