Month: November 2019

It was an extremely cold and frosty, but beautifully sunny day as myself and the Naturedays at Aigas education team headed out for an afternoon of seed collecting. Each year, Naturedays runs an outreach programme where the team heads out to Highland schools, nurseries and local green spaces to teach students and young people about the natural world they live in. This year’s programme focuses on human impacts on the natural world and how we can use nature’s solutions to solve the problems we are currently facing as a result of climate change. One activity included in this programme involves giving each group a handful of acorns that the students plant out and eventually grow into oak trees. Not only will the students be able to learn practical skills for planting and tree
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The hedgehog is a well-recognised spiny mammal, native to the UK. Most people are familiar with or have had a close interaction with these loveable little mammals. Be it a glimpse of a pointed face through fallen autumn leaves, hearing the munching of slugs on our garden lawns or stories of the motherly Mrs Tiggywinkle from the classic tales of Beatrix Potter. Unfortunately, our beloved spiny friends have faced some tough times in the last few years. The People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) have uncovered, through their own mammal surveys, that since the last millennium over a third of all hedgehogs across the UK have been lost. That has left us with less than 1 million individuals across the entirety of the UK. This loss has
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When all had gone quiet on the Aigas estate, I decided to have a wander round our five giant sequoia trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) that we have on site, originally planted by the Gordon-Oswalds who built the Victorian part of the Aigas house. I always look up in awe at these trees and how the wet climate in the UK has allowed them to grow so quickly compared to in their native range in California. It is remarkable that the sequoias we have in Scotland are only around 200 years old at most but they have grown so tall and are now an important part of other species’ habits. If you look up at a giant sequoia you will most probably notice a number of holes excavated by
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