Ten years ago we had our first Safari Day with clients and back then we didn’t have a blog (that was something we only added to our website in June of that year) so here’s a short trip report from my memory…<\/p>\n
4th January 2008 was a cold, gloomy day as we headed to the North Northumberland coast.\u00a0 We’d had a minor setback in that the council hadn’t got their heads around how to license a vehicle that was going to be used to carry paying clients but was clearly neither a hackney carriage or a private hire vehicle – so our insurers wouldn’t let us use it for it’s intended purpose.\u00a0 That’s how I found myself as navigator and wildlife guide, but in our clients’ car instead of in the NEWT Landrover.\u00a0 When Karen booked the day for herself, Paul and Ash a few weeks earlier, there was one particular target species – Roe Deer<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0 I’d got 2 or 3 sites in mind that should produce sightings of deer, <\/strong><\/em>and we did eventually track down a small group as they grazed in a coastal field \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 Early January doesn’t have a lot of daylight and in the gloom of dusk we watched a Harbour Porpoise<\/strong><\/em> in the shadow of Bamburgh Castle as a lone surfer demonstrated that there are far crazier things to do on the Northumberland coast in the middle of the winter than search for wildlife \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n Over the following weeks the calls from journalists and radio presenters started to come; “Wildlife Safaris in Northumberland?” “Wildlife Safaris in southeast Northumberland?” “Is this really what you’re doing?”\u00a0 “Who would want to come to Northumberland for a Wildlife Safari?\u00a0 This isn’t Africa.”<\/p>\n Along with skepticism from local media, there was the harsh assessment by a local tourism marketing expert – “You’ll never make it work.\u00a0 There simply isn’t the market to support a year-round wildlife guiding business in Northumberland. You might survive a couple of years.”<\/p>\n Ten years on and we’re still here, still growing, still developing – we’ve been an active member of the Birdwatching Northumberland\/Wild Northumberland consortia, promoting our beautiful county as a nature-based tourism destination, we’ve delivered press\/media trips ranging from stargazing on Holy Island to a week identifying potential filming locations along Hadrian’s Wall with a Belgian TV presenter and producer,\u00a0 we’ve grown our pelagic trip programme<\/a> from 2-3 sailings each year to 19-20, led a marine conservation project that became the first to identify the key feeding and calving areas for White-beaked Dolphins off the Northumberland coast, supported the process that’s designating Marine Conservation Zones in the North Sea and never stopped looking for new wildlife locations around our stunning county\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Some huge thank yous are due here: Iain Scott, Karen Davies, Keith Raine and the Go Wanbeck project for all of the support pre-NEWT and in the very early days when we were on an occasionally terrifying learning curve, all of the partners in Birdwatching Northumberland\/Wild Northumberland, all of the other businesses who we’ve worked with over the last ten years, and to all of our clients – you’re just as important a part of the experience as the wildlife, and your love and enthusiasm for Northumberland and its wildlife keeps us continually motivated to deliver a more engaging experience.<\/p>\n Here’s to the next ten years of sharing our passion for Northumberland’s wildlife with clients on NEWT trips \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ten years ago we had our first Safari Day with clients and back then we didn’t have a blog (that was something we only added to our website in June of that year) so here’s a short trip report from my memory… 4th January 2008 was a cold, gloomy day as we headed to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,141],"tags":[240,66],"class_list":["post-4201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bamburgh-castle","category-northumberland-coast","tag-harbour-porpoise","tag-roe-deer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4203,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4201\/revisions\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernexperiencewildlifetours.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}