The Outer Hebrides Wildlife Festival is back!
Planning for the 2026 Outer Hebrides Wildlife Festival is well underway and we’re excited to have just launched the programme! We’re delighted to have so many local groups, businesses, community councils, and individuals hosting events this year. In total, we have over 90 events planned across Lewis, Harris, Berneray, North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, Barra, and Eriskay.
Expect boat tours, guided nature walks, art exhibitions, community beach cleans, poetry, music and storytelling sessions, film screenings, wildlife identification and survey workshops, art and craft workshops, ceilidhs, and even a gin tasting (with a focus on the pollinators we have to thank for the botanicals of course)!
The main festival week will take place Saturday 20th – Saturday 27th June, with a Fringe Festival running until the end of July. We hope to see you there!
New species for Berneray!
Once again this year, we are working with Buglife on the Scottish Oil Beetle Hunt. We’re asking you to keep your eyes peeled for Oil beetles and to record any sightings. Submit you records via the iRecord app or website – include a photo if you can!
Scotland is home to three species of Oil beetles: Violet Oil beetle (Meloe violaceus); Black Oil beetle (Meloe proscarabaeus); and Short-necked Oil beetle (Meloe brevicollis).
The Short-necked Oil Beetle is one of our target ‘species on the edge’ in the Outer Hebrides and we are extremely excited to bring you the news that we have found Short-necked Oil Beetles on Berneray for the first time! Currently the sand-dune loving beetle is found at sites in Coll, Tiree, Islay, Uist, Barra and now Berneray – who knows where the beetle might turn up next. Could you be the one to find it??
Supporting grazing and survey training 🐄🐝
We’ve been working hard with crofters to provide another 30 virtual fence collars across the islands. This is all thanks to funding we received from Comhairle nan Eilean Siar. This funding and the collars they are paying for will benefit both wildlife and crofters, by allowing areas where fences have become dilapidated to be grazed by cows, reducing the rank grasses and allowing flowering plants that are normally outcompeted by grass a chance to grow and come back. As well as benefitting the crofters by increasing their graze-able land, the increase in flowers benefits pollinators such as the Great Yellow Bumblebee and our island sub species of the Moss Carder Bumblebee (Bombus muscorum ssp. agricolae) which is only found here and on Shetland.
With bumblebees in mind, Emma has been delivering a series of talks and training sessions on bumblebee ID for the Outer Hebrides. She also led a how-to session on Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s BeeWalk surveys, encouraging and teaching volunteers how to create their own BeeWalk that they will be doing over the spring and summer. These have been a great hit and we’ve been supporting our volunteers who have taken this on. We will be doing more ID and Beewalk talks and, if the weather is kind, some outdoor Bee Safari sessions in the summer alongside other events for the Wildlife Festival.
Crofter consultation
In February we begun the process of looking for an experienced engagement consultant to research the links between nature connection, mental wellbeing, and nature-positive action within the crofting communities of the Outer Hebrides. We were delighted with the response and have now appointed a consultant to the role.
Soon we’ll be looking for crofters to take part in this consultation. It will be one-to-one interviews and we’re looking to speak with crofters of different ages, genders and backgrounds from across the Outer Hebrides. Interviews can be conducted in Gaelic or English. Keep an eye out for more information coming soon, or feel free to get in touch now and express your interest in taking part: sote@nature.scot.
