We are delighted to announce that Steve Blow has joined the Spey Catchment Initiative as a Nature Restoration Officer.
Steve brings more than 35 years of hands-on conservation experience to the role, having worked across the UK in a range of habitats — from the uplands of Snowdonia to the woodlands and peatlands of southern Scotland. His career began with the Brighton Countryside Rangers and has taken him through roles with the Scottish Wildlife Trust and, most recently, Cairngorms Connect, where he served as Delivery Manager for five years.
At Cairngorms Connect, Steve played a central role in delivering habitat restoration across 60,000 hectares, with a particular focus on woodland expansion, peatland restoration and riparian management. The project that stands out most for him during that time was the montane woodland species rescue project on RSPB Abernethy — a painstaking effort to restore and connect remnant populations of native willows in a remote mountain basin, carried out with the help of dedicated volunteers and nursery staff.
That experience of working at landscape scale — looking at the bigger picture to identify where intervention will have the greatest impact — is something Steve is keen to apply across the wider Spey catchment.
“Cairngorms Connect covers 20% of the Spey catchment,” he says, “and moving to work across the whole catchment, with a much more diverse range of landowners, farmers and land uses, is really exciting.”
Steve lives in Grantown-on-Spey and has the Spey on his doorstep — something he says genuinely shapes how he thinks about this work. Outside the office, he volunteers with the Anagach Woods Trust and supports the Spey Invasive Species Initiative by running a mink trap — a practical illustration of the hands-on approach he brings to conservation at every scale.
We are very pleased to have Steve on board and look forward to the contribution he will make to catchment restoration across Speyside.
