Welcome Back to WWT Caerlaverock
WWT Caerlaverock is reopening today, welcoming members and visitors alike to enjoy our fantastic wetland site and habitats. After lots of hard work restructuring and reorganising, our doors are now open and we are so excited to have you visit us again.
We are delighted to be welcoming people back to WWT Caerlaverock after being closed for just over 6 months. It has been a tough period for the reserve and those involved in managing it but no different to other conservation sites and organisations.
Caerlaverock is a spectacular nature reserve home to so many rare and scarce species and a huge density of common ones. But people are critical to its purpose.
Peter Scott once said, "the most effective way to save the threatened and decimated natural world is to cause people to fall in love with it again, with its beauty and its reality." And what better way if for them to experience first-hand.
Back in the early days of Caerlaverock in the 1970's Peter Scott took the innovative decision to open its doors for visitors at a time when to visit most other nature reserves you had to apply for a permit in writing, often weeks in advance, and even then, they weren't always granted.
So, there has been a long history of people and nature mixing on the site. A potent mix of paths, expertise and fantastic hides has helped to generate fantastic nature experiences that have stayed with people for years if not lifetimes. I was only talking to someone recently who had come of a dawn flight walk about 10 years ago and was telling me vividly about his experience of watching thousands of geese coming in against a stunning sunrise. These experiences aren't just about a species but often a cocktail of nature, time, place weather, people, food (sometimes) and time of life and Caerlaverock provides the perfect setting to frame these life experiences.
Caerlaverock is really important to WWT as a wetland conservation organisation, not just as an embodiment of its corporate policy of wetland conservation but also for the way it connects to so many different types of people. So, with a whole new team (apart from me!) we are delighted to be able to fulfil our purpose of welcoming people back onto the site to enable them to fill up the memory banks with special wildlife encounters. As managers of a site, we thrive on the positive feedback from the visitors, we get a buzz from seeing and hearing about people enjoying and getting the site. And since you have been away the site has got even better. More wildlife has moved in, more rare species have been discovered, and we will be telling you about these over the next couple of months.
