The Cairngorm Reindeer Herd

This weeks blog is time to talk about plants! We’re venturing out onto the flats and hills here in the Cairngorms to take at look at the sorts of plants the reindeer eat, and those they don’t.

An ecosystem has many teeny, tiny moving parts. Every living thing has a role, providing something, maintaining something, preventing...

Hopscotch is one of those reindeer in the herd who isn’t up in your face and super greedy but is very reliable when it comes to catching up and handling because of how very tame she is. She has aged into a really sweet old girl and having had her fair share of calves over the years it’s so great she has passed that on as they too are very sweet. She’s a funny one Hopscotch be...

My top three calving moments…

I’m almost at a complete reindeer year now, having worked through late summer, the rut, Christmas, and free range season, the last for me to complete the set – calving season! I was ready to be inundated with calves everytime I went up the hill each morning, but this May saw a steady trickle of calves, keeping all of us herder...

Over the past year and a half our new exhibition & paddocks have been a non-stop project. One thing we knew we wanted to achieve was to make the new and improved paddocks a haven for local wildlife.

Our mission to make a home for wildlife within the paddocks started with some bat boxes. We strapped these to some trees and snags at the edge of the woods our paddo...

How are we nearing the end of the year?! After the Summer, the reindeer are in great condition and we have some cracking sets of antler within the herd. Christmas training has began for our 3 year old boys and there is a noticeable change in temperature with colder weather beginning.