Features

Wildlife in The North

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

For many years, we were fortunate to have Ray Collier as a guest blogger on our website. Ray’s knowledge of Scotland’s flora and fauna was exceptional, and his weekly blogs on our website and articles in the national press opened many eyes to the often less talked about creatures and flowers that are found across our countryside.

We maintain an archive of his posts because we feel it’s a valuable insight into our ever changing natural world, and in particular where we live, the the Scottish Highlands. Our archive spans nearly 10 years from January 2008, until Ray’s sad passing in March 2017.

Ray was a well respected conservationist, naturalist and writer and while his wasn’t a native Scot, he loved our wonderful countryside with an unparalleled passion. A former chief warden for Scottish Natural Heritage, Ray was well qualified to expand our knowledge and encourage us to look beyond the obvious of nature’s delights.

Pine marten - Ray Collier
Pine Martin

We’d encourage you to revisit some of his old posts, they can be found by clicking the Wildlife in The North links on every page of our blog, and then traversing via the older/newer entries links at the bottom of each post. If you are searching for information about a particular mammal, bird, flower, or tree that can be found in Scotland, you may find what you are looking for via our search tool. We’ll try and make his posts more accessible in the future.

You can read Ray’s obituary on The Guardian’s website, and Scotland’s Nature blog has an article that expands on his career. Both are worthy of your time.

We were lucky that Ray chose to publish on our website.