The First Huntly Nature Weeks 2025

On the first weekend of the summer holidays, Huntly's green spaces came alive.

Greener Huntly's first Nature Weeks ran over a fortnight at the start of the summer break, funded through the Neighbourhood Ecosystem Fund by Inspiring Scotland. The timing was deliberate: these are the weeks when children are free, families are looking for things to do, and the town's parks and river path are at their most used. The programme was designed to meet people where they already were and offer something they wouldn't have thought to organise for themselves.

The events covered a lot of ground, literally and figuratively. A bug safari introduced children to the invertebrate life hiding in grass, bark, and pond margins — the species most people walk past without noticing, which turn out to be the foundation of much of the visible wildlife above them. A dawn chorus walk drew a group of early risers to the riverbank to hear what Huntly actually sounds like before the town wakes up. A guided wildflower walk traced the town's green corridors, putting names and stories to the plants growing along the paths residents use every day.

Children cycled through the shallows of the River Deveron — shallow enough to be safe, cold enough to be memorable. A scything demonstration on the meadow introduced a traditional skill back in demand as land managers move away from mechanical cutting too heavy for sensitive grassland habitats. A wildlife photography competition produced a body of images that documented the season and gave participants a reason to look carefully at things they might otherwise have ignored.

Running through all of it was a practical purpose beyond the events themselves: species recording. Participants used phone apps to log what they found — plants, insects, birds, mammals — and those records became the first systematic baseline dataset for Huntly's greenspaces. That data fed directly into Greener Huntly's Ecosystem Services Plan, the detailed ecological assessment of the town's green infrastructure published later in the year. Without the Nature Weeks, that baseline would have taken months of specialist survey work to produce. With them, it was built in a fortnight by the people who live here.

What the fortnight demonstrated was something that community ecology projects often assert and rarely prove: that residents, given the right conditions, can contribute meaningfully to the scientific understanding of the places they live in. The species records collected during Nature Weeks are not approximate or anecdotal. They are real data, logged to national recording systems, now part of the permanent record of biodiversity in this part of Aberdeenshire.

The plan is to make Nature Weeks an annual fixture, building on the baseline year on year. As the record grows, it becomes possible to track change — to see which species are appearing, which are declining, and how restoration work is affecting specific sites. The community that built the baseline can continue to maintain it.

Details of next year's programme will be announced through our website and WhatsApp community. If you missed this year, it is worth making a note.