I thought I might start an annual blog of photos I’ve taken over the winter season, of things that are supposed to be reindeer – and aren’t. Although it turns out that being as I didn’t really go anywhere this winter, I didn’t take that many photos. Will try harder next year…
First up, shortbread. The commonest offender at Christmas I reckon, every shop has Christmassy tins of red deer, blatantly assuming they are reindeer. Or maybe just assuming that ‘deer are deer’ and they’re all the same… (arggh).
Shame on you, Tesco.
Ah, wrapping paper. Also a common offender. I’m not even sure what this (below) is supposed to be. It ain’t no reindeer, that’s for sure…
Another image I saw online that I thought warranted a mention, despite not being my own photo, was a new Banksy on a wall in Birmingham. The ‘reindeer’ (prancing Christmas affairs) are pulling a sleigh represented by a bench that is often used by homeless people; in the Guardian’s words: A Christmas cracker with a bang of reality. I like Banksy’s artwork, but ya know, would have been better if the mural showed actual reindeer…
Whilst I mostly failed miserably at remembering to take photos of the Christmas monstrosities masquerading as reindeer (quite possibly because I usually take a wide berth around the Christmas aisles in most shops), my winner this year (below) came looking for me at the Reindeer Centre, arriving in a box of stationary I’d ordered from Viking.
Eventually, having stared for too long at the vaguely fallow deer-esque antlers, still in velvet, on a head that isn’t a fallow, I realised it’s an AI picture entirely (as opposed to some bubble wrap and a ribbon being photoshopped onto an actual photo). God help us. So I’m naming and shaming you, Viking Office Supplies!
I’ll be back in a year with the Christmas 2026 edition of this blog…
Reindeer live for an average of 12-13 years, with 17 or 18 being an exceptional lifespan, and I have now worked here since November 2007 – getting on for 18 years. In 2023, it got to the point where only a small handful of old reindeer still remained in the herd who had been alive when I first arrived, with everyone else having been born in the duration of my employment.
These five, Lulu, Enya and Elvis (born in 2006) and Fern and Fly (born in 2007), became the ‘oldies’, outlasting many reindeer who were younger than them. I thought of them as my gang of old buddies, the only reindeer to have been here longer than me. Lulu in particular was a real character and a favourite of mine – you can read a previous blog of mine about her here.
Fern in 2018 in her heyday, aged 11 and with an incredible set of antlers.Handsome Elvis with his silver coat.Fly looking shocked that I wanted to take her photo!
But after a couple of years of the situation not changing, 2023 rolled around and in the second half of the year, suddenly we lost Lulu, Enya and Elvis close together. My cohort of oldies was down to two! Fly managed another few months before her time came, leaving just Fern, older by a year to any others in the herd. But Fern was in remarkably good condition for a reindeer aged nearly 17. Big antlers for an old girl and in really good condition, though by late summer 2024 she was definitely looking a bit ‘older’ in comparison.
Fern in February 2024 at nearly 17 years old – looking incredible still.
Throughout winter 2024/2025 Fern continued to soldier on, in better condition than some of her younger buddies other than a bit of arthritis that we could manage with pain relief. We saw that part of the reindeer herd at least every day or two through the winter (in summer we see the females much less) and in the latter part of the season it started to become apparent that Fern’s sight was declining.
We made the hard decision to put her down at the end of the winter, at the point when we would naturally stop seeing the females daily as they move away to their summer pastures. Whilst she may have continued on for a few more months, the potential of her injuring herself accidentally out on the mountains and suffering a slow end without us knowing about it was a risk we were not willing to take – welfare always has to be the first priority for our animals.
My last photo of Fern, taken about 5 weeks before she died. Snoozing in the sunshine!
With the passing of Fern, the whole herd has now completely changed since I started. Gazelle, Sika and Sambar are now 17 years old (Gazelle the oldest by about a fortnight), and I have known them for their entire lives, and this feels like quite a significant point in my time here. Possibly mainly because it’s making me feel even older than usual, but hey ho.
Just like people, some reindeer have huge resemblance within their families, and some more so than others. I thought I’d write a wee blog to talk about a couple of the best examples in our herd today – and then I discovered that Ruth had beated me to it. So here’s a couple more examples of striking family resemblance, and you can read Ruth’s ‘Mini-me’ blog here.
Family ‘looks’ run especially strongly in Holy Moley’s family. She herself is the spitting image of her mum Galilee, and Holy Moley’s daughter Mississippi popped out looking like a carbon copy too. Here are Mississippi and Holy Moley in the photo above, taken in September 2024 when Mississippi was 16 months old – whilst obviously smaller still as she’s not full-grown, the resemblance is uncanny. Holy Moley only grows a single antler each year due to an injury as a calf, and it seems Mississippi even tried to emulate this look by breaking hers! I’d loved to have had the opportunity to photograph Galilee alongside the two of them, but sadly she died when Holy Moley was only 4 months old.
This is half-brothers Jelly and Cicero, who are both extremely similar. Jelly is a touch darker, but both grow matching antlers and for much of the year they can be pretty hard to tell apart, especially as they are the same age as each other. The best family resemblance of all is between their dad Houdini and Cicero (on the right in the photo), but once again I’ve never had the opportunity to get a photo of them all together, and Houdini is now very old and age has now changed his appearance somewhat. Houdini was originally born in Sweden and imported to join our herd in 2011, hence we bred from him a fair bit to use his ‘fresh’ genetics, but these two offspring are the most similar in appearance, both to him and to each other. All three grow relatively simple antlers for males, with not too much going on at the tops compared to some reindeer.
There are some other good examples in the herd, but it can be difficult to get photos of certain individuals together, so maybe I’ll add another blog further down the line when opportunity arises!
Antlers are my ‘thing’, here at the Reindeer Centre, so it’s a natural subject to turn to for a blog when Ruth is starting to look a little twitchy about needing the rest of us to crack on and provide her with some blogs to keep her going through the calving season (no chance of having enough time to write any then!).
I thought I’d write about different antler shapes amongst female reindeer in this blog, as there is so much variation. Reindeer tend to grow the shape shaped antlers from year to year, but there are factors that influence it, such as general body condition, or whether they’ve got a calf at foot to raise – so more variation tends to be seen amongst the females from year to year than the males.
I’ll start with Marple, above, who I would say grows very much the ‘average’ style of antlers. Upright shafts with multiple tines growing backwards from them; forward-pointing tines originating from the base, and a ‘blade’ – a tine from one antler growing towards the nose. I’ve written more about Marple’s antlers in the past here. However, we also see a wide range of shapes from year to year, such as:
The ‘Bonsai’: Indigo’s antlers are very convoluted and wiggly here!The ‘Salad tongs’: Meadow grew this incredible set of antlers as a two year old – I’m not sure what happened to them but they would have made excellent salad tongs!The ‘Ant’: Merida’s efforts in 2024 were, quite franky, ridiculous.The ‘Unicorn’: Multiple reindeer over the years have only produced a single antler, such as Dixie here. It’s a natural occurance that just happens sometimes. The ‘Gate hooks’: If you’re going to grow a gate hook on your head, might as well grow two! Russia looks very strange….The ‘Lazy antlers’: Israel couldn’t be bothered to put too much effort into her antlers this year, but all the effort went into her body instead. Look at those rolls of back fat!!!The ‘I don’t need no antlers’. Arnish was a ‘polled’ reindeer, one who never grew antlers, but she was built like a tank so no-one messed with her at all – the lack of antlers certainly didn’t hinder her in the herd!
Read more about polled reindeer in a previous blog here, and if you’re wondering whether we ever sell antlers, you can find out here. There’s more general info about antler growth here too.
Every reindeer herder looks forward to May – it’s pretty much the best month of the year for us with calving time for the reindeer dominating it. But May is also one of my absolute favourite months for other reasons too, the trees are coming into leaf, the plants in my garden are growing like mad, the weather is generally fairly amenable, and the migrant birds are back.
May looks like THIS to reindeer herders!
Mention May to any reindeer herder and calving is – I guarantee – the first thing that pops into their head. Reindeer are very seasonal with their breeding, and whilst the occasional calf might be born in the last few days of April, the vast majority arrive in May every year. Calving is a wonderful time of year for us – who can resist the cuteness of a a newborn reindeer? – though it comes with a fair amount of stress too, as we do our best to keep everyone happy and healthy. You’ll find lots of blogs about calving if you use the search function on the blog page here (only visible on a laptop/desktop) if you’d like to know more. Plus lots of lovely photos – of course!
Calves Gelato and Zoom at couple of weeks old
But I have other connotations for the month of May. The second one are the cuckoos. We’re lucky enough to still get plenty of cuckoos in this area, although nationwide they have declined by about 65% since the early 1980s. Even the least ‘birdy’ person in the UK surely knows their iconic call, and I associate them so much with May. They call from the forest below the reindeer’s hill enclosure all through the month, and the far-carrying sound is so reminiscent of all the early mornings over the years that I have trudged about on the hill side looking for cows with their newborn calves. Cuckoos seem to stop calling earlier than some species, I’ve noticed, and already as I write (early June) I realise that I’m barely hearing them any more. Such a short season, and yet they are utterly ingrained into our conscious in spring! Read more about other migrant species who are summer visitors to us in one of my previous blogs here.
The third thing I really associate with May here in the Cairngorms is the cotton-grass (Hare’s-tail Cotton-grass, to be precise), which grows on acidic moorland and is familiar to many, with it’s bobbing cotton-wool like flower heads.
Hare’s-tail cotton-grassFab as a calf
It’s not actually a grass but a sedge, and some years give particularly good displays, where it can almost look like it has snowed. It comes into flower in May, and grows particularly well in the bottom of our hill enclosure on the flatter areas there, which tends to be where the cows and their calves hang out during the month.
Calving in the cotton-grass… A very grumpy looking Brie with her grey calf Latte, and Peanut and her calf Kuksa in between.
So there we are – the three ‘c’s that are incredibly strongly associated with May to me. The fourth would be ‘chaos’, but that’s part and parcel with calving so can be combined into one!
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 CamHow does it look?? Trying out different positions for the antler decor in our new shopBuilding 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 TripHelping 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!
Russia, born in 2005 in the ‘countries’ year, was one of the first reindeer I got to know. She was already quite an old girl, but one of the tamest reindeer in the herd and always super chilled out. She was also ‘interesting’ in appearance – therefore standing out in the herd and making it easy for a wet-behind-the-ears reindeer herder to put a name to a face. There was something odd about her face, about her eyes… Now I don’t claim to be any sort of oil painting myself, but at least my eyes are in the right position on my face.
Russia’s… weren’t. They were a good bit further up her skull than normal, giving her an odd appearance of peering down her nose at you the whole time. Don’t believe me? Here you go:
I’m not saying this was a bad look in any way, just… odd. Her usual style of rather simple, straight swept-back antlers exacerbated the look too.
Russia with probably the nicest set of antlers she grew – still very simple, especially in comparison to Sequin and her fancy set in the background! Ibex, on the right, has a more average female set.
Russia had 6 calves in her lifetime who survived long enough to be named, including Pavlova, Spider and Brie who are still with us today. Normally I would say family resemblance is strongest between mother and daughter, but in Russia’s case it is her son Spider who inherited her looks, including the eyes. Oh, the eyes…
Russia with Spider at a couple of weeks oldFive months later – Spider has grown somewhat! Russia has cast and regrown her antlers too in the meantime.Adult Spider and his eyes – way too far up his face!
Russia was a lovely friendly reindeer, seen here with Heather enjoying a mouthful of feed from her rucksack. This photo was taken around August one year, at which point Russia had been free-ranging on the hills for about three months, hardly ever seeing a herder, but here she is totally happy to walk straight up to us. Her offspring have generally been friendly too, Pavlova a little shyer and Brie very bold, but with much more ‘attitude’ than her mum. Once again it is Spider that is the most similar, in character as well as looks.
Another photo of Russia…… and Spider again. Peas in a pod!If you have a long nose, then best to make sure you look right down it…
And finally, here’s what Russia herself would have had to say about my opinion of her unusual appearance:
Hen
N.B. There are other blogs on family resemblance in the herd. Among others, you can find Ruth’s blog about Emmental and Pony and their respective offspring here, and her blog on Mini-mes in the herd here.
We are opening to the public once again on Saturday the 8th February 2025! With some BIG changes though for the 2025 season as we’ve now moved into our brand new Reindeer Centre building, having operated out of the neighbouring Reindeer House since it was built in 1960.
The brand new Centre, with Reindeer House just beyond it.
However, we think it’s really important that people understand that everything is still a work in progress and changes will continue to happen for the foreseeable future as we continue landscaping and developing, so 2025 will be a year of us working around what we currently have in place, whilst it changes constantly. But at the moment, what’s the deal?! Let me try and explain what we will have on offer at first, and how this might change throughout the coming months:
To start with, let me make it clear that – like over the last 12 months – Hill Trips to visit the reindeer up in their mountain home aren’t affected in any way and will run completely normally up on the mountains. The differences are all down in Glenmore at the Centre – thankfully the hills and the reindeer don’t change!
Over the February half-term, we will have 4 reindeer on display in our Paddock area. From the end of the half-term the Paddocks will be closed once again, opening again at the start of the Easter holidays and remaining open for the rest of the year. Just now much of the groundworks there are still to be done – we managed to get enough boardwalk completed in time to have reindeer on display at Christmas time, but there is still much to do over the course of the coming months. This includes a new Elf House (of course!), more viewing areas, another ‘bothy’ building, and a covered area for the reindeer. We will also landscape the ground within the Paddock itself to improve the aesthetics and make it more reindeer-friendly! As you can see in the photo below, there’s a lot to do from the stage we’re at just now…
The current Paddock area, with viewing platform at the right. Much more to come in the future!
As such, tickets will be initially be available on the day rather than for pre-purchase online. At times we will aim to have herders out in the Paddocks giving talks but much of the time the Paddock will be self guided, meaning our prices may vary accordingly at times.
At the moment, some of our previous display boards are up temporarily in the Paddocks for visitors to peruse.
On arrival to the Centre, visitors will now come directly into the new Centre to check in/purchase tickets, rather than Reindeer House. Our entrance ‘atrium’ is very much a work in progress still, with old signage temporarily still in use whilst new signage and displays are developed – this will all be updated gradually over the time as work is completed.
Emily has been working tirelessly on the design of the new shop, and ex-herder Olly has been spending his weekends building beautiful wooden stuff to make it look pretty! Andi and Cameron have added the finishing touches too. It’s a little smaller than our old shop so we’ll have to work out the best use of the space as we go, but right now it’s looking lovely.
Beautiful wooden shelves!Antlers have many uses!
The Exhibition is still being designed and we don’t have an opening date for this yet, so for the time being visitors for the Paddocks will be bypassing that area and going back out the building the way they came in. It also means we have space to work on displays behind the scenes for the time being.
Exhibition room, which in the future visitors will pass through on their way out to the Paddocks.
One thing we do have up on display already is our ‘Thank You board’ for the people who pledged for our Crowdfunder appeal last year for their name to be displayed on the wall in the new Centre…
… and the plaques are up for those who pledged for one too!
And here’s our new office! It’s been a bit of a juggling mission to get everything to fit in, but we’re just about there…
And of course, how about the car park? Last year the builders used it for their temporary cabin and machinery, and over Christmas we used it ourselves for staff. Just now we’re finishing off signage to get it ready to open to the public, and it will include a designated disabled space and (hopefully) EV chargers. Please note that it will be for customer use ONLY (you can’t park there just to walk to the beach!) during our opening hours.
Car park – signage and parking bays still to be added, along with barrier between it and the road.
In no way will the car park be big enough at busy times of year for all our visitors, but there is still parking elsewhere in Glenmore, and in a very tight space it is as big as the surroundings allow. How we wish that the Reindeer Centre and it’s associated groundworks didn’t need to be shoe-horned into such a steeply sloping area – it’s made everything so much more difficult, but we can only do our best with what we have!!!
So here’s to the year ahead. Although we were working hard behind the scenes, at times last year we felt rather like we were twiddling our thumbs waiting for the building to be signed over to us – but now it is onwards and upwards from here on!
I thought I’d write a wee blog to thank everyone who has come to volunteer for us this year. However, if you’ve volunteered in a previous year, please don’t be remotely offended if you’ve not found your name in a blog like this – it’s literally only because I have a few spare minutes and Ruth (blog master) is sitting next to me… so probably time I wrote a blog once again. Gotta keep her sweet…
Volunteering this year has had a slightly different feel to it, as the Paddocks normally take up a considerable amount of a volunteer’s time each day; poo-picking, sweeping, opening and closing them each day, chatting to visitors out there… But this year that aspect has vanished completely, so volunteers have been able to be a bit more ‘relaxed’ during their week, sometimes not starting until gone 10am. Unheard of in the past! Although sadly this luxury was not afforded to us full-time herders… Volunteers this year have therefore spent the majority of their time helping us on the Hill Trips, usually twice a day, with rather less time spent pottering about down at the Centre.
Caitlin joined us for a week in August. Here she is with Hemp and Limpopo in the hill enclosure.
Normally we take volunteers each year from May to October, but long-term regular volunteer Emm is afforded special status, often coming outwith these months. She managed three stints this year, and you’ll find many blogs over the years from her on our website, the most recent (at time of writing) being here. We love having Emm here to volunteer!
Emm with her adopted reindeer Mo, braving the weather at a very cold and wet local Christmas event a few years back.Emm in September this year with Cowboy and Mivvi.
I’ve just peered at the wall calendar here in the office and counted 26 other volunteers who gave up a week of their time to come and help us this year – as ever from all walks of life and ranging in age from 18 to late 60s (I’m guessing – apologies if I’ve offended and congratulations if I’ve flattered!). We love this range of people from all walks of life – it’s much more interesting for us to have a stream of totally different people here every week than it would be to get people all of like mind.
Of those 26 people 12 were returnees, which I guess means we must be doing something right! There’s an element of apprehension for us on a Monday morning when a ‘new’ volunteer is due to arrive, not knowing what to expect of someone – the scant info we gather in the application form only goes so far to give us an idea of what someone will be like. This year everyone, new or returnee, has been absolutely wonderful though, so we never needed to worry.
Stephanie returned for a week in June of this year, the third year on the trot! Stephanie is pictured doing a very important volunteer job – offering the slightly leaner youngsters some extra food at the end of a Hill Trip. Yukon is delighted!
So huge thanks must go to all 26 lovely volunteers, in order only of when they visited: Victoria, Jayne (who wrote a lovely blog you can read here – thanks Jayne!), Anne, Kerry, Rachel C, Marcus, Stephanie, Anna, Wendy, Aleksandra, Becca, Rachel S, Jocelyn, Nora, Caitlin, Katie, Callum, Helen, Christine, Karen, Sharon, Colin, Sophie, Lisa, Emily and Brenda. You are all amazing! A special shout-out to Nora, who at 18 was our youngest volunteer but also the furthest travelled – having persuaded family to come on holiday to Scotland from Washington D.C. in the States, so she could spend a week of that time with us!
Rachel S joined us in July for a second time. This is herder Kate with Dr Seuss and Ärta (left) and Rachel with Ob and Iskrem (right) helping out with harness training.One of the main responsibilities of a volunteer is helping out on Hill Trips, carrying food, helping dish out the hand feed, and talking to our visitors. This is Alex who helped out in July for a week doing a sterling job of not letting Jelly in to the white bag!
Another person to mention is 14 year old Maisie, who lives locally and is the daughter of family friends of the Smiths. This year Maisie has been joining us on some days in the school holidays and has been wonderful, super chatty and sociable for such a young lass, and always keen to get involved and help out. She’s also very fit, being into lots of outdoor sports, so puts me to shame anytime I’m on the hill with her!
Borlotti saying hello to the lovely Maisie!
And the final person to mention who’s a constant help throughout the year is Carol. Carol started out as an adopter, living relatively locally, and has progressed to being a regular volunteer, helping on the Hill Trips most weekends. She has finely honed her hand-feeding talk over the years and now has the groups listening with bated breath!
For anyone reading this that is thinking that a week’s reindeer herding sounds like a fit for them, why not come and join us?! We start booking in each season’s volunteers each January, so drop us an email then if you’re interested and we’ll send you an application form. We can’t provide accommodation unfortunately, but there is both a campsite and a youth hostel within a couple of hundred metres, not to mention a huge amount of other accommodation elsewhere in the area.
But finally, I will finish on a sad note. Our wonderful long term volunteer Paul, who visited for a fortnight twice a year for around 25 years, initially with wife Pat – sadly passed away in his mid-eighties this summer. Paul was a retired joiner and so built all sorts of things here over the years, mixed all the feed for the reindeer and generally made everything wobbly and creaky into something strong and stable. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey, keeping us constantly entertained with his stories, and did his best to get us all drunk in the evening at least once during each stay! We will miss him hugely.
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.
