Category: Seasonal

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Reindeer migration

As the seasons change and we transition from spring into summer our female reindeer will start to move from the lower grounds where they have spent most of the winter, higher onto the hills. This is partly to stay cool as the weather will warm up but also to follow the grazing. In the middle of the winter there will be more snow higher on the hills, meaning further for the reindeer to dig but in the summer the tops of the hills are where the best grazing is.

Waving the cows and calves off to spend the summer free-ranging.

For our reindeer this migration may be only a few miles but across the world, reindeer and caribou (which are genetically the same as reindeer but haven’t been domesticated) migrate long distances. In fact, caribou hold the record for the longest land migration of any animal, migrating a whopping 2,000 miles between their summer and winter-feeding grounds. The equivalent records are held by the humpback whale with the longest migration through water of 5,000 miles and the arctic tern with the longest migration through the air with a mind boggling 18,000 miles.

Long Distance Migration (Varpe and Bauer).
Arctic Tern.
Humpback.

2,000 miles is still an incredibly long way and takes the caribou first to their spring calving grounds near the coast. The spring calving grounds are highly fertile, providing lots of food for the new mums and free of predators, which is important as the young are born. This sounds like the ideal location to spend the summer and perhaps it would be if it wasn’t for the swarms of mosquitoes that arrive at the start of the summer. These mosquitoes, as well as the warmer weather, drive the caribou to migrate higher onto the hills. They spend the summer grazing on a plethora of different plants and lichens. Summer is a time of abundance in the arctic and sub-arctic regions.

Lace and Ryvita free ranging in the Cairngorms.

With long hours of light, the plants grow quickly, and the reindeer will graze on over 200 different species. This allows the reindeer calves to grow quickly, before the winter. It also allows bulls, cows and calves to all grow a set of antlers. The antlers grow over roughly 5 months and can reach a massive size. The largest set we’ve had in our herd weighed 8.9kg for the pair. It is also important that reindeer gain weight in the summer in order to survive the harsh winter.

Christie’s calf, Espresso, Christie and Borlotti enjoying the best of the summer grazing on the plateau.
Glacée and Dante looking fantastic at the end of a summer of free-ranging.

As autumn approaches the reindeer will migrate yet again. As the temperature drops, there will be less to eat high on the hills so the reindeer will move to the lower hills in search of better grazing. It is also the time of year that the mushrooms emerge so many of the reindeer will come into the edge of the woodland to forage mushrooms. They eat many varieties, but the boletus family are their favourite.

In our herd the female reindeer spend the summer months free-ranging and the males spend it in our hill enclosure. This means there is another drive for the females to come to the lower slopes and into the hill enclosure, the boys! The cows know that the rut is held in our hill enclosure each year so when their hormones tell them it’s time to find a mate, they know where to come!

Dante munching on a mushroom.

The migration of the Cairngorm reindeer may be much smaller than reindeer and caribou elsewhere, but it is equally important. It allows the reindeer to move to the best location for each season, following where the best food and climate is.   

Lotti

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Photo Blog: May 2025

The start of May was a whirlwind! The first calf of the year was born on the 25th of April, then the cows left us in suspense for a whole week until the 2nd of May until the next one came along. It was then a flurry of calves being born all over the place – we had 19 within one week! Calving then slowed down and things became a bit calmer with the last one found on the 28th. In general we’ve had a very successful month and the vast majority of the calves and their mums are already out free roaming in the hills – I can’t wait to head out to see them over the summer.

On top of this we’ve also had two Hill Trips a day and all the usual business in the office. So I’ll leave it there and just let you enjoy the cute pictures…

As a reminder, we won’t reveal the names of the new mothers until after we’ve let our adopters know in the June newsletter so I’ve tried to be deliberately vague.

1st of May: Brew bored of me talking on a Hill Trip and finding a comfy seat on my rucksack! I’m sure a lot of visitors would empathise with her – I do tend to go on a bit.
1st of May: Sisters Zambezi and Juniper hanging out together.
6th of May: A gorgeous newborn male calf.
6th of May: Bordeaux and Turtle wondering what I’m up to on another beautiful day. I’m starting to forget what rain feels like!
7th of May: Amazon looking beautiful whilst out free ranging in the hills!
7th of May: Druid is a shy boy and doesn’t handfeed but he loves eating from the white bag at the end of the visit, as you can tell from the crumbs on his nose!
9th of May: Choc-ice is a bold and rather cheeky fella!
12th of May: This gorgeous wee one is just over a week old and already very settled around us, so long as mum isn’t too far away!
12th of May: A beutiful female calf.
12th of May: Cameron walking a calf into the ‘nursery’ area of our enclosure, the mum is just ahead, off camera and this wee one is less than 12 hours old.
13th of May: Andi feeding the main herd in the enclosure. Look at the size of Sherlock’s antlers next to everyone else! Busby closest to camera.
13th of May: A beautiful calf chilling out in a bog!
14th of May: Another gorgeous calf!
14th of May: Three ‘normal coloured’ calves in the wrong place on the other side of a fence to their (unconcerned) mums! Who do you belong to?!
14th of May: Another calf cooling down in a bog. Look at that row of bottom teeth!
17th of May: Spartan tapping his antlers encouraging their growth.
18th of May: The first batch of calves getting walked out! Here’s Cameron walking with a mother and her calf following on behind.
18th of May: Free ranging mother and calf! A beautiful evening waving them off!
18th of May: Another calf now free ranging in the hills for the summer. Good luck wee one!
19th of May: Kuksa yawning after a Hill Trip. Tiring work being this cute!
21st of May: A really funky coloured calf! What a cutie.
23rd of May: One year old Chai having a suckle from mum Cheer. Usually the calves stop suckling long before this but Cheer and Chai remain closely bonded.
27th of May: How Jimmy spent the majority of my Hill Trip – at my side giving me the puppy dog eyes!
28th of May: Another reindeer calf just for good measure!
28th of May: Elbe, the twin brother to his more famous sister Alba, looking great.
29th of May: Some of our gorgeous boys – Jester, Kulfi, Busby, Mivvi and Olmec.

Ruth

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Variety is the spice of life!

We often get asked by visitors what we do when we’re not up leading the Hill Trips. Being a Scottish reindeer herder is a really varied job, and in the past year as we’ve moved into our new building it has been even more so! Here are a few photos from the past few months:

What people think we spend all our time doing – a snowy day moving the free-range herd across the mountains with Cam
How does it look?? Trying out different positions for the antler decor in our new shop
Building new welly racks! Testing my DIY skills (or lack of) to the limit…
Team effort unloading several trailers of wood chip into the new Paddock area.
Hanging out with Winnie.
A day refreshing our first aid skills, though we hope to avoid using them!
Another snowy morning moving the herd into position for the Hill Trip
Helping with landscaping in the Paddock area.
Tree planting alongside our new exhibition area.
Coffee “supervising” whilst I poop-scoop!
Finding a very old bit of cast antler on the mountain,
Building many racks for storing all of our things!
Appreciating Sundae’s beautiful nose!

Andi

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Building up to calving

With only a week or so to go until we could be seeing the first reindeer calves born, here are a few things which are preparing us, and the reindeer, ready for the big event. There aren’t any pre-natal classes for the reindeer but there is a pattern that we tend to stick to at this time of year. About 4-6 weeks before calving all our reindeer need an annual vaccination which was done at the end of March. At this time the herd are still free ranging so we brought them into our mountain enclosure for a couple of days for this as it can leave them feeling a little grotty. They then go back onto the free range for a few more weeks.

Zambezi leading the herd down for breakfast under a brilliant blue sky at the beginning of April.

This year we had an extremely hot and sunny start to April. This also coincided with the Easter holidays and the combination meant we were seeing extremely busy hills with day trippers and hikers. The hot weather was a little tough on the reindeer so they’d seek the cooler climes higher on the hill which meant for a longer walk to find them each morning. Of course, us herders had no problem with this, especially as it was cracking weather! We had to be canny about where we left the herd ready for the daily Hill Trip as we didn’t want them to be disturbed. Once we were into the second week of wall-to-wall sunshine the herd split forces and one group headed in one direction and the other group in the opposite direction. This still left a group of around 50 reindeer for hill trips but the other 20 had a 3-4 day ‘time out’ from visitors. Maybe they did it on purpose as it was mainly our older girls! As a result of them naturally splitting and us not wanting to miss the boat in getting pregnant cows in ready for calving we decided that we’d take them in a week earlier than we were planning to, so Kate and I did just that. We split off the pregnant cows, some of their 2024 calves and left out anything that wasn’t in calf so they could continue to free range. It gave us peace of mind knowing that anything due to give birth in a few week’s time were in and away from disturbance in the mountains. The last thing they need before giving birth is to be chased by an out-of-control dog or a drone.

The free roaming herd enjoying the hills in the good weather in early April.

Since, the free-range herd haven’t ventured too far and we catch up with them every few days for a check and a feed. In this group is Winner and Alba (hand-reared calves from 2023) so this is setting them up nicely for remaining on the free range for the whole summer. The cows in the enclosure are getting an easy feed twice a day and everyday their bellies are growing and udders starting to form. It’s exciting to watch this process.

Alba and Winnie have remained out with the free ranging herd.
Sheena checking in with some of the free ranging reindeer.
Ryvita is one of our oldest girls at nearly 16. She’s got the biggest velvet antlers out of all the females at the moment and is looking super. As she is long retired from breeding she’ll now get to spend the vast majority of her life out free ranging in the hills.

Amongst us herders we are all set with our annual calving bet picking a female reindeer who we hope won’t be last to calve, otherwise we will have to do a forfeit. Once upon a time the forfeit was to jump into a very cold loch, however, nowadays so many of us enjoy open water swimming it’s not really a challenge so now the loser has to make a cake in the autumn for when we all get together to name the calves of that year. Much more appropriate I think!

Feeding the herd now in our hill enclosure – lots of wide bellies on the hill!
The pregnant girls in the enclosure get an easy time with us now looking out for them and giving them at least two good feeds per day. Here’s Hopscotch and her almost five year old daughter Juniper eating from the same pile of food.
In the enclosure we’re regularly inspecting the size of bellies and whether there is any sign of an udder. Not sure Hopscotch is impressed!

Fiona

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How does a reindeer keep warm in the winter?

Each winter, when the temperature drops, and we start reaching for our big coats and gloves. It always amazes me how comfortable the reindeer are in these conditions. It’s not a surprise really, being an arctic animal, they have evolved to cope with some of the coldest temperatures on the planet. Reindeer don’t show physiological signs of being cold until -35°C and have been known to survive right down to -72°C in Siberia. So how do they do it? I thought I would write a blog describing some of their incredible adaptations that keep them snug in the winter.

Cairngorm reindeer in a blizzard.

Coats

Reindeer have an incredibly insulative coat with hairs all over their body, in their ears, up their noses, between their toes. The only part of a reindeer without hair is their eyeballs! Their winter coat is so insulative that they lie on the snow without melting it. Their winter coat is formed of two layers, long guard hairs with a fine downy layer underneath. The long guard hairs are all hollow, with a honeycomb structure inside trapping pockets of warm air – an excellent insulator. They are also triangular allowing them to fit closely together without gaps to let the cold in.

Peanut lying down in the snow. In their winter coat, reindeer are so well insulated that they lie on snow without melting it.

Clicking

A question that we are regularly asked on Hill Trips is: what noise does a reindeer make? In the spring mothers and calves call out to each other by grunting and in the rut a bull reindeer will grunt to his females. During the winter though, reindeer don’t make many vocal noises. Instead, they make a clicking noise. This comes from a tendon sliding over a bone in their back legs with every step they take. This allows the reindeer to stay together as a herd during a blizzard when they can’t see each other without having to vocally call out to each other, which would lose body heat.

Herd of reindeer keeping their eyes closed during a blizzard.

Nose

Reindeer noses are amazing, definitely one of my favourite reindeer adaptations for the cold. During the winter time, reindeer generally keep their mouths closed, keeping the heat in, and instead breath through their noses. Inside their noses are amazing scroll structures which increase the surface area between the cavities where the air they are breathing in and the air they are breathing out are stored. This means heat exchange can occur and the air they are beathing out can warm the air they are breathing in, essential when the outside air is well into the minuses. Back in 2018, Ruth wrote a fantastic blog explaining in detail how amazing the nose of a reindeer is, it is well worth a read for more information, click here to see!

Glacée showing off her gorgeous velvety nose.

Feet

Reindeer have huge feet which serves two purposes: snowshoes and snow shovels. By being so big it spreads their weight out on the snow, stopping them sinking too far into the snow. Their back feet also step into the prints of their front feet and they will move as a herd in a single file line, stepping in the prints of the first reindeer, this makes walking through snow incredibly efficient. Sometimes when it’s really snowy here, we put out skis on to go and find the reindeer, in that case they will walk in our ski tracks instead. They can also their feet as big shovels to dig through the snow. Reindeer can smell lichen through a meter of snow and will dig through the snow to get to it.

Big reindeer feet with splayed out hooves.
Lotti on skis with the herd following in her ski tracks.

Antlers

Last but certainly not least…. antlers! Antlers are absolutely amazing and definitely could be an entire blog by themselves (in fact I have linked some previous blogs about antlers below). They are made of bone and grow and fall off again every year and then regrow the following year. They grow each year during the spring and summer, and whilst the bone is growing it is encased in a specialised skin called velvet. The velvet provides the blood supply that feeds the bone as the antler is growing. Once they finish growing, the velvet strips off and the antlers can then be used as weapons! The males use them to fight with each other during the rutting season over the right to breed with the females. Once the rut is over, their antlers will fall off, they are too heavy on the males to keep them all winter. Our heaviest set weighed a whopping 8.9kg. So, what do antlers have to do with the cold? Well, during the winter, once the males have lost their antlers it’s only the females and the calves who still have them. This gives the females a physical advantage whilst they are pregnant and makes sure they get plenty of food to eat during the harshest time of the year. The females loose them too, in the spring, as the new antler grows through underneath.

Beanie showing off her beautiful antlers in March last year.
Sherlock, who in March had not only lost his previous antlers but had also started to grow his new antlers already!

Lotti

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Amy’s winter photo blog

Turns out a lot of my picture taking when it comes to the herd is usually done in the winter. But who can blame me as the environment on Cairngorm chops and changes so much, you almost receive whiplash! On the run up to Christmas, we had a herd of females out free ranging which consisted of yearlings, two year olds and a hand full of our retired girls. This meant that we would occasionally  head out to feed the free rangers and here is a picture of Alba from such a trip- she’s looking rather magestic if I do say so myself.

7th of November 2024 – hand-reared Alba enjoying a winter free-ranging.

The weather takes a turn a couple of weeks later and here is a picture of Akubra ladened with snow in the morning and a picture of Borlotti on the feed line in the afternoon once the weather had settled. Any eagle-eyed readers will notice a little snow bunting in the picture which turned out to be super tame, trying to pick up the remains of the reindeer food and almost landed on my head!

21st of November – Akubra in a blizzard.
21st of November – Borlotti and a snow bunting.

On the 23rd of November the weather was pretty severe. Myself, Lotti, and Sheena made and attempt to feed the herd in our hill enclosure where we couldn’t see (even with ski goggles on) and hardly could stand up. It was that wintery that snow had started to freeze onto Lotti’s hat! For anyone that knows Lotti, she has a pretty frosty exterior, which she is taking quite literally here.

23rd of November – Lotti in a blizzard!

Cheer is very aloof in character and has recently realised that the hand feed that us herders carry around on the Hill Trips is rather tasty! This has been quite the success for us herders as Cheer will often come up to us looking for food.

24th of November – Cheer licking her lips!

We’re jumping another couple of weeks here with a picture of lovely Mochi out on the free range. I am sure the girls had been sauntering over the ski road prior to this picture, so we decided to move them to higher ground so they weren’t causing chaos. You can also see Winnie and Juniper in the same trip.

19th of December – Mochi.
19th of December – Winnie and Juniper.

Finally, we are finishing with pictures from a beautiful day we had during January. We had trudged through quite a depth of snow, falling into lots of drainage ditches on the way out to feed the free ranging reindeer, for them not to come over to meet us. It had been two days since they had last been fed by us herders, so we were expecting a little more enthusiasm from them. But just before we were going to turn back for our lunch, the reindeer started making their way down to us which meant we could kick back, enjoy the sunshine and views and wait for the herd to make their way over.

10th of January 2025 – The herd coming to our call!
10th of January – Morven yawning.
10th of January – Vanilla on feed line, highly camouflaged!

Amy

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A cold start to January 2025

For all of the UK, 2025 started with a cold snap and in many places lots of subsequent snow. In the Cairngorms we were treated to about 10 days of beautiful snowy weather and temperatures down to about -17. Luckily reindeer are so well adapted to the cold, that they don’t even feel the cold at -17, instead they actively enjoy cold weather in the winter. Here is a photo blog showing some of the beautiful snow days that we have had recently.

Peanut lying down in the snow. In their winter coat, reindeer are so well insulated that they lie on snow without melting it.
Nuii, Peanut’s daughter, a firm favourite amongst the herders.
The last Hill Trip of the year walking down to the reindeer.
Glacée and the rest of the herd walking out to the free-range.
Maisie, Andi and Lotti after letting the reindeer out to free-range for the rest of the winter.
Glenmore looking like Narnia.
Lisette and Cameron leading Frost and Mr Whippy off the hill to go and free-range at our second base.
Reindeer calves running through the snow for their food!!!
Sheena stuck in a snowdrift.
Gorgeous Chai.
The herd waiting for their food!
Sheena, Cameron and Amy on the way back home from a snowy reindeer feed!
And finally, here is a photo from the next day! With the snow almost entirely gone, what a difference in 24 hours.

Lotti

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Thermal photos of reindeer

In early October, a few of us were up the hill with the reindeer at about 8pm (the time on the camera was set wrong – definitely wasn’t 3am!), when it was already pitch dark. One of our friends, Sam, had a thermal camera with him that he was playing with, so we thought a few of his photos would make an interesting blog subject.

We always talk about how good a reindeer’s coat is during the Hill Trips – up to 10,000 hairs per square inch of the skin, with a percentage of those hairs (the ‘guard hairs’) being hollow to trap in body heat, and the remaining hairs forming an incredibly dense undercoat. This coat is designed to keep reindeer alive in incredibly cold environments; the recorded coldest temperature that reindeer have been found alive in is -72 degrees Celsius. Thankfully in Siberia and not Scotland!

These are female reindeer Turtle and Mangetout in this picture. You can see that they don’t show up as much as you might expect, and this is down to that super efficient thick coat that is trapping their body warmth in. Most heat is lost around their eyes and muzzles, and you can see heat retained within their coats where the hair is slightly parted.

A little bit of heat is being lost around the base of Scully’s antlers too, but her antlers themselves are in hard bone just now, with no velvet skin covering them – as you can see there is no heat at all coming from them.

Another setting on the camera, showing in colour this time. Again the eyes and muzzle are most obvious, this time on Merida, along with her legs where her coat isn’t as thick.

This photo is interesting for a couple of reasons. This is me (Hen), and look at how much heat is being lost at my neck. My body is showing up relatively well too, although perhaps not as much as expected – however in this picture I’m wearing a long-sleeved thermal top, a t-shirt, a jumper, a bodywarmer and a waterproof jacket, as well as a neck buff and gloves (it was a very cold night, in my defense)! Yet still my body is showing up as warmer on average than a reindeer’s – with a couple less layers on I would have been glowing like the sun!

The other (more) interesting thing in this photo is the set of antlers in the middle of it, belonging to Pip’s big female calf, who’s grown amazing antlers for a calf this year. Unlike all the adult reindeer in these pics, the calf’s antlers are still covered with velvet skin – but one is dark and one is light. At this time of year the blood supply to the calves’ antlers is cutting off, so here the right hand antler is still vascular (has a blood supply) whilst the left hand one has already lost it’s supply. Sure enough when Sam pointed this out, I touched her antlers briefly and the right hand one was still warm but the left one stone cold. How cool – we’d have never have known without Sam’s camera!

The castrated male reindeer mostly still have velvet skin on their antlers just now, but unfortunately there were none in this group that we could point the camera at – it would be interesting to see how vascular they are still, if at all. Another time! In the meantime I’ll stand by my statement that antlers are one of the coolest things in the animal kingdom!

Many thanks to Sam Ecroyd for the use of his photos for this blog.

Hen

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Times a changin’

‘Here’s something to give you all a laugh…’ Fiona ambled into the office yesterday afternoon brandishing a piece of paper. It turned out to be a copy of the rota from July 2009, which sure enough caused much hilarity. Only five staff running the whole shebang? Just… just 3 staff working that day… in midsummer? Fiona – you worked 27 out of 31 days?! Why were you and Mary working six day weeks in the first place?

A Hill Trip 15 years or so ago, before tourism really exploded in the area.

It got me thinking about how different the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre is now compared to 15 years back – it’s a totally different beast; in some ways almost unrecognisable. Having started in 2007, I was away for the summer of 2009 (still attempting to have a ‘proper’ career), but the July 2009 rota looks very familiar to rotas of my first few years – fewer staff and fewer days off.

Pretty much the entire staff of the Reindeer Centre one winter… Ceris, Sally, Sofia, myself, Mary and Fiona in the front (cuddling hand-rear Grunter). Now it takes double the amount!

The massive change in everything here at the Centre has come about for multiple reasons, but the main one is the explosion in the tourism not only in the area, but in Scotland as a whole. When I first started we were very much a wee family business, taking a handful of people up the hill to see the reindeer daily. Ok, slight exaggeration perhaps, but looking back that’s what it seemed like, compared to the more professional, bigger and busier business that we are today. Well, vaguely professional anyway. Sort of professional. Actually, not very profes… Well, bigger and busier business anyway.

Gradually becoming a bit more professional… new sign replacing the ancient crappy one! North and Byron look relatively unimpressed.

Much of the increased tourism I think can be put down to social media. We used to spend hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pounds each year on advertising, both having our leaflets distributed over the Highlands and adverts printed in local publications. Now, we basically don’t do anything at all. There’s just no need – use it right and social media provides free advertising for a business. We operate at capacity much of the time now, with not enough hours in the day to run extra tours, so there is no point in attracting people only to turn them away. Scotland as a whole has experienced this huge increase in tourism in latter years, some places for the better and some for the worse, the infrastructure struggling to keep up. Anyone living in any UK ‘beauty spot’ such as the Lakes or Snowdonia will know what I am talking about.

15 years ago we had no limit in numbers on the Hill Trips purely as none was needed – and we never had any issues. But about 10 years ago we had to adjust this, first limiting the Trips to 25 groups of people (parking space being the foremost problem at that point). By the time we re-opened after the first Covid lockdown, we needed to limit the number of actual people too, as it was clear that overcrowding was fast becoming an issue. We settled on 50 people as a maximum, with Trips of more than around 20 people requiring two guides rather than one. I shudder to remember the occasional group Trips we used to do for tour companies of well over 100 people… with one herder. Incidentally, the biggest company that used to visit us – and had several groups on the calendar back in July 2009 – were an international student organisation who used the acronym ‘ISIS’. I think they probably changed their name at some point…

Some things never change in summer. Summer = lazy reindeer! Dr Seuss here is one of the laziest… Photo: Elke Mackenzie

Looking at the July 2024 rota, there are 13 names along the top. Most of us now work four day weeks, with the younger and newer staff on five day weeks (although it’s usually just a matter of time until a plaintive voice says ‘um, Fiona, about next year… I was wondering…’). Several staff now just work a couple of days a week alongside another job, so altogether there are heaps of us – along with a different volunteer each week, plus a regular weekend volunteer. In the summer holidays 6 staff work daily, plus the volunteer. How on earth did we sometimes manage with only three?! In the middle of summer! I guess we could at this point mention that collectively all the staff back then were a lot younger than the average nowadays, but even so… and also that suggestion makes me feel old.

But necessity demands change over time and bit by bit we have attempted to drag ourselves into the 21st century, bringing in bookings form and procedures the office rather than vague notes on a calendar; 1st aid training for all staff, and eventually an online booking system for visitors too. As I type Andi is in the process of upgrading our computers and digital storage systems in the office, as we’re at our wit’s end with them all. Progress. The new Centre building, currently half-built next door, will be the most obvious major jump forward, finally providing full accessibility to the Paddocks for all abilities. And a toilet for visitors (just the one mind, we’re not going too overboard)!

The biggest change of all. The old Paddocks and Exhibition…
…and the new Centre and Exhibition underway.

It’s important to make it clear however, that even when we move into the new building we intend to do our best to retain our ‘character’ – rather quaint perhaps, and very much a friendly, family run business. It’s a fine balance between visitor provision and ‘familiarity’ I think – bigger, ‘posher’ companies have designated staff doing designated jobs, but this leads to unfamiliarity between roles, and that is not a road we are willing to go down. The staff that serve you in the shop will be the same staff who look after the reindeer themselves, who do the office work, the maintenance, lead the guided tours… you get the picture. This was the case back in 2009 and remains the case in 2024 – everything changes but at the same time nothing changes.

Hen

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Photo Blog: July 2024

By the end of July the reindeer finally start looking themselves after what seems like a very long moult. They’re now mostly in their short, sleek and darker summer coats and their lovely velvet antlers are looking amazing. It’s been a generally cold summer so far which the reindeer have enjoyed as it means less pesky flies to bother them.

We’ve been busy doing morning harness training sessions with the boys and carrying LOTS of feed up the hill as their appetite has ramped up – their putting all their energy into those growing lovely antlers and big bellies. Some of the free roaming females have been seen by other herders (sadly not me this month yet!) so no pics of them in this blog, but the ones who have been seen have all looked very well, I always love hearing who has been spotted! The office is busy with sorting out Crowdfunding rewards and the usual adoptions. Plus it’s now peak summer holidays so lots of fully-booked Hill Trips and a busy shop.

2nd of July: Ob and Nile and a very scruffy herd behind.
2nd of July: Kernel already looking very smart in his summer coat.
3rd of July: Amy with Adzuki harness training.
4th of July: Jimmy looking curiously at my white bag.
8th of July: Can’t resist this pic of Mr Whippy’s hairy hot pants! Sorry Mr Whippy for the unflattering photo – you’ll look fantastic once you’ve moulted. To add to the strange look, the yellow on his antlers is for sun protection.
9th of July: Harness training on a beautiful morning!
9th of July: Tub has forgotten to moult and is one of the hairiest reindeer in the herd at the moment.
13th of July: A detective and inspector walk up a boardwalk… Sherlock and Morse first in line for food!
13th of July: Elbe and herder Hannah.
14th of July: I spent the morning at the hill farm feeding the reindeer there and also the pigs and these handsome Soay rams.
16th of July: Jester and his enormous antlers.
17th of July: Fiona feeding the herd their breakfast.
22nd of July: Great to see Athens back in our hill enclosure after spending the first part of the summer at the Hill Farm with Tilly.
23rd of July: Aztec (Athens’ big bro) is also back from the farm. Voted greediest reindeer in the herd in 2022 (see here) and I don’t think he’s lost the title!
25th of July: Morse and Poirot chilling out together after the Hill Trip.

Ruth

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