Lossiemouth and Kingston
Yesterday I made a small trip out to Lossiemouth and then the wildlife reserve at Kingston. The reserve at Kingston is at the mouth of the Spey river. A large part of the reserve used to (apparently) be quarried, but has been left to regenerate over the last 40 years or so, with some exciting results. There is a lot of regeneration of many native species of tree, including Aspen. Some information can be found on the SWTs website, here
Findhorn Bay.
Here are a couple of shots of the bay taken over the last two weeks. There are often kite and wind surfers on the water, as the wind rarely seems to let up, and the sunsets up here tend to be pretty spectacular.
Photos from my day off…
During the work week we, as usual, took a day off. So, on Wednesday I took a walk up the Red Burn on Dundreggan. I then met Dundreggan project manager Steve near the Spring planting site (not far from the source of the Red Burn, where I saw plenty of fish and Dragonfly) for a walk about the site. It was fantastic, I could already see the trees I’d planted (over 2000 in amongst the 20000 plus) before entering the site, which is fenced off to keep deer out.
It was, and will be, interesting to note how the trees in the monitoring plots perform. In each group of plots there are 4 plots containing Birch, Birch and Alder, Birch with soil taken from the Birch woodland on Dundreggan, and Birch with fertiliser. My initial impression was that the Alder is doing exceptionally well in these plots. Alder is known to be a good Nitrogen fixer, so this could prove to be beneficial to the Birch.
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- A fine day for a day walk about the TFL manor
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- Have I said that I love spiders?
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- Allt Ruahd – the Red Burn
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- The Vapourer. An awesome name for an awesome caterpillar
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- Steve walking amongst ‘my’ trees. They’re gorgeous.
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- In amongst some of the young trees, is this mycorrhizal?
4th September, let the work week fun begin…
First week of the TFL season and my group is posted to Dundreggan, to carry out work on FCS land in Glen Moriston. My co-focaliser is the newly initiated Mr John Garrett. There have been a few last minute drop outs, but that doesn’t seem to bother the volunteers who have turned up, who plough through the work, and include one who has travelled over from Spain especially.
Roughly 1700m of fence removed in two days, a sizeable stand of spruce trees and an area of regeneration roughly 4 or 5 hectares, cleared of non-native tree species (Spruce, Douglas Fir, etc). This was accompanied by great food with some important experimentation with cakes.
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- Removing the Port Clair fence
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- Dan wins the nose-tape game
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- Ben, John and Mike are laughing at…
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- …another of Virginia’s tales
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- While the others consider the merits of going highland dancing, I take a look at the Glen Moriston falls
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- Glen Doe, Friday afternoon.
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- This goes into/comes out of the side of a hill. What’s its point?
Life since the office 
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