The ‘June lull’

The spring here is extremely busy, as life at the Reindeer Centre revolves around the female reindeer and the calving season, and no day passes particularly peacefully – both for good and bad reasons. Herders scurry up and down the hill all day long, visitors arrive hopeful of seeing newborn calves, and there is almost always some sort of drama going on behind the scenes… Is that calf sucking properly? Was that reindeer looking a bit peaky this morning? Help – so-and-so has just calved and promptly turned feral… Why does that cow appear to have no calf – it was with her 5 minutes ago! There is never a day where I get to 5pm, and think ‘well, that was a boring one’.  

Early June and the cows and calves head off to free-range for the summer, leaving behind a rather calmer state of affairs in our hill enclosure.

In contrast, June is a time to draw a few breaths and take stock. In the first week of the month the cows and their calves are led out on to the mountains and they head off to free-range themselves, and then calmness finally returns to our lives. While admittedly June does sometimes feel a bit lacking in excitement after the chaos of the previous few weeks, it also brings with it a welcome lull – generally all is quiet on the reindeer front, and all is calm at the Centre itself too.

June is scruffy reindeer month too – here’s Cicero, Morse, Kiruna and Fava looking… frankly, rather moth-eaten!

The spring tends to be a time when reindeer pick up more illnesses as ticks are more prevalent, but by the time we reach June this settles down a bit, and we have less occurrences of high temperatures and out-of-sorts reindeer. Us herders can therefore relax slightly – less worried that someone is about to expire unexpectedly. We do, of course, keep our vigilance levels as high all through the summer as through the spring, but June, July and August are undoubtedly a little calmer on the veterinary front. September brings with it a spike in ticks – and therefore illnesses – once again, but for now all is relatively quiet.

Regular temperature checks are done throughout the summer, to look for a tell-tale raised temp of a reindeer with a tick-borne fever.

As well as the reindeer influencing our level of busy-ness very variable throughout the year, the other major factor is our visitors. Being a tourism-based business, the number of people through our doors goes up and down like a yo-yo throughout the season, with spikes coinciding with school holidays. As the saying goes we ‘make hay whilst the sun shines’, soldiering on though hectic spells with millions of people around, but it is countered by the quieter periods. Our reindeer apparently consulted a calendar in organising their yearly cycle – as spells when we are busiest with the reindeer themselves (calving in May, the rut in September/early October, Christmas tour in November) tend to coincide with school term times. How considerate of them! Until… the Christmas holidays, when everything goes out of the window and reindeer chaos and visitor chaos collide. This is one of the reasons the Reindeer Centre closes for a few weeks each January – us herders are so frazzled that we need to recuperate.

But I digress. Back to June. All kids, in the UK at least, are still at school in June so it is one of the quieter months to visit – the afternoon Hill Trips in particular this year tended to be quite small. It felt a bit like ‘old times’ back before the area – and Scotland in general – became much, much busier with tourists. I started working here in 2007 and at that point Hill Trips with a dozen or less people were completely normal but in more recent years much bigger groups have become the norm – by 2019 we were occasionally taking tours of 70 or even 80 people. In 2020 however, we put a cap on the maximum number of people to 50 in an attempt to go for quality over quantity (as in a quality tour, as opposed to quality visitors), so now it never gets quite that crowded. But – speaking as a guide, at least – this June was wonderful. Busy morning tours but then smaller ones in the afternoon; I even did a tour with just 5 lovely visitors on one occasion. So peaceful! Plus it gave me time to catch up on all the office work that had been cast aside throughout May…

Hen

Adopter stories…

Every now and then we like to feature some visitor stories in our blogs. Here’s a couple of stories from long-time reindeer adopters Karen, Steve and Sally 😀

Karen and Steve, Moray: We started to visit the herd on holiday every year in 2011, we loved seeing and feeding the herd. When Blue was a year old, he followed me around on the Hill Trip and I fed him. My son took a wonderful picture of myself stroking his chin which he seemed to love, and I fell in love in an instant! We then adopted him until he sadly died; at the time I was going through breast cancer which hit us hard as I was just recovering from my third surgery at the time. We wanted to adopt a family member of Blue’s so transferred the adoption to LX, his brother, whom we have met once on the Hill Trip and fed! We are so privileged to be adopters and we love these beautiful animals so very much, it fills us with joy when we visit them! When we were adopters of Blue we even had t shirts made with the picture below saying respectively ‘I am Blue’s Mummy/Daddy’ on and wore them proudly when we visited them which gave the herders much laughter. It was very surreal how Blue seemed to bond with me that first day, he seemed to feel my loving energy towards him, and we loved his beautiful white colour (like his father before him) although we learned he was not an albino.

Lovely Blue!

To see how these wonderful people are so devoted to these beautiful and gentle animals is so fantastic, and to see them in their own habitat is even better and extremely important. We took our best friends Esme and Kevin up and they fell in love with the naughty Bond, so for Christmas we adopted him for them! We got the pack, and I wrote a poem in 4 verses or so to see if they worked out what the present was, and Kevin got it after 3 verses! They were very joyful to get this as a Christmas present, and we hope to visit again soon since we now live in the Highlands in Speyside at last!

Sally, Colchester: My encounter with the Cairngorm Reindeer Herd started in August 1998, the day was awful, raining heavily, I remember jumping over deep puddles and running water in the hill enclosure, you can see from the photo I oblivious of the weather condition! Totally enraptured with the two furry noses nuzzling my hand, staring at the gorgeous big deep brown eye and the enormous grin on my face totally besotted! They were extremely greedy and it looks like I’m about to fall over backward but I don’t think I did. I then retuned in 2016 to be a volunteer during my holidays.

My next encounter wasn’t until 2016, for the second year running I had booked to go on a hill trek but had to cancel for ill health. My friends still went and I was (not very bravely) holding back the tears of disappointment. My friends went off for their adventure and I was left waiting in the shop for them to return (4.5 hours later). An angel called Tilly then asked a herder to take me to the Paddocks and show me the reindeer there and show me what jobs are completed throughout the day. Best 4.5 hours of my life!

I have since returned a few years running as a volunteer during my holidays. My favourite time is either the afternoon I spent in the hill enclosure picking up poo, bags and bags of it, or showing a child how to feed the reindeer – they’re nervous to start with but have the biggest grin on their faces once they’ve managed it, then there’s no stopping them, or talking to visitors in the Paddock. My absolute happy place is sitting amongst the reindeer after a Hill Trip, the reindeer lay down and digest their food, I’m so close amongst, everything is quiet and peaceful, the reindeer adorable, the scenery amazing and the fresh air so clean.

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