Conservation time

Our team members get involved in a range of different activities, discovering, and exploring Arran. We also do a fair amount of conservation work, and this week has been no exception.
Yesterday the team met Jeremy from the NTS in Glen Rosa, where he furnished us with some fairly mean looking tools, and we headed on to the hillside to an area where the NTS has been planting native trees.  The trees have been planted amongst dense bracken, which is both a blessing and a curse.  The bracken favours terrain with the deep soils and nutrients needed by the trees, it's often an indicator for areas where there used to be woodland, but bracken also shades out the young trees, competes for nutrients, and can smother them when it dies back. Therefore, our conservation volunteers have been working in this area for many years now, helping to control and beat back the bracken and encourage the young trees to shoot up.  There are real and tangible changes happening each year that we go back, and it is starting to look like a mini forest!

Adventure Expeds John Muir Award teams also have the chance to really get to know the flora and fauna of Arran, so we spent some time looking at the plants that are found in Glen Rosa. We love the midgie eaters (carnivorous plants) such as the round-leaved sundew and pale butterwort below. 

Pale Butterwort

Round-leaved sundew

Today we headed out of the mountains and to the coast, to meet Jenny Stark from the Community of Arran Seabed Trust for a beach clean and marine litter survey in Lamlash. Adventure Expeds teams have been cleaning this beach for a number of years. We find a range of fishing waste, and domestic refuse washes up here, including sewage-related debris. The coast here is also an important area for special breeding birds such as eider ducks and we are happy to do our bit to try and clean it up for them.