Day Three!

First thing in the morning on day three was to help a couple of the herders take out some of the reindeer from the paddocks for a short walk around the visitor centre. There was no time for sleigh training today, so it was decided to take them on a walk to make sure the calves got used to walking alongside adult reindeer and being on a halter.

Horse, pictured below, had a good old scratch of his antlers in a bush- perhaps they are a bit itchy as he is beginning to strip his velvet antler coat.

After this little leg stretch, I went around the visitor centre with one of the herders, Sheena, and turned everything on, swept up and poop-scooped the paddocks. We then took the 11am hill group. It was a smaller trip than the previous two days, and so it was just one herder and myself, instead of two. It was nice in a small group- people were responsive to Sheena's talks, and they enjoyed asking questions. They were chatty, and some stayed for a while- visitors are guided to the reindeer, but they are free to stay for as long as they want before leaving, and we wait until the last have gone. It's nice to have the time amongst the reindeer, learning new things from the herders, and topping up my reindeer name knowledge. There are lists with which reindeer are in which area, and what colour and number their ear tag is- so it is possible to work out who is who if nobody knows by looking.

My list is slowly being annotated with identifyable features, and mini antler sketches!

There are approximately 150 in the herd, so this list is just of the ones in the hill enclosure- there are many many more!

After lunch, in place of sleigh trailing, I was set to work mixing food. The feed is mixed of various components (unsurprisingly there isn't a reindeer feed retailer in the UK!). This inclused barley, sheep food, hay, sugar beet and dark grains (leftover from the whiskey industry). There is a recipe of how many buckets of each need to be loaded into the cement mixer. It is turned, emptied out, and refilled until the giant sack is full. The green bags in the background contain one or two buckets of this super reindeer mix, and they are the bags that the herders carry onto the mountainside.

The day finished with what intitally sounded like a straightforward trip to the hill enclosure to feed all the reindeer, but became a bit more complicated, as there was a group of free range reindeer that had come down the hillside and were taunting the bull in the top field, Fergus. He is notorious for being a bit of a terror in breeding season, so the herders get someone to distract him with a bag of food outside the field (this was my job!), so they can go into the enclosure and pour out food for him and his ladies! But before we could do this, we needed to remove the group of free range females from his view. Which might have been simple as, we had two dogs who were extremely obidiently waiting for us in a dip in the ground- and just viewing the dogs would send the reindeer scampering away. Except that there were two free range reindeer who hadn't been looked over for a while in this group, so it was decided we needed to seperate them off and get them into the enclosure for a check up tomorrow. So eventually the whole free range group was ushered into a section of the enclosure, the two were then seperated from the group, the rest of the group were let back out, they were walked back around the pen and then ushered away by the presence of the dogs, and then at last we fed Fergus's group, then the other reindeer, and back to the centre! Phew. Bearing in mind all this is happening around the edge of a very large enclosure, on steep group, and with uneven marshy ground, (in the midst of this herder Chris sunk into a marsh that flooded his welly!) it really is quite a workout. Phew! Still having a great time though!

The herd being led down the side of the enclosure. I was walking behind so that they couldn't turn back. Turns out I'm not so fast over this kind of terrain as reindeer! 

Bond looking adorable!

Tiree (I'm uncertain of spelling!!) getting extremely excited by an oversized stick when we joined her and Sookie again on the outside of the enclosure.