Reindeer – Page 21 – The Cairngorm Reindeer Herd

1st May 202030th April 2020

A day at the farm

Whilst I’m normally based over at the main visitor centre in Glenmore, with the current chaotic situation I’m spending a lot more of my time at our second base, the hill farm at Glenlivet. The Smiths have farmed there since 1990, specializing in native breeds such as Belted Galloway cattle, Soay sheep and Wild boar crosses, plus of course extra summer hill grazing for our lovely reindeer herd. I thought I’d give all of you wonderful folk a snapshot of one of my typical days at the farm…

7.15am: Up bright and early, it’s a glorious sunny day outside. Breakfast, pack my lunch (leftovers from last night, win!) and plenty of snacks, just like the reindeer my appetite is never satisfied!

7.55am: Out of the house to head over to the farm. It’s about a 35 minute drive for me, and at the moment it’s rare for me to pass more than a couple of cars. Not a bad commute!

8.30am: Arrive at the farm and make a plan for the day. The morning is usually spent feeding the animals. I load up the quad bike, a lifesaver when lugging heavy feed up hilly fields!

9am: First stop, the pigs. We have a mix of Wild boar and Tamworth, also known as “Iron Age” pigs. They get fed first because if you leave them too late they make a pretty big effort to break out and come and find the food themselves! When I first met the pigs years ago, I was a little daunted as they charge up and down grunting and slathering ready to eat, but actually they’re pretty well behaved and haven’t attempted to nibble on me yet!

Next up are some of the Soay sheep and Red deer. Soays are quite wild in nature, a lot more skittish than most sheep you’ll meet, which also means they’re hardy and self-sufficient, rarely needing any assistance lambing or seeking much shelter from the weather. But they do enjoy some extra feed! The red deer are very different from the reindeer, much livelier and jumpier, but come charging after the quad in expectation! Their antlers are growing at an insane rate – every time I see them they seem to be a few inches bigger…

10am: After reloading the quad with more feed, it’s up the hill to check on the reindeer. Throughout spring we have the male reindeer in what we call the “French” enclosure, as it’s where we initially housed our reindeer who joined us from France in 1995 (original hey?!). There is a large shed which is handy for providing shade and also for handling the reindeer for vaccinations etc, and the enclosure extends right up onto the hillside, providing natural grazing.

Roman decides I’m being too slow to put the feed out…

The reindeer have pretty good body clocks and are ready and waiting, and cheerfully come in to eat their food from the troughs round the shed. This gives us an opportunity to check everyone looks happy and healthy – we’re already into tick season, and these biting pests can make our reindeer poorly. Today though, everyone is fine, so after chatting to everyone and admiring their lovely antlers, also growing fast though nowhere near as large as the ones on the red deer, it’s back down the hill.

Dr Seuss showing off his new antler growth

Houdini, Origami and Bovril enjoying lunch

11.30am: Powered by a good cup of coffee (essential!) and a snack, my next job is mixing up a big batch of reindeer feed. We have worked out a good combination which is perfect as a supplement to the natural grazing our reindeer have on the hills. They do love their feed, it helps them put on body condition in the summer and maintain condition through winter, and means they’re pleased to see us every day – in the same way that I like to see people who have a habit of bringing me cake! We use a repurposed cement mixer to do the hard work for us, and bag it ready for the next few days of feeding the herd.

1pm: Lunch! Working outdoors makes you hungry, a great excuse to eat plenty of food! (I think I just take after the reindeer…).

1.45pm: I hitch up the snacker trailer to the back of the quad and fill it with feed for the Belted Galloway herd. The cattle were in fields in the glen, across the river, so getting there involves a bit of hopping on and off the quad to open and close gates. Once there, I run out the feed in a line and count the cattle to check they’re all present. It’s calving season and the new calves look incredibly fresh and clean, like they’ve just been through the wash!

The Belties are delighted to go anywhere for food.

Dolly the Highland cow, and a beltie calf

3pm: The rest of the afternoon is taken up with odds and ends, sorting out a delivery of burgers and sausages into the appropriate freezers ready for sale, packing firewood into storage, and folding up tarpaulins… there is never a shortage of things to do on a farm, even when I can’t drive a tractor!

5pm: Homeward bound. I’m tired after being on my feet for most of the day, but I’m so grateful that I can spend my time like this – I’m appreciative of how lucky I am to be out in the country, working with animals and able to pretty much forget what is going on across our planet. The reindeer, cattle and sheep have no idea that our lives have changed so much in the past couple of months – they are still living life as normal and expect us to feed and care for them as normal. It’s a welcome break from the news and social media updates which can be pretty worrying at present. Whilst you may not be able to escape to a remote hill farm, I hope you can find your own escape if you’re finding things hard, whether that is in a good book, taking a new route for your daily exercise, or deciding to turn off your laptop and phone for a day. Take care all!

Andi

24th April 202026th July 2020

Lockdown for those who are still herding reindeer!

We are now into week 5 of lockdown and life for the reindeer herder who is still working has taken a dramatic change in some ways and yet it all feels completely normal in others. Myself (Fiona), Andi and Lotti are still employed while all the other staff here at the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre are on furlough leave… a term I’m sure everyone is familiar with now. Hen is tending to her ever growing garden, which in this weather is the best place to be; and Dave has got plenty of work on his croft to keep him amused, especially now his sheep are lambing! The other herders have got plenty to keep them busy, though I suspect are missing their ‘reindeer’ time, especially as we go into a crucial time of year… the calving season. Unfortunately they cannot be involved with calving this year but we will be sure to keep them updated with all the new arrivals.

Bringing the cows into the hill enclosure ready for calving

Where the reindeer management has remained the same over the past month (luckily coronavirus doesn’t affect the reindeer themselves), being closed means our work is chopping and changing between a lot of hill time, feeding the herd and a lot of office time. We have had lots of new adoptions come in, as well as donations. Folks who used to adopt reindeer but maybe it has lapsed over the years have renewed as a way of supporting us while we are closed. We are so very grateful to you all so a massive THANK YOU. We will keep our social media well updated so where we can’t have the Centre open and taking all you lovely people on the hill to visit the reindeer, hopefully we can keep you in the loop with the goings on in other ways.

Kipling WILL get to the bag of feed, one way or another!

The past week in particular has been pretty hectic so it was all hands on deck! There was a group of six female reindeer who had decided they wanted to venture away for calving into the depths of the mountains so we headed out to bring them home. With four of them haltered up the other two followed nicely and we brought them back to our mountain enclosure. The next day the rest of the herd were brought in too and Lotti and I did the big split of who is pregnant and who isn’t. The ones pregnant have been kept back to calve in our mountain enclosure and the ones who aren’t will head back onto the free-range. That isn’t the last we will see of them though, as we will hopefully still catch up with them daily. The ‘Christmas reindeer’ (castrate males) and bulls who have spent the winter either here on Cairngorm or on the Cromdale hills are now all back at our hill farm on the Glenlivet Estate. Although we aren’t doing guided public trips onto the hill daily the management of the herd will remain the same so we may well get a few of the male reindeer back over here to Cairngorm once calving is over.

Fetching the remaining group of male reindeer down off the Cairngorm free-range.

One thing we have been publicising a lot is our Wild Farm meat which is our sister company based at our hill farm at Glenlivet with our other animals (NOT reindeer!). Reindeer herder Nicky has been fantastic in drumming up local business from her friends and neighbours, so meat sales have gone through the roof. Got to make the most of what business we can still do. I’m having to get involved with setting up adoption packs again. My role in the company over the past few years means I haven’t been so involved with this, but luckily I haven’t forgotten what to do! When Lotti and Andi need a hand to get a load done I swoop in to help out. As long as they don’t expect me to do this when everything is back to normal (wink wink!).

All in all we are getting quite used to the not-so-normal life of a reindeer herder and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t rather enjoying it… Our local area of Glenmore is quiet so we have the surrounding hills and Loch Morlich beach to ourselves. With four of us living here at the Centre – Lotti, Olly, Joe and I along with the two dogs Sookie and Tiree we get out running, swimming, cycling, early mornings to watch wildlife at its best, watching movies and TV dramas and lots of lovely cooking. We have even had a pub crawl. This involved each of us turning our bedrooms into a pub… Maybe that is another blog for another time, watch this space! The one enjoying lockdown the most is my dog Tiree. For those of you who know her she isn’t the most sociable dog to strangers, however if she knows you, she loves you. So when going out on walks and pottering around the house with no strangers coming to visit, she is in her absolute element. She is currently fast asleep below my feet in the office after her 7 mile run with Joe at 6am this morning and the morning feed up the hill with us… It’s a dog’s life for sure!

Fiona

17th April 202026th July 2020

The Curious History of Reindeer in Iceland

At the beginning of February I took a trip to Iceland in winter conditions and learned about the fascinating history of reindeer on this island country in the North Atlantic. Although I did not spot any reindeer, the history of the animals their interesting story is worth sharing nonetheless.

Similarly to the reindeer here in the Cairngorms, reindeer in Iceland were introduced from another part of the world. However, unlike Scotland reindeer in Iceland were never native to the country at all. All land mammals in Iceland aside from the arctic fox were introduced to the country over the course of its natural history. Reindeer are the largest amongst all of them. In the late 1700s reindeer from Norway were brought to Iceland because the king believed that the reindeer would be a perfect match to the cold, harsh conditions. Being that farming was the most common trade in Iceland, it was assumed that all of the farmers would then take up reindeer herding.

The reindeer were brought to four different regions in Iceland: the South, Southwest, North, and East. And right from the start this venture was a complete failure. Within the first few years the majority of reindeer in Iceland had died off. The harsh volcanic landscape proved difficult to maintain the food resources necessary for the animals to survive. To this day, the only surviving group is in East Iceland where the habitat is more suitable to the needs of the reindeer and food resources are abundant.

Hen’s photo of reindeer in East Iceland, back in 2007.

The stark volcanic landscape of Northern Iceland

Those reindeer continued to thrive though and herding them never took off at all leaving an estimated 6-7000 wild reindeer roaming about the Eastern Fjords. The Ministry of Agriculture found that ‘reindeer farming’ would not be viable given the amount of resources compared to the large population of wild reindeer. Ultimately the decision was made to not begin any sort of commercial reindeer farming.

Our Cairngorm reindeer free ranging on a beautiful February day.

Just like in Scotland, the reindeer in Iceland do not have any natural predators to control their population. So each year the government issues 1200-1300 permits to hunt reindeer as a means to prevent overpopulation which would collapse an already fragile ecosystem. Where as here in the Cairngorms, the numbers of reindeer are much smaller which allow us to control the population through selective breeding each Autumn. As a result of this, when the snow begins to melt in the spring we are looking forward to another wonderful calving season, just around the corner.

Bobby

3rd April 202019th November 2020

A winter not to be forgotten…

It’s not been a very snowy winter at all, and nor was last winter either. While there’s been the odd decent fall every now and then, it’s generally all melted away quite quickly. Until, ironically, about 6 weeks ago, when winter finally made a proper appearance. Since then the mountains have been much whiter, and the skiing good… until our new and nasty acquaintance known as COVID-19 stopped play for the ski centre, and pretty much the rest of the world to be honest.

But thinking about snow reminded me of the incredible 2009-2010 winter, when it started snowing at the beginning of it and just didn’t stop. So here’s some photos of back in the days that we got ‘proper’ snow – all of 10 years ago!

Many of you may have seen this photo (above) before, in one of our calendars or on a Christmas card. But in front of this line of reindeer are herders Fiona and Mary, struggling through deep snow while the reindeer had the easy job behind. This was the day we moved them from the hill enclosure out to the ‘free-range’, having closed to the public at the end of the Christmas holidays. But before moving the reindeer themselves, we had to make a path ourselves – easier said than done in some places!

We were wearing hi-viz as we’d led the reindeer the easy way until this point – i.e. right down the middle of the road.

I like to call this photo ‘Congo takes a wrong turn…’

Back down at Reindeer House, it just didn’t stop snowing! Day after day there were several more inches of fresh white stuff each morning, and gradually everything disappeared.

The elves were well and truly snowed in!

Think Reindeer House’s oil tank is under there somewhere…

Any flat sections of roof required clearing regularly to stop them collapsing. The elf house roof is just visible at the left of this photo.

Feed storage on the hill became trickier to get to than normal.

Thank goodness reindeer are so well designed for snow! Here’s old lad Sting having a good rest in a comfy bed.

But thankfully the reindeer coped just fine, and being as a lot of the deepest snow was during our closed spell in January and February, it didn’t matter and we had a ball playing in it most of the time.

A photo from a different year, but it’s kinda cool!

Hen

27th March 202025th March 2020

Weather the Storm

As everyone knows all too well, these are worrying and testing times for all and my heart goes out to anyone reading my blog. With the latest ‘call to arms’ by the government we really must all help to slow the spread of the coronavirus that is sweeping the world.

Nobody is immune from this, young or old, but some people will sadly be more susceptible to the symptoms and it is these people that our thoughts need to be with as their lives depend on all of us acting sensibly and not selfishly.

But we must all stay positive and work our way through the crisis and although this is only a part analogy I would like to think, for myself anyway, that we will ‘weather the storm’ like a reindeer.

Reindeer wait out a blizzard, always facing into the weather.

In blizzard conditions reindeer just hunker down. Face the wind to keep their hair flat, trapping air in their coat and so helping to not lose heat. Reindeer will then lie and wait for the storm to pass. For us all these testing times will eventually pass and in the meantime we must all ‘hunker down’.

Coated in snow as they hunker down, each with their own bubble of personal space.

Interestingly although reindeer are a strongly herding animal, gregarious like people they do have a social distance that they like to maintain whether they are lying down or up grazing. They don’t ‘huddle like penguins’ but they enjoy each others company at a distance. So maybe think of the reindeer when you are out and about, keep your distance (at least 2 metres) and this too will help to slow down the transmission of the virus.

As many of you know when we name the calves born each year we choose a theme and the name of each calf (there are exceptions!) has an association with that theme. The association is sometimes quite tenuous but that makes it all the more fun and challenging to match a name to a reindeer!

2012 was an exciting year, with the Olympics in London, the Queens Silver Jubilee and indeed our own silver anniversary. May 2012 was 60 years since the reindeer were successfully brought back to Scotland, by Swedish reindeer herder, Mikel Utsi. So with that in mind we thought 2012 and 60 years would make a good theme for the calves born. Olympic, Gloriana, Duke and LX are some of our reindeer who were born that year.

One of the male calves born that year, was born with a wonky nose, which made him look slightly different from the rest. In 2012, Boris Johnson was the Mayor of London and oversaw the Olympics so we called our funny looking reindeer Boris!

To this day Boris still looks different to the other ‘straight nosed’ reindeer, indeed at a Christmas event a couple of years ago in Huntly, a young lad was heard to say, “That reindeer has got a nose like a banana!” Now I’m not saying Boris Johnson has a squint nose, but he does seem to like to look ‘different’.

Our Boris just chilling on the Cromdale free-range last week, a bit less on his plate than the other Boris has…

Anyway I hope my wee story about ‘Boris the wonky nosed reindeer’ has put a smile on your faces and maybe even our Prime Minister’s face during these dreadful times.

Maybe this Christmas we could be singing Boris the Wonky-nosed reindeer had a very funny nose, instead of Rudolph with his red, shiny nose!

I’m humming it already!

Tilly

20th March 202019th March 2021

Winter free range days

From January to May, our whole herd are out roaming free on the mountains, enjoying the wintry weather that they’re so well-equipped for. Whilst it can be ridiculously wild at times, on other days it is completely still, with glorious sunshine. I thought it would be nice to put up a selection of photos from the last month or two to give you a taste of our winter days…

Oslo leading the herd over for breakfast.

Glorious views out over Aviemore on a beautiful day.

Camus, Sika, Brie and Bordeaux. Sika’s not sure about what she just ate!

Ochil wondering if the food is ready yet

Okapi has cast the main uprights of her antlers, leaving her looking a bit like a unicorn!

Spider has found a nice pool for an after dinner drink.

Pavlova is easily recognised with her white tuft of hair on her forehead.

Parmesan with her white face marking, and old lass Fonn in the background.

Olympic is always one of the first to see us.

Fonn is the oldest reindeer in the herd, at nearly 17 years old.

Dixie, Fly and Lulu, stalwarts of the herd.

We always give the calves some preferential feeding out of the bags – it keeps their condition up and keeps them tame – here’s Bordeaux, Florence, Athens and Texel enjoying a snack.

Angua and mum Tap. Both are quite shy reindeer but we’ve put lots of effort into feeding them extra feed each day and their confidence has come on in leaps and bounds.

Hen, Lotti and Dave – feeding mission completed!

Andi

13th March 202019th March 2021

The Proposal

On a wild Hill Trip in February we were fortunate to witness a special moment. Andrew passed his phone to Manouk during a brief break in the weather and asked her to to take some pictures. She was able to capture the moment his partner Jasmine, became his fiancé.

Olympic kindly lent his nice thick winter coat as a nice background. Aztec was keen to watch on too in case it meant handfeed!

Thanks to Jasmine and Andrew for sharing their photos with us. Congratulations from everyone at the Cairngorm Reindeer Herd. Let us know if you want Olympic and Aztec at the wedding….

7th February 20201st April 2020

Adopting a reindeer? What’s that all about?

I imagine that there might be quite a few ‘newbies’ to the reindeer herd and to our social media pages just now, being as Christmas is the busiest time of year for our reindeer adoption scheme. Several hundred people will have had an A4 white envelope under their tree on Christmas morning last month, with a brand new, shiny reindeer adoption tucked inside. Hopefully some of those people have since tracked us down online to see what on earth they’ve just become part of… I thought I’d write a little bit of an introduction to us, and primarily to the adoption scheme, to shed some light on what we’re all about. So if you’re ‘new’, then welcome!

Reindeer roaming freely on the Cairngorms

We have the only reindeer herd in the UK whose reindeer are in their natural habitat, and who spend at least some of each year living out on the mountains in complete freedom, with no fences to be seen. Reindeer are native to the UK but died out here thousands of years ago, and our herd was re-introduced from northern Sweden in 1952. We’ve been running guided walks out to see and feed them on the hill ever since.

Reindeer in our hill enclosure, where we take the Hill Trips to (for most of the year at least)

Visitors mingling with reindeer on a Hill Trip in a different location

Guided walks form a large part of our income, directly supporting the management of the herd, but we have several other ways of earning money too – one of the main ones being the Support Scheme, the income from which is all ploughed back into the upkeep of the herd. This was started in 1990, and I see from our database records that we still have two adoptions that were originally set up in 1990 which are still going today, in their 30^th years! We have about 1200 adopters in total just now, having had over 9000 adoptions in total over the years.

I think the biggest appeal of our adoption scheme, in comparison to those available for other animals, is that we still hand-write the majority of our correspondence to our adopters. No printed packs pulled off shelves and ready to go for us… Maybe it makes it a bit less ‘professional’ but I feel it’s so much more personal, and there can be very few animal adopters in the UK who receive a personal letter direct from the people who look after ‘their’ adoptee (complete with spelling mistakes and the likes!). A generic typed letter must be so much more the standard nowadays. Perhaps we’re just old-fashioned here at Reindeer House.

A range of certificates of former designs…

Now we’ve settled on a good certificate design, so we rotate the colours through the years. All very organised!

Photos of every single reindeer in the herd have to be taken, cropped, printed and filed ready for the right one to be glued to each certificate.

In the run up to Christmas, all hell breaks loose here in the office. Adoptions, both renewals and new ones, start pouring in and reindeer herding becomes a delicate balance of outdoor work, dealing with visitors, and frantically making up adoption packs. I liken them to a tide, at times threatening to overwhelm us and at times receding as we battle them under control. In November and December the tide never recedes for too long though, before returning with fury. There was a memorable Friday this Christmas just past when we started the day with 30 adoptions waiting to be made up, several of us then working at them pretty much all day, and finished the day with 45, as they came in faster than we completed them! Panic stations.

A typical, frantic, day in the office at Christmas time. This is Andi’s ‘panic’ face!

Along with the yearly adoption pack come the two newsletters, printed in June and October and posted out to everyone. By snail mail – we’ve not really got on board with the idea of emailing digital copies yet. Lots of our adopters are in the “mature” category too, many of whom don’t use email regularly. And to be honest, sometimes the old fashioned ways are much more straightforward – give me printed material over PDFs anyday. Don’t even get me started on whether direct debit is an option for renewing adoptions or not… (Our computers, and my brain, would melt.)

We highlight a different reindeer each newsletter, a female in June and a male in November.

A busy day for the post office when the newsletters are all ready to go!

Along with the pack and the newsletters, adopters also get one free admission each time they visit. For some this is never, for some, multiple times a year. We also always do our best to ensure adopters get to meet their adoptee when they visit too if they give us advance warning of their visit, although this is not always possible depending on the time of year. Nothing beats the delight of hand-feeding your ‘own’ reindeer!

Hand-feeding on the Hill Trip. Photo by Carole Curtis

Many adopters have become very familiar faces to us now, and with the rise of social media, friendships have formed between adopters. On the subject of social media and the internet in general, gone are the days when adopters saw one sole photo of their reindeer per year. Now we do our best to be relatively active online, posting photos regularly and (no surprise here) blogs. A social media course told us a few years back that, as a business, we should be blogging regularly, so we started doing so every Friday, and have not missed a week yet. All hail the ability to ‘schedule’ blogs far in advance, meaning there’s not a last minute panic!

And sometimes, it all just goes wrong. Spot the mistake… Face palm moment.

So thank you, each and every one of all you adopters! You help fund every aspect of the herd and the company (including paying our wages 😉 ) and enable it to be so successful, and your generous support is NEVER forgotten. And if this has whetted your appetite and reindeer adoption sounds like the thing for you, more details can be found on our website.

Here’s to the next 30 years of reindeer adoptions!

Hen

31st January 202024th January 2020

Learning Reindeer Names in January 2020

After the hustle and bustle of the festivities and Christmas events, the Reindeer Centre is closed for most of January and part of February. For the staff it’s peaceful here at Glenmore, and a great time for keeping busy catching up on all types of jobs related to all aspects of the Centre: Christmas kit, shop, office and outdoor, involving cleaning, maintenance, decorating, and even a new bathroom for those that live in!

Meeting up with the free-range herd to feed them.

But one of the perks of the job is that we do also have to find time periodically to hike up and find, check on and feed the reindeer. This year is the first time in a long time we have had not only the usual females and calves out free ranging in the Cairngorms for the winter months, but also some of our boys with them too.

Feeding free ranging reindeer in January. Right front: Christie – Female born 2017.

For myself, after working here almost two years now, I have become confident at learning the names of most of the male reindeer, due to leading frequent hill trips with visitors up to see them all through the Summer months. However, with the females usually free-ranging along with any calves all through the warmer months, this has given me little opportunity for familiarising myself with the girls. The winter hikes this January to check on our free-ranging reindeer have given me a better chance to get to know the females, and with Andi’s tuition and constantly testing me each week, I finally feel like I am making some progress!

The ones with distinctive markings such as Oatcake, Camembert, Parmesan, Christie and Texel, or that are lighter in colour like Lulu and Mozzarella are the easier ones to learn. I am also guilty of learning them by the size and shape of their antlers, which are like a fingerprint and unique to each reindeer, but also fall off once a year, thus leaving you back at square one! Until they regrow again, but a year is a long time to wait.

Texel – Distinctive female calf born May 2019.

When I first started and was learning the names for the male reindeer on my first hill trips, I actually discovered that learning the colour and number of the ear tags was the easiest method for me. By law we have to give each of our reindeer an ear tag with a number, similar to if you keep cows or sheep. To make it more exciting (and easier to learn their names), each year our ear tags are a different colour, and we also pick a theme. For example in 2009 they are pink tags and named after cakes, biscuits and puddings. We have Clootie (after the Scottish Clootie dumpling), Jaffa, Hobnob, Pavlova to name a few. And in 2016 they are named after Ancient Civilisations, so we have Pagan, Inca, Chola, Suebi, Celt, and many more.

The longer you are with the reindeer the more attuned you become to the subtle differences between coat colour, variations in face and body shape, and more obviously their individual personalities and traits. I guess if you have ever worked with horses or dogs before, as I have, or any other animals for that matter, then it’s similar. To the untrained eye a species of animals is just that, but the more you get to know them the more obviously they stand out as individuals, and also the more fond of them you become.

Nicky

24th January 202024th January 2020

Ben’s Reindeer Herder Interviews (part 3 of 3)

If all the reindeer were to have a 100m race, who would win?

Fiona = I reckon Shekel would have won because we exercised them at Christmas he was always in the lead. There’s a great photo of him on our playing cards that we sell in the shop where he looks like The Joker with his tongue out and this is due to all the running he used to do which made him thoroughly exhausted.

Hen = Well not Svalbard, he’s too fat to run fast. It’s gotta be a female, they’re far more fit and active than the males. Probably Sika, but only if she was running in the opposite direction to humans.

Andi = I can think of plenty of reindeer who would be contenders for coming last. But for first place I think it would be one of the younger females, as they tend to maintain their fitness, when compared to the over-indulging males who have slightly let it slide. Let’s go for Spy…she has some speed on her when she doesn’t want to be caught.

Manouk = Monopoly because he would have just cheated. He was a cheeky chappy.

Chris = Well it’s likely to be a female because they get more practice at running around, and some of the boys are carrying a bit too much timber. I can’t think of an obvious winner but Chelsea is the only reindeer that I’ve had a proper race with so I’d have to pick her.

Lotti = Ooooo, who’s got long legs? Lace has got long legs hasn’t she? Plus she’s so beautiful. I’d like to think one of the females would be the fastest so that they can break general stereotypes and beat the males.

Ben = Drambuie or Hook. They’d find a way to win. Don’t get me wrong they’d be in last place with 2 metres to go but I’ve tried to herd them into paddocks before and they can move so quickly when they feel like being sneaky. So yeah, make either of those two feel sneaky and they’d be my outside bets for the victory.

Dave = Roman would probably have a pretty good crack. He’s a young and athletic bull.

Bobby = Bond: the fastest, the best muscle fibres in any reindeer EVER.

Nell = Well I’m not sure; I haven’t seen any of them run. It’d be quite interesting to see all the reindeer herders in a 100m race. I reckon Fi would win, or maybe Chris, or maybe you (Ben). Either way the reindeer would beat all of you.

Which reindeer is/was the easiest to bribe/coax with food?

Fiona = Urmmmm probably Crann to be honest, especially in his elder years because if he got his head in to a bucket of lichen then there was no way of getting him out.

Hen = Hmmm…Dixie. Every time you want to catch her you can count on her to fall for the bag of feed trick. So she ends up being the decoy reindeer (the one we lead to get the rest to follow) quite a bit.

Andi = Most of the yearlings can be bribed with mere crumbs. Nancy was pretty awful come to think of it, she was pretty much climbing on me for some food whilst I was out on the free-range.

Manouk = Svalbard!!!

Chris = Oh wow, there’s too many to name really. But I guess I’ll have to go for Kipling again.

Lotti = Ahhh, they’re all so greedy! I think I could make either Olympic or Sherlock follow me absolutely anywhere with food. They’re so greedy. They’re always at the front of visits.

Ben = Haha, so many of the boys: Bond, Sherlock, Dr. Seuss, Olympic. Kipling as well could be a contender. I think we’re all grateful for those greedy boys and girls; it makes the actual herding part of the job a lot easier.

Dave = Kara. She’d follow you anywhere man, as long as there was promise of a feed.

Izzy = Svalbard. I remember one time; Svalbard was standing in the middle of the boardwalk, blocking a group of visitors from getting past. He was there for a good few minutes and he just wasn’t budging. Nevertheless, one shake of my food bag and he quickly dashed over to me. He was pretty disappointed when he realised that the hill trip had finished and the food had gone however at least he’d budged.

Bobby = Dr Seuss definitely.

Nell = Ryvita for sure! She walked to the very top of Cairngorm with me and her calf just in case I had food in my bag. This was immediately after she had eaten all of the food in my bag.

Which reindeer has done the funniest thing in your presence?

Fiona = There was a reindeer called Pepsi and we were on a Christmas event when a noise from the visitors startled him, and his response was to jump right up on to the sleigh. Ooo, and, we used to have a hand-reared reindeer called Utsi back in the day. Dad was leading them on two events that day, and the afternoon one was down in Perth. Utsi obviously didn’t know that it was one of those rare days where we had two events in a day because he exited the van in Perth with so much enthusiasm, but when he saw that we weren’t indeed home and we had another event, his response was to just turn around and get back into the van.

Hen = Hornet once used me as a stepping stone after I fell over into the river right in front of him. Luckily he was a calf at the time. Ooooh, actually I’ve got another one for you as well…last year when we were worming the reindeer, Roule made a break for it but managed to do so by going through my legs, which meant that I was being dragged through the shed by a full grown female who possessed an impressive set of antlers. I was essentially riding a reindeer backwards. Chris mentioned that he thought about grabbing Roule to attempt to stop her, but he was concerned it may well have spurred her on. Anyway, the whole experience culminated in me having an impressive set of bruises, some of which I could show my friends, some of which I couldn’t.

Andi = Midway through a trek years ago, on a hot summer’s day, we stopped for a break at Utsi’s hut, as we usually would. Scout then suddenly decided that the coolest place to stand was inside the tiny hut. But in order to do this he had to climb through an absolutely tiny doorway. However the boy managed it, and then subsequently enjoyed his lunch in there.

Manouk = Screel, she full on managed to knock over a guy who was the size of a rugby prop forward. It was pretty unbelievable.

Chris = Kipling AGAIN, sorry. There are lots of others which could be contenders, but she had the most recent incident. Trying to eat a bag of boardwalk staples and inspecting our bag of tools when Izzy and I were doing some repairs recently.

Kipling saw a bag and assumed it was food

Lotti = The first thing I can think of is a funny thing that I’ve done in a reindeer’s presence, I once fell in to a bog and sunk all the way up until the top of my thighs, and then I was really struggling to get out and I just remember Okapi and Ryvita looking at me with their puzzled expressions almost saying “what on earth are you doing?”.

Ben = We had a reindeer called Lego who has sadly passed away but I remember on my first summer here in 2014…Lego was partial to long siestas and Lego was deaf. Whoever was taking the 14:30 hill trip with me had called the herd and was busy leading them towards where they’d have their meal. However, Lego was too busy sleeping. Being at the back, I saw this unfold, so I approached Lego, lay 50cm away from him, and then eventually he woke up….his face when he saw none of his homies around him – just the face of a reindeer herder looking back at him – that was something that still makes me laugh to this day. It all happened over the course of a second but I could see when ‘the penny dropped’ and he realised he was all alone. Boy oh boy, he moved quickly to re-join the herd after that. Didn’t even give me a wave goodbye or nothing.

Dave = The late Fergus! I mean…he tried to head butt me on my first day whilst I was working in the paddocks. He also followed me round the paddocks when I was painting the fences red, resulting in him getting his nose all red and looking like Rudolph. And then he tried to mount me.

Izzy = Chris and I were repairing the boardwalk not long ago when Kipling came over and no joke, she tried to eat the nails. I think it was because these nails were being stored in an old food bag but when we then took the bag away she got in a right mood and started stamping her feet like a right missy. We actually lost a few nails down the slats of the wood as a result of her mardy episode.

Bobby = I’ve seen a bunch of reindeer pee on people which is always kinda funny but I don’t know if you can put that in your blog (yes, we definitely can). Just put Bond again, he tells the best jokes, he’s such a special reindeer.

Nell = I remember hearing about how traumatic castrations were (granted all the boys told me this whilst crossing their legs) however when Atlantic’s time came he just stood there and chewed the cud. He wasn’t bothered in the slightest.