Beyond the trees the bracken gave way to low, deer-cropped heather and ling, bronzed by the winter. As we climbed, a cold rain began to spatter, soaking the pages of my notebook. My ballpoint now scored a dotted line on the page, more imprint than ink, ghost-written. Head down against the wind, I noticed the fruiting bodies of the tiny lichens on the moor. It was as if an enamellist with a fine brush had crept up the mountainside, ornamenting them minutely with a shocking deep orange. We stepped over crimson plush cushions of sphagnum moss, like the upholstery in an Indian restaurant.
As we reached the peak of Binnilidh Bheag, the lights came on. The land, dull brown and tan before, flashed into colour. The sunshine, cleaned by the rain, was laser-sharp, and the wetness of the land accentuated its tints. Little pools on the moor below us exploded into points of light. The pines through which we had walked flared up: green fire amid the cool mauve of the bare birches. Beyond them the meanders and oxbows of the River Moriston snaked mercury, bulging with light.
The sun clipped out the features, making a scrapbook of the land. Ribbons of low trees surged up the small burns. Whale-grey rocks breached from the waves of heather. Among the beetle tints of the moor, a tiny green field emerged, and the broken wall around it rose into view, delineated by shadow. I thought of the love with which that field had been raised, suckled from the barrow with dung, primped and petted with mattock and spade, through brutal winters and cruel, deceptive springs, clothed with kale and neeps and tatties, before the Clearances snatched its makers from the land.
Would the rewilding of a large tract of the Highlands inflict similar damage upon the lives of its few remaining inhabitants, depriving them of their remaining means of making a living? This is a question I was unable to answer until I read a report published by the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association, which set out to document what it called ‘the economic importance of red deer to Scotland’s rural economy’.24 It succeeded in demonstrating the opposite.
After denouncing attempts by conservationists and two of the more imaginative estates (Glenfeshie and Mar Lodge) to reduce the number of deer and encourage the reforestation of glens and braes, the association explained that in areas dominated by large landholdings (such as the region in which Trees for Life is working) deer stalking is the main source of employment. Other opportunities in such places, it says, are ‘very limited’. So it commissioned a survey to discover how many people are employed in the management and running of the deer business on these estates.
It took as its case study the county of Sutherland, a wide territory in the far north of Scotland, covering 5,200 square kilometres. Of this, the report reveals, 4,000 square kilometres are in the hands of estates, which number just eighty-one. In other words, three-quarters of one of the largest counties in Britain is owned by eighty-one families, or by their secretive trusts in tax havens. Across the ten it sampled, covering 780 square kilometres, it found 112 people in full-time equivalent employment.25 That means that just one person is employed by the dominant industry for every seven square kilometres, an area five times the size of Hyde Park. The association’s figures suggest to me that the absentee owners and their monocultures of deer prevent not only the ecological regeneration of the region but also the economic regeneration.
The report also revealed that the income generated by stalking on the estates throughout Sutherland is £1.6 million. This is a tiny sum when spread across 4,000 square kilometres. Their expenditure on deer management is £4.7 million. In other words, stalking can be sustained there only because the bankers or oil sheikhs or mining magnates who own the land burn money on their expensive pastime. Even the tiny numbers of people employed by deer stalking are reliant on the irrational spending of absentee landlords, which could be terminated at any time.
Compare these figures with a study from the Isle of Mull, which discovered that colonization by white-tailed sea eagles has brought £5 million a year into its economy and supports 110 full-time jobs.26 Thousands of people now travel to the island to watch the chicks hatching and fledging from the eagle hide at Glen Seilisdeir or to take an eagle cruise on Loch Shiel.27 The eagles now account for half the enquiries at the visitor desk of the island’s main ferry terminal.28 A study commissioned by the Scottish government calculates that wildlife tourism in Scotland is already worth £276 million a year.29 Rewilding and the reintroduction of other missing species could greatly enhance this figure, generating many more jobs than deer-stalking does today.
Gamekeeping is one of the greatest threats to this source of employment. Already one of the reintroduced sea eagles has been killed, alongside many other birds of prey, by poisoned meat laid out, most probably by a gamekeeper.30 By damaging the potential for wildlife tourism in Scotland, the deer and grouse industries could be destroying more employment than they generate. This is not to dismiss the gamekeepers’ right and need to work. But it does suggest that more people could make a living if the land were put to another use. The skills and local knowledge of the gamekeepers would be in high demand as wildlife-watching became a more important industry.
The wind filled my mouth and sealed my ears. It roared inside my head and numbed my hands. I watched a new cloud mass rolling towards us, dark as fate. We set off over the moor on the far side of the hill. But for porcupine tufts of unpalatable grass, the earth had been shaved: the plants, like those on some of the sheep pastures of Wales, were just half an inch high. Water welled up around my boots with every step. We came down to a gash in the soggy moor, torn from the land by a small dark stream. It had exposed the stumps and trunks of great pines, buried in the peat but now eroding out of the hillside.
‘They haven’t been dated yet, but they’re close to the surface of the moor, so they’re likely to be recent. There would probably have been trees alive here 150 years ago. You can go to almost any glen in the Highlands and you will find the stumps of the vanished forest. It’s a tree graveyard.’
Heading down the hill by another route, we were hit by a storm of rain and hail. Driven by the wind, it was so hard and cold that I could feel the inner contours of my skull, sounded out by the sonar probing of ice and water.
We found ourselves among denser heath. In the midst of the storm, Alan stopped to show me hard-bitten birch twigs emerging from the heather. The lichen that encrusted them testified that they were much older than their size suggested. The path down the brae took us into another corner of the remnant forest, where a few more crabbed pines clung to the same ridge. The squall passed suddenly and the sun slashed through the sky, almost violent, its intensity somehow heightened by the coldness of my skin, as if, frozen hard, I could no longer absorb the concussion of light. I wrote now with the pen wedged in the palm of my hand, as my fingers could no longer close round it.
Here the bark of the ancient birches was corrugated like the cracked surface of a lava flow. The old pines had slowly heaved great rocks out of the soil, and now clutched them in their exposed roots, dangling over the ridge on which they grew, as if they were about to hurl them into the valley. The twigs of the great oaks were so heavy with lichen that at first I thought they were in leaf.
Beside the path was a glittering black dome, perhaps a yard across and two feet high. When I looked closely I saw that it was covered in large shiny ants, swarming furiously. There were so many that I could not see the nest beneath them. They had polished black heads, tawny collars, swollen abdomens striped black and pewter. Alan told me that these were wood ants. They were absorbing energy from the sun through their dark bodies.
‘They will bring the warmth back down into the nest. When the sun goes behind a cloud, they slow down. If it stays behind the clouds, they return to the nest. Wood ants are solar engineers. They always build their nests with the main slope facing south: you can use them to orient yourself. They need a mixed woodland to survive: pine needles for building their nests and birch or aspen for the aphids they milk.’
And there, close to the nest, were the pale green trunks of as
pen, their bark pitted as if it had been blasted with shotguns. Like the other species of the old forest, they had aged without progeny for many years, but now the volunteers who worked on the estate had placed guards around the suckers the old trees threw up, in some places as far as fifty yards from their trunks. The suckers grew much faster than seedlings could, as they could draw upon the network of roots: even in this harsh land, the young shoots could rise by over a yard in ten weeks. The ants had already been seen tending and taxing the aphids which feed on the sap, extracting the honeydew they secrete.31
Aspen, favoured by deer, is now rare in the Highlands. Trees for Life had been mapping its remaining stands, protecting the suckers and cutting root sections to propagate and grow in places from which the tree is missing. Aspens support rare insects, lichen and fungi, but Alan also had another species in mind. The estate extends to the river, which looks like an excellent habitat for beavers. Like deer, they will feed on aspen in preference to any other plant; its suckering habit is likely to be an adaptation to the assault it encountered wherever it grew.
‘We are getting the habitat ready. But we don’t own enough of the river to do it all ourselves. We’ll have to persuade the neighbouring landowners to help.’
In the autumn volunteers swarm the woods, collecting birch catkins. They return in the spring to find pine cones, and lay them out to crack in the sun. They pass the seed to the Forestry Commission, aware that local stock is likely to prosper here more readily than seedlings from elsewhere. Trees for Life had been propagating the less common species–aspen, juniper, holly, hazel, dwarf birch–in its own nursery. ‘But that will probably have to go in the restructuring.’
Alan was continually, and unsentimentally, adjusting the operation to match its fluctuating budget. He appeared unabashed by these decisions.
In the other glens in which they worked, the Trees for Life volunteers were restoring alder carr, blocking drainage ditches to raise the water levels and replanting the missing trees. They were fencing areas where eared willow grows and planting hazel to create more habitat for red squirrels. Already in some of these places willow warblers had returned and water voles were spreading into new habitat.32 They were creating a corridor of woodland which would, in time, connect Glenmoriston with Glen Affric, five miles to the north.
As Trees for Life reduces the number of deer through culling and draws them away by shifting the feeding stations, Alan explained, he expects birch to colonize much of the open ground, followed by pine, then oak, ash, wych elm, holly and hazel. The north-facing slopes were once dominated by pine; the lower southern slopes by broad-leaved trees. ‘We don’t expect trees to return everywhere here. It would be sparser in places: a mosaic. Not like the wall-to-wall conifers in the plantations.
‘It was when I saw these places in the 1980s that I felt called to do something about it. Seeing the stumps in the peat and the remnant trees, I asked myself: what’s the message in the land? What’s the story it’s telling us? My question was: “What’s Nature seeking to do here?” That is crucially different from the ethos of human domination. Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.’
This land, he hoped, would within fifty years be used by capercaillie, ospreys, golden eagles, red squirrels, boar, beavers, perhaps lynx. But these were the less contentious of his proposals. ‘My aim is to have wolves back in Scotland by 2043. That would be 300 years after the last one is said to have been killed here. It’s one generation from now. Ecologically they could live here today. The obstacles are cultural and economic.’
I stood, braced against the bitter wind, under the torn canopy of the old trees, absorbing what he had just said, my synapses firing, my thoughts slipping across a world that had suddenly become more labile, more thrilling, less predictable than any I had pictured until then. I felt a shiver of transgression–of sharing a thought forbidden, abhorred–mingled with confusion and doubt. Was this possible? Permissible? Even to imagine?
We ate our sandwiches in Alan’s car, then put our seats back and slept. He fell asleep immediately, as if he had turned off a light. I drifted for a while. Wood ants swarmed over the land, darkening the earth, each one carrying a seed in its mandibles, now frantically ruffling through the earth with their snouts, eared and bristling, shoving in the seeds and scraping the soil back with their trotters, swarming on, tusks and antennae, over the mountains and through the next glen . . .
I will not try to disguise my reasons for wanting to see missing animals reintroduced. It is not, as the previous chapter might have suggested, the desire to control floods, or reduce erosion or hinder the spread of disease, though all these might be useful side-effects. My reasons arise from my delight in the marvels of nature, its richness and its limitless capacity to surprise; from the sense of freedom, of the thrill that comes from roaming in a landscape or seascape without knowing what I might see next, what might loom from the woods or water, what might be watching me without my knowledge. It is the sense that without these animals the ecosystem is lopsided, abridged, dysfunctional. I can produce reasons scientific, economic, historic and hygienic, but none of those describe my motivation.
Living in Britain, I am constantly reminded of the scale of our loss. According to the biologist David Hetherington, who runs the Cairngorms Wildcat Project, the United Kingdom is ‘the largest country in Europe and almost the whole world’ which no longer possesses any of its big carnivores.33 It has also lost more of its large native species–both carnivores and herbivores–than any other European country except the Republic of Ireland. Britain also happens to be the slowest and most reluctant of any European nation to begin rewilding the land and reintroducing its missing species.
Perhaps this is connected to the fact that we have one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world.34 Large landowners, who are often (though not universally) hostile towards any wild animals that might compete with or prey upon the animals they hunt, and often deeply suspicious of proposed changes to the way they manage their estates, are peculiarly powerful here. Though they and their views tend to belong to a very small minority, they dominate rural policy, and little can be done without their agreement.
A group called Rewilding Europe intends to catalyse the restoration of ecological processes across a million hectares of the Continent by 2020, and to encourage other bodies to take on a further 10 million.35 It appears to be on schedule. In the first phase of restoration, it is working in the Danube delta, the southern and eastern Carpathians, the Velebit Mountains of Croatia and the dehesa (or montado)–the wooded savannahs–of Spain and Portugal.
The Danube delta contains the world’s largest reedbeds and the last primeval forest in Romania, some of whose trees are 700 years old. Despite the best efforts of the former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, şand a wildly misconceived project by the World Bank, much of the marshland remains undrained, and many of its rivers still flow freely. Many of the dykes, agricultural schemes and pumping stations the developers commissioned have collapsed or ceased to function. Here there are pelicans, bitterns, eight species of heron, hobbies, red-footed falcons, rollers and bee-eaters, waders, geese and grebes of many species, hoopoes, orioles, fire-bellied toads, giant catfish, sturgeon weighing almost a tonne. But the native mammals have been hunted nearly to extinction.
The great forests and floodplains of the eastern Carpathians, divided between Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine, still contain bison, lynx, wolves, bears and beavers. As farmers have moved off the land, their fragmented ecosystems are beginning to reconnect. In Poland over a million people–most of them Polish–travel to these mountains every year to walk and watch the animals. In Slovakia, however, the old-growth forests are still being logged, as the potential for generating money by other means has not been fully grasped.
The southern Carpathians, in Romania, through which I once walked and camped for three enchanted weeks, still possess in many parts a natural treeline. The great beech forests of the valleys give way to firs
on the slopes, which diminish into scrub, then high alpine pastures, where, as the snow retreats, crocuses, saxifrages, pinks and primroses spring up. The clearings in the lowland forest were, when I visited, so thick with butterflies that it was sometimes hard to see the path. There are wolves, boar and bears in these mountains, large parts of which are already well protected. The rewilders want to reduce hunting to raise the number of chamois and red deer, and to reintroduce bison, beavers and griffon vultures. In 2012, the first five bison, which had been extinct in Romania for 160 years, were released into the Vanatori Neamt reserve.36
The Velebit Mountains, which rise almost 6,000 feet from the Adriatic coast, already support lynx, wildcats, wolves, bears, chamois and boar, as well as a magnificent variety of birds and snakes and butterflies. In the dehesas and montados of Spain and Portugal, the Iberian lynx, extinct across much of its former range and now the world’s most endangered wildcat, is slowly recovering, through the reintroduction of animals bred in zoos. The governments of the two countries have set aside over a million hectares of this land for conservation, to protect the lynx, the Spanish imperial eagles, the vultures, Iberian ibex and other rare wildlife that lives there.
In each of these places, Rewilding Europe is seeking to demonstrate that restoring ecological processes makes more money for local people than was generated by the industries that formerly used the land. It is hoping to reintroduce missing species and to raise the populations of animals which until now have been persecuted. While talking to two of its officers I was told something I have not heard from environmentalists in a long time: ‘money is not a problem’. Public enthusiasm for rewilding on the Continent is so great that their initial projects are fully funded.
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