Day 11 (September 24, 2025): North Berwick

At the Seabird Center in North Berwick                   

(by Louisa, Malvina, Florian)

Our day started early…Because (drumroll please) we had a birthday girl to celebrate. Obviously, we had to do this at 12 o’clock sharp. Yippee :-)

Then, after a short night, our train left at 8.30 for North Berwick at the coast, more exactly, the Seabird Center. There we were greeted by Charlotte (not the one from our class and also not the French Assistant Charlotte from our school. A completely new Charlotte!) She was leading our workshop at the Center.

 

We started out with an introduction and then shortly went on to the real business: the rock pooling. For the ones that don’t know what this is (probably all of you lol), it is a practice where you wander around the beach during low tide, looking for small sea creatures, with a bucket in hand. We learned many things such as how to pick up a crab, why wellies are important to bring on a Scotland trip and how slippery seaweed actually is. We also learned that Bryozoa are single cells that can live together in colonies, every cell taking over a specific task. As a result, they function as one unity.

Another fun fact: the sea squirts, which are chordates and look like blobs of jelly, are more closely related to us humans than, for example, a crab. Luckily, we escaped without any broken bones (except for the one broken toe which has accompanied us all along). At the end we united our collected crabs (holy “crab” were there many crabs!) and had a closer look at them. Charlotte then explained some things about the crabs and the other creatures.

 

 

 Then we started the second part of the workshop: cleaning up the beach. We were all shocked to hear that some people used to flush down their plastic Q-Tips and therefore they would have entered the ocean directly because the canalisation is directly connected to the sea. Today the plastic variations are fortunately banned in the UK, but still we found some of them today at our beach cleaning, which shows how long plastic remains in our environment. 

Next on the agenda was our lunchbreak, which we desperately needed. Sadly, we couldn’t enjoy our lunch in peace, because we had some uninvited guests… the seagulls. As seen in the picture, they even stole some fries from our neighbours!

After the well-deserved lunchbreak we had a so-called wildlife-walk. Actually, it was just a little stroll around the harbour with binoculars, with the idea of observing the seabirds surrounding us. The seabirds were of lesser interest though than the seal that we spotted. But the real highlight was yet to come. We got to see dolphins, real life dolphins, jumping-out-of-the-water dolphins. This led to a lot of OOOOH’s and AAAH’s. Charlotte told us that the Scottish dolphins are double the size of American dolphins and can grow up to a size of 4 metres. Apparently, they need a lot of mass around them to adapt to the Scottish climate. 

 

 

At last, we had a little boat trip around Bass Rock, the world’s biggest colony of gannets, and another little island we wholeheartedly called “te lil buniiland”. After the dolphins earlier today, the excitement for the Gannet birds (Basstölpel in German) was not as outrageous anymore. Still, we were surprised by the stink and the noise caused by the thousands of birds. Nevertheless, some of us were really invested and took some pretty wildlife photographs, whilst others slowly started to fall asleep.

 

Timetravel: back at home - dinnertime

Whilst some of us were cooking a delicious meal, the birthday girl had to search for her lost birthday present which revealed itself to be stuck behind the nightstand. Happily ever after, everyone could enjoy their dinner, some of us even with a good glass of wine. Now we are still waiting for the promised birthday cake that has been in progress for at least 24hours. Oh, by the way, the birthday girl was me, Malvina. 

“Guid nicht” – as the Scots would say!