It’s not often that guests want to swim in the sea during their stay at Aigas, however we are more than happy to encourage those who brave the water! In the Highlands, the waters don’t tend to get much warmer than around 14 degrees Celsius in the summer, and that number can easily be halved over the winter months. The west tends to be slightly warmer due to the influence of the Gulf Stream, which brings with its current a warm flow of water. I know what you’re thinking – warm is a bit of an overstatement for Scottish waters… Well a couple of us rangers decided to put this to the test, and we have challenged ourselves to swim in the sea every month of the
Continue Reading...

It was dark today. The kind of dark that makes you want to snuggle back into bed clutching a hot water bottle closely to your chest and drift back to sleep. It felt like a cold winter’s night, but it was, in fact, 8.00am. Time to start the day. Many layers later and it's 8.30am and I'm out the door with the cold biting my face. The frost is clinging to the leaves and glistening in the morning light. A beautiful day ready to be seized. A lot of solo jobs to be getting on with today; the Scottish wildcats were waiting for their breakfast, their enclosures needed cleaning, the endless amount of on-site feeders needed replenishing, camera traps needed checking for activity and I need to
Continue Reading...

It was a rather grey afternoon on the Aigas estate, but myself and the other two academic placement students had been tasked with an exciting challenge – to design and build our own bird feeding station. With winter in full swing, the natural food supply for our garden and woodland bird species dwindles as invertebrates become scarce, the berries on the trees begin to disappear and the ground frosts over. Over the past month we have noticed, especially on the extremely cold and frosty days, the bird feeders we currently have up have been emptying at a much faster rate. This gave us motivation to construct another station to provide our regular winged visitors with a constant supply of food. The last feeder that was placed in
Continue Reading...

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
Continue Reading...

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
Continue Reading...

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
Continue Reading...

As we approach November the spawning season for Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) begins. Spawning occurs throughout November and December; in larger rivers this may begin and finish a month early or later. Salmon are anadromous spending 2 to 3 years as juveniles in freshwater streams before migrating to the ocean for 1 to 4 years travelling over 6000 miles then returning back upriver to spawn. Many individuals die after spawning only the surviving population are able to spawn again. 1000 to 17,000 eggs can be laid by a single fish; however, an extremely small amount of eggs survive to maturity due to predation, ecological factors and interference during other life stages. Three returning fish per parent is considered a successful outcome. [caption id="attachment_3305" align="aligncenter" width="770"] An Atlantic
Continue Reading...

Autumn in the Highlands. Crisp frosty mornings, mist rolling in low waves over the valley, the cacophony of pink footed geese filling the skies - this season is undeniably beautiful. However, it heralds the departure of one of my favourite species, the osprey. As we, and all of our resident Scottish animals, ready ourselves for the colder months to come, almost all of Scotland’s ospreys will have started their long journey South for the winter. Their incredible migration averages around 6,700km, taking them about 45 days to reach the sunny wintering grounds of Western Africa. For this years young fledglings, this must be a daunting prospect. Their parents will leave weeks before them and they must navigate the journey alone; how they manage this is still a
Continue Reading...

After completing my first week as an Academic Placement student at Aigas, I wanted to make the most of my first day off and explore more of the area I am lucky enough to be spending the next year living in. Myself and another academic placement student, Paige, decided to head to the Flow Country and learn more about the blanket peat bogs found there. Peat bogs are arguably one of the most important habitats in the tackle against climate change because of the large amount of carbon that the peat stores. The Flow Country peat bogs alone contain 3x the amount of carbon there is stored in all of Britain’s woodlands combined! The more carbon there is stored, the less there is released as carbon dioxide
Continue Reading...

This was our first visit, excitement and eagerness increasing as the time for our drive north approached. We had no hesitation in making an early start, to allow a leisurely drive with stops but still getting to Aigas for settling in before the afternoon tea. The baronial Aigas mansion welcomed us as we drove up the drive to be met by one of the rangers who showed us to the cottage with common lounge where we would be spending the week. Excellently appointed, with everything we could want and we managed to get some unpacking done and clothes hung up before it was time for afternoon coffee/tea and cakes and formal welcome. We already had our programme for the week, printed out and left in our room,
Continue Reading...