Every time I open a Tetra Pak I hope I am helping eagles. Coignafearn is an unusual Scottish estate, set at the end of the road west of Tomatin (Tom-aaaahhh-tin) and owned by the Tetra Pak heiress Sigrid Rausing.
Her aim is to restore the ecology of the estate and she has a passion for eagles. How many land owners in Scotland have you heard say, ‘I believe it is absolutely despicable of landowners to kill eagles’? And how many have you believed?
She also said ‘I do think the land belongs to us all by its nature. I find the idea that landowners can do what they want is abhorrent’.
Ms Rausing has enlisted the help and advice of Roy Dennis and locals say that she has a good team of staff on the estate. Certainly, what she says she wants to do sounds much more enlightened than what we hear from many estates. Coignafearn has a modern outlook and talks about ecology quite a lot!
But Ms Rausing doesn’t have a pair of Golden Eagles on her land and she would like one (how often do you hear that from a Scottish estate?). She says ‘The Monadhliaths are potentially one of the best areas for golden eagles in Britain. That there are no breeding pairs on Coignafearn is due to persecution.’ and that wandering eagles have been relentlessly persecuted in the Highlands.
Henry liked Coignafearn.
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It’s great she’s doing that. Is she also addressing the appalling impact on the world of the packaging that makes her rich?
For ages I asked my local authority if I could recycle tetrapaks but the only suggestion was to collect them until there was enough to send back to the manufacturer for disposal. Now they are part of the standard recycling collection but I would love to know how they are processed!
A very good example of how it should be done whether in Scotland or England. My one real worry is that were it to change hands it would be back to the bad old ways of the majority. Put quite simply most estate owners really don’t get it and without huge persuasive forces probably never will.
Many of her sporting estate neighbours have breeding pairs of golden eagles as they have a good supply of food to feed the eagles and their chicks due to their management. As you rightly point out Coignafearn has no breeding eagles quite possibly due to her ‘enlightened’ management policies ‘rewinding’ and limited food supply.