Highlands Rewilding Ltd is developing an economically viable land management model for nature recovery and community prosperity. Education is a vital component of this model, collaborating with academic partners, the company is developing nature-based solutions research to inform policy-setting and create a platform of knowledge to assist other landowners. This initiative creates opportunities for university students – placements, internships, and theses – and high school students through Outdoor Education Classes, Environmental Science Classes, and work experience.
Calum Brown from Highlands Rewilding also hopes to rewild and re-people the Scottish Highlands by increasing carbon sequestration, growing biodiversity, creating new green jobs generating a sustainable profit. The actions already taken have included Afforestation with native species, initiated through a partnership with the COP26 Innovation Zone to plant a ‘Forest of Hope’ on their estate at Beldorney. Felling existing monoculture conifer plantations and replacing them with mixed native species or peatland restoration.
By managing his land this way and supporting others in doing so, Calum aims for his farm to become a world leader in accelerating nature-based solutions that can tackle climate change. These management practices help to rebuild local economies, post-covid and establish new opportunities for ethical profit from land management.
Calum plans to develop continuous cover sustainable forestry in future, with a diverse mixed woodland providing a future income source. He is also implementing Regenerative agriculture, which provide sustainable farming activities, and Eco-building, where he hopes to build a small number of timber eco-homes, to help tackle the rural housing crisis in the Highlands.
Some of the benefits seen include rapid increases in grassland diversity and quality through regenerative grazing practices, restoration of native vegetation in areas of monoculture forestry, and much-improved regeneration of semi-natural woodlands because of deer population control.
This work has generated enormous benefits in establishing management approaches, and by providing learning opportunities across estate activities. Highlands Rewilding rangers at Bunloit Estate hosted pupils from Glen Urquhart High School (GUHS) in 2021 & 2022 through two blocks of weekly Outdoor Education Classes. The classes saw the pupils conduct peat depth surveys; plant the beginnings of a “food forest”; build bird boxes; work on camera trap surveys; learn how to identify areas of deer damage and how to larder a deer carcass. The rangers are looking forward to resuming these classes after the holidays, along with a new Environmental Science class which will focus more on ecology at Bunloit.
Highlands Rewilding has increased awareness of teachers, and pupils around how the knowledge and skill involved in the traditional career path of gamekeeping can be applied to a career path of deer management for ecosystem restoration. It has involved the local community through employing locally and providing amazing experiences to young people.