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Golden eagle on a decimated mountain hare.

Restoring the Caledonian Forest

Doug Gilbert

I’m setting off today to monitor the progress of natural regeneration in the woodlands at Dundreggan. As I climb through the birch woods, I notice some of the smaller creatures that abound – wood ants scurrying busily about, a woolly caterpillar crossing the track in front of me, the green flash of a tiger beetle as it drones away from my step. As I pass a grove of old Scots pine trees, I notice a few seedlings poking out of the heather at the side of the pathway. A feeling of excitement – it’s happening! – enters my thoughts. In the quiet thrum of a summer morning, I start to tune in to the natural world around me. A young buzzard mews; a woodpecker chacks in annoyance at me and I stoop down to examine a pine cone dropped by a red squirrel some time ago. They’re on their way back too, I muse. Reaching the upper edge of the wood, I emerge from the dappled green shadow of the birches and squint in the full sun on the moorland. The wood ends abruptly – tall mature birch trees give way suddenly to a treeless moorland, which now stretches ahead as far as I can see above me. I find my monitoring point among some tall heather on the slope of a small, steep hill and start counting and measuring all the young seedling trees I can find – lots of tiny downy and silver birch, a few young juniper bushes and several rowan. A few of these are beginning to emerge above the general level of the heather vegetation – poking their heads above the parapet – and I see that one of the rowans has not been browsed for at least two years. All good signs. As I get my eye in, I can see a few birches in the vicinity also poking above the heather and bog myrtle. If we continue like this for the next few years, it will really begin to look like a young forest!

Dundreggan is a small island of hope for the future of the Caledonian Forest, a wild woodland that once stretched across much of Highland Scotland but which is now reduced to a shadow of itself. Only 4% of Scotland’s land area is currently covered by native woodland, and over half of that is in poor condition, mainly because of high browsing pressure from herbivores – mainly sheep and deer.

I joined Trees for Life in 2014, inspired by the vision for a big native forest in the north-central Highlands of Scotland. There is something fundamentally exciting about the prospect of a big forest, inhabited by all the things that should be there, and one where natural processes are in charge. We live in a highly managed landscape: urban cityscapes, straight-edged agricultural monocultures, commercial forests of regimented conifers and checker-board treeless moorlands. Where are those places where we can experience the full power of natural growth – the sheer exuberance of plant and animal diversity that develops in more natural systems?

At Dundeggan, a 4,000+ ha estate in Glen Moriston, just west of Loch Ness, Trees for Life are building habitats for the future. Our treeless uplands are accepted by most people as ‘they way things are’, almost unable to imagine a landscape of wooded hills and mountains. Treeless uplands have landed Scotland with a triple whammy of reduced biodiversity and resilience to climate change; increased risk of flooding, as water cascades rapidly off the hillsides into spate rivers; and degradation of peatlands, leading to pollution of drinking water sources and more greenhouse gas emissions. Trees for Life’s vision of naturally wooded hills and mountains is an antidote, not only to these ecological problems, but also to the feeling of hopelessness that often pervades people’s thinking about environmental issues. At Dundreggan volunteers take part in practical action which addresses these issues at a fundamental level – we plant trees and encourage natural regeneration of native woodlands, building the beginnings of a new, hopeful future for the uplands of Scotland.

At the heart of these issues is the red deer population, particularly the stags so beloved of Visit Scotland as the poster boy of the Highlands. The original painting, The Monarch of the Glen, by Sir Edwin Landseer recently toured the public spaces of Scotland and the picture of a huge, wild, noble animal still resonates with people as an icon of wild Scotland. However, the development of a commercial industry around sport shooting of red deer stags has meant more and more management of the deer population of the highlands – selective culling, translocations of stags across the country in an attempt to ‘improve stock’, habitat manipulations and more recently winter feeding with silage and turnips have reduced the wild red deer herds of the past to semi-ranched livestock. For decades now, public bodies such as the Red Deer Commission and its successors, Scottish Natural Heritage and now the Scottish government have been encouraging, cajoling and more recently threatening the deer sector in Scotland to take action to reduce the over-population of the uplands with red deer (along with other deer species), but the industry seems entrenched in the view that a high red deer population is required to produce a sporting stag ‘surplus’. As this impasse grinds on, Scotland’s upland habitats become more and more degraded.

The rewilding of red deer is arguably now the most urgent conservation challenge in Scotland. By reducing the deer population and expanding their natural woodland habitat, we can begin to address all these problems. Biodiversity, flooding, pollution, greenhouse gas emission and, importantly, the welfare of the deer themselves can all improve under a reduced deer population. Even the sport stalking experience can be enhanced. The need to fence establishing woodland would reduce – or even disappear – if natural process were truly allowed to establish. Imagine a Scotland where unstoppable native woodland expansion was happening across large areas of the Highlands – new habitat areas for our native woodland flora and fauna; a more natural patchwork of wooded and unwooded habitats fundamentally based on natural processes; where hunting wild red deer was truly a challenging activity in a wonderful varied natural landscape of woods, bogs, mountain tops and meadows.

These are all big issues and big visions, but we have to start in the here and now. As the old adage goes – ‘the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the next best time is now’. Trees for Life’s Dundreggan rewilding project beckons us towards a new future for the uplands of Scotland – not a return to some past idyll, but forward to a more sustainable, more diverse and more entrancing natural landscape.