Wild at heart at Caerlaverock

Discover a real winter wildlife treat when the wild swans arrive in Scotland in the colder months on their long journey from Iceland.

 

Most of us are familiar with our resident mute swans that we have fed in the park with our kids, or when we were children ourselves. Whooper swans, and their rare cousins Bewick’s swans, are known as ‘wild swans’, and they certainly seem very wild. There are few sights and sounds more evocative in nature than a flight of whoopers alighting on a coastal saltmarsh, ‘whooping’ to each other, reassuring all in their party that it’s safe to land and have a good feed.

 

You can enjoy the magical experience of getting close to hundreds of these rarely approachable creatures at Caerlaverock Wetland Centre - a spectacular 1,400-acre wild reserve situated on the north Solway coast in Dumfries & Galloway. From October to April you can marvel at the twice-daily wild swan feeds, conducted by the reserve wardens. You can watch this joyous event from the comfort of the Peter Scott Observatory, and also get great views of other wildfowl from a number of towers and hides on the reserve.

 

As well as the swans, Caerlaverlock plays host to the tens of thousands of barnacle geese.

Thousands of the black and white barnacle geese that nest on Svalbard in the Arctic spend the winter on the saltmarshes of the Solway. Witness the unforgettable spectacle of their dawn and dusk flights between October and April.