We have been to Brownsea many times day trips. It’s an amazing place, but the amout of time there is limited by the times of the boats.
You can not miss the last 5pm boat!
This time, we were going to be spending 4 days and 3 nights on the island! We’d get the chance to see and do things we had never gotten round to before, like spend lots of time in the Dorset Wildlife Trust wetlands and explore the extreme western end of the island, near the old Pottery Pier.
We camped at the same site where Robert Baden Powell held his first expermimental camp there in 1907 and there were scout groups visiting there at the same time as us.
I took advantage of the low light pollution and cleat skies on one night to have a stab at taking some photos of the Milky Way, something I had never attempted before. I had some success and can’t wait to have another go some time.
There are a number of hides and a visitor centre (with a new observatory in the process of being built) in the Dorset Wildlife Trust section of Brownsea Island. They’re free to visit, but you can make a donation (cash or contactless) if you wish to help the cause, and you really should because they are fantastic. We spent time in each hide, but with a 3 year old and a 5 year old who do not like staying quiet, we moved on to avoid disturbing too many people. There were lots of spoonbills on site that day, along with avocets, terns and a whole host of coastal and wading birds.
Brownsea is rather famous for its red squirrel population and quite rightly so, with approximately 250 living on the island. We saw the squirrels often whilst walking round the island, but the eaisest place to sport them is behind the church, it seems people leave nuts out for them, which I’m not sure of the ethics of.
Brownsea is also home to a small population of Sika deer. They are really habitualised to people and they seem to have no fight or flight instincts! We stayed and watched them for about 30 mins and even joggers and mini 4-wheel-drive vehicles did not scare them off.
See Wildlife 