Grantee: RSPB Scotland

Duration: 18 months (July 2026 – December 2027)

 

This project monitors the declining population of Greenland White-fronted Geese in Caithness to inform urgent conservation action.

Background

Scotland & Ireland host the entire wintering population of this Red-listed species, making the Greenland White-fronted Geese one of Scotland’s most critically threatened wintering birds.

Climate change is reducing breeding success, with fewer goslings surviving each year the global population continues to decline. Feeding grounds remain undesignated and unprotected, while Caithness farmland faces growing pressure from energy development infrastructure and woodland grant schemes.

Monitoring of GWFG in Caithness has until now relied upon a volunteer network led by the Caithness Bird Club and the Greenland White-fronted Goose Study Group. This approach is labour-intensive and is frequently hampered by the geese’s secretive, mobile and partly nocturnal behaviour across a vast landscape. For many years, locating and observing the flocks has consistently proved extremely difficult.

Remote sensing, using passive audio recorders and camera traps, offers a low disturbance, cost-effective alternative capable of generating continuous data that traditional survey methods have so far been unable to provide.

The Project

Over the autumn, winter, and spring of 2026/27, RSPB Scotland will deploy a number of camera traps and audio recorders across the Broubster Leans reserve in Caithness.

Audio recordings will allow the team to detect arrivals and departures from the Broubster Leans roost, revealing how frequently the site is used and identifying which areas within the reserve are most active. Combined with camera trap data, this will provide an unprecedentedly detailed picture of temporal site use, both across the season and within individual days.

Camera trap imagery will enable individual identification of GWFG through their unique belly stripe and white facial frons patterns, as well as identification of family groups and first-winter juveniles, who lack the characteristic white forehead patch and belly stripes of adults. This will support productivity recording, enabling assessment of breeding success from the previous summer. Camera traps may also allow assessment of abdominal fat profiles across the season; data that is almost impossible to collect through conventional fieldwork given the wariness of the birds.

This project will produce, for the first time, a detailed and continuous picture of how GWFG use RSPB Broubster Leans across a full wintering season. The findings will directly strengthen the evidence base collected during Caithness wide GWFG surveys conducted in 2025/2026. This is needed to identify and secure protection for undesignated GWFG feeding grounds in Caithness, a critical and long-standing gap in the conservation framework for this subspecies.