Kitabı oku: «Rewilding», sayfa 2
Loch Morlich, Badenoch and Strathspey.
Rewilding in the Cairngorms National Park
Will Boyd-Wallis
Rewilding is as simple as planting wildflower seeds in a window-box, as complex as landscape-scale restoration of habitats – it’s also everything in between. All forms of rewilding lead to more people connecting with nature and this is happening by the bucket-load in the Cairngorms National Park.
The largest National Park in the UK contains a quarter of Scotland’s native woodland and an incredible 1,200 species of regional, national and international importance. The central mountain core, towering over northeast Scotland, is a broad plateau with thin soils and vegetation more akin to the Arctic. Yet even in the wildest, most remote and most extreme uplands, the vegetation hints at a long and complex history of landscape and land-use change.
In the core of the Park there is evidence of hunter-gatherer camps estimated to be nearly 10,000 years old. Ruined shielings (stone and turf shelters) remind us that our vast open landscapes have been altered for many centuries. Gaelic place names litter the maps, hinting at a more wooded landscape where our ancestors had an intimate knowledge and close connection with every wood, crag, hill and cave. The landscape is more cultural than natural, but now more than ever before, we have the potential to give back more to the land than we take.
If you have a head for heights, you may be lucky enough to find very rare plants like the woolly willow or the alpine sow thistle hidden on a ledge. The ledges keep them safe from fire and herbivores, but they cannot cling on for ever. The chances of pollen passing from one isolated plant to another and the delicate seeds finding a safe place to germinate are slim, but that is set to change. Thankfully rare plants, like the montane willows, are subject to a lot more attention now that there are prominent goals to restore woodland, wetland and peatland habitats – but we still have a long way to go.
The Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) is pushing hard to inspire and encourage nature conservation throughout the National Park. The top three conservation goals set out in our National Park Partnership Plan are all to do with landscape-scale collaboration, deer management and moorland management. We aim to see real meaningful change over the next few decades that will lead to bigger, healthier and better connected habitats. With forest cover at only 15% of the Park area, there is vast scope to expand and connect our native woodlands. Guided by our new Forest Strategy, the health and species diversity of our existing forests will be enhanced and native woodlands expanded by willing landowners.
Many estates already incorporate conservation management of woodlands, wetlands and peatlands alongside their other management objectives, for the greater good of nature and for us all. Four ‘Cairngorms Connect’ landowners already manage 9,800 ha of forest and 10,000 ha of wetlands with an ambitious 200-year vision to expand them further through deer management and peatland restoration. Six ‘East Cairngorms Moorland Partnership’ landowners aim to integrate habitat enhancement and species recovery alongside moorland management. Three other partnerships work with landowners in the Spey, Dee and South Esk catchments to restore wetlands, plant riparian woodland, re-meander rivers and encourage natural flood management.
The Cairngorms Nature Action Plan has helped to focus attention on the habitats and species most in need of help. Over 1,000 ha of peatland restoration and well over 3,000 ha of native woodland creation has been achieved by landowners supporting these goals over the last five years alone. There has been a strong emphasis in involving people in conservation through volunteering and events to celebrate Cairngorms Nature. Major complex projects to care for the capercaillie and the Scottish wildcat have received millions of pounds of investment from the Heritage Lottery Fund. These charismatic species deserve all the help they can get, but we haven’t forgotten the ‘little guys’: the Rare Invertebrates and Rare Plants projects are doing great work to involve more and more people in helping these crucial threads in the web of life.
Ptarmigan.
We are at a time of great change. Opinions on the future of our uplands are often polarised and yet, if our recent ‘Europarc’ conference is anything to go by, there is an overwhelming force of commitment across Europe to rewild, repeople and reconnect us all with nature in our National Parks.
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.
Carrifran on a cold February day.
Carrifran Wildwood
Philip Ashmole
The vision of a restored wildwood in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, conceived by Philip and Myrtle Ashmole in 1993, was based on the conviction that a grassroots community group could purchase an entire valley and – by a science-led process of ecological restoration – recreate an area of upland wilderness. This had to be large enough to establish plant and animal communities comparable to those flourishing there 6,000 years ago – long after the loss of the ice sheets, but while the sparse human inhabitants had relatively small impact on their environment. That date was easy to choose, since it was the age of the oldest longbow known from Britain, found in peat high on Carrifran in 1990.
Central to the wildwood concept was the idea that after planting and protecting missing species of trees and shrubs, we could gradually hand over management to nature, so that the wildwood would develop as a naturally functioning ecosystem, with a wide variety of beautiful habitats and a rich diversity of species.
Establishment of the Millennium Forest for Scotland Trust (MFST), an inspired offshoot of the National Lottery, triggered formation of the Wildwood Group in 1995. Members came from a wide range of backgrounds and occupations, united by a clear vision and a willingness to work for free. With other activists, we helped to form and become part of Borders Forest Trust (BFT) in 1996. However, a suitable site for the wildwood was hard to find, and lottery deadlines had passed by the time we had made a deal for the purchase of Carrifran, so the group decided to raise the funds themselves. A link with the John Muir Trust gave weight to our appeals, and there was an extraordinary response from members of the public, so that BFT was able to purchase Carrifran on Millennium Day.
Carrifran is a spectacular ice-carved glen extending some 650 ha, and rising from 160 m by the road to 821m at the summit of White Coomb, the fourth-highest peak in southern Scotland. In 2000 the entire site had been grazed and browsed for centuries by sheep and feral goats. However, because some rare mountain flowers remained, it formed part of the Moffat Hills SSSI and is now also a Special Area of Conservation.
For a grassroots group with an ambitious vision, gaining the confidence of relevant authorities is crucial. Planning the transformation of Carrifran began with a major conference in Edinburgh under the title ‘Native Woodland Restoration in Southern Scotland: Principles and Practice’. This was followed in 1998 by monthly meetings in a local pub of a diverse and lively planning group convened by our local volunteer Adrian Newton, a forest ecologist at Edinburgh University. The group developed a restoration plan for Carrifran which gained the necessary approval of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and the Forestry Commission late in 1999. Within BFT, we agreed that management decisions for Carrifran should be made by a Wildwood Steering Group and a small Site Operations Team, maintaining the grassroots character of the project. Ultimate responsibility, however, rests with the BFT Trustees, some of whom are also members of the Steering Group as volunteers.
On Millennium Day more than a hundred supporters were piped onto the site to plant the first trees, raised in back garden nurseries. By the end of that month our Woodland Grant Scheme application had been approved, an extraordinary benefactor had agreed to pay for half a million trees (all of them to be propagated from seed collected locally by volunteers) and Hugh Chalmers had been appointed as Project Officer with funding from SNH. In the summer an 11-km perimeter stock fence and some temporary internal fences were erected with windfall funding from MFST, and that autumn most of the goats were rounded up and taken to sites in England found for them by Hugh.
Over the next seven years 300 ha of broadleaved woodland were established in the lower parts of the valley, using contracts with individual planters and small groups. The rules of the grant scheme left us deficient in shrubs such as hazel, hawthorn, blackthorn, juniper, roses and all the scrubby willow species that would be expected in and around ancient woodland, so tens of thousands more shrubs had to be added later. This planting has been the main role of a dedicated band of ‘Tuesday volunteers’ who have come to work at Carrifran each week, some of them for more than ten years. In addition, hill-walker volunteers have inspected and made running repairs to the perimeter fence almost every month since 2001.
The great altitudinal range of Carrifran offered an unusual opportunity to establish treeline woodland and ‘montane scrub’, low-growing, wind-pruned shrubs growing in such exposed conditions that upright trees could not survive. This habitat is almost lost from Britain but widespread in Scandinavia and elsewhere. In the last decade about 30,000 willows and junipers have been planted high up at Carrifran, mainly during a series of 15 High Planting Camps in spring.
In the main valley some of the trees are now 4 to 5m high and in some places the canopy is closed, favouring shade-tolerant flowering plants, such as ferns and bryophytes, and causing the retreat of bracken. Bluebells are rapidly colonising the woodland from a few places where they have survived for centuries, and some of the special mountain flowers have escaped from their prisons on the crags and spread down the burns, providing a wonderful floral display in summer.
Other changes following removal of grazers and planting of trees have been revealed by formal studies at Carrifran and the adjacent valley of Black Hope, still grazed and functioning as a ‘control’ site. Vegetation surveys carried out in 2000/01 and 2013 showed extensive replacement of anthropogenic grassland by heathland and recovery of tall herb communities (especially along watercourses). Annual surveys of breeding birds show woodland species flooding in to reclaim habitats lost many centuries ago. Data of this kind are rare, and their publication generated a marked increase in visits by student groups and professional environmental managers. Furthermore, feedback from members of the public shows that Carrifran has now become truly inspirational, as we had always hoped.
In the meantime, Borders Forest Trust has been developing a more extensive vision, ‘Reviving the Wild Heart of Southern Scotland’. In 2009 the Trust purchased the 640-ha farm of Corehead and Devil’s Beeftub, which now features both low-intensity sheep farming and 200 ha of developing native woodland. Four years later BFT purchased Talla and Gameshope, meeting the northern boundary of Carrifran and extending to 1,830 ha, more than half of which is above 600 m. Grant-aided planting on this site already covers 40 ha, and volunteers have planted thousands of trees, as well as starting to establish montane scrub on the 750 m summit of Talla Craigs.
Of the 3,000 ha of hill land owned by BFT, a large proportion falls within one of only two ‘wild land areas’ identified in southern Scotland in a recent SNH project. BFT hopes that in the years to come, restoration work by the Trust and nearby landowners will ensure that the whole of the area becomes a truly wild and naturally functioning ecosystem.
Ulpha Common, Lake District National Park.
Rewilding and Nature Agencies
Robbie Bridson
Between 1969 and 2007 I was privileged to work on nature conservation and land management as a Nature Conservancy Council warden, afterwards chief warden, and ultimately regional manager. Over this period my responsibilities involved working in Wiltshire, the Highlands and coast of Scotland, and North West England. During those 38 years, there was plenty of opportunity to be involved in species research and management on most major habitats. As chairman of the wardening staff association in Britain I had a unique opportunity to be involved throughout the country. After retirement in Cumbria my appointment to the Lake District National Park Authority gave an insight into planning, recreation and tourism.
Having been ‘out of the loop’ for some time my memories and assumptions might not be accurate, but I am aware that changes have affected the management of nature conservation over the past 50 years.
It seems improbable now, but I recall that in 1974 there were only two of us (a warden and a scientific officer) working on the ground in Scotland south of the Clyde and Forth. The RSPB had wardens on sites in Britain but many fewer in number than now. The Wildlife Trusts were not widely known and had few site managers.
The National Trust was involved in its country house management, landscape, and recreation, with just a small number of staff dedicated to nature conservation. The Forestry Commission was focused on timber production.
All that has changed. I am always pleased to see Wildlife Trust staff featuring regularly on Countryfile and the RSPB has become the most well-known and influential organisation for nature conservation in the UK with many links to the rest of the world. The National Trust employs dedicated ecologists and staff who are knowledgeable and effective in safeguarding the natural environment on their properties. The same commitment to nature conservation with well-informed staff has occurred in the Forestry Commission along with their emphasis on recreation. Throughout Britain local authorities now have officers working in all aspects of managing the environment and involving people.
When I became a warden there was no training to equip anyone becoming involved in nature conservation. Working as a volunteer was a way to become part of the system but there were no academic or technical opportunities. Today there are myriad colleges and agricultural establishments offering degrees in a range of land and wildlife management. Perhaps there are already courses in rewilding?
Governments have also made some major changes that improve the safeguarding of biodiversity, with the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, the European Habitat and Species Directives, and the creation of the Environment Agencies perhaps being the most significant.
It might seem that wildlife is now safeguarded in Britain, but it all remains vulnerable. The long-term consequences of climate change, agricultural intensification, pollution, and development will always be major threats.
Looking back over the years, I feel there are some aspects of the changes to the Scottish, Welsh and English wildlife agencies that have diminished their ability to protect the environment. They are directly linked but there are three elements that I feel are significant.
The break-up of the Nature Conservancy Council The government set up the former Nature Conservancy (later Nature Conservancy Council) with very focussed policies based on science and research. The agency was filled with dedicated, and inspirational, ecologists and developed into a national network. I remember that if there was a question, for example about entomology, ornithology, or geology, an expert was at the end of a phone and could arrange a visit. That national network and the focus on science and research has gone.
The clumping together of the environmental responsibilities This would seem a positive move, as all the impacts on our environment are linked and should be coordinated, but it relies on sufficient qualified staff and management. My occasional discussions with former colleagues in the three national agencies reveal that their nature conservation responsibilities are being overwhelmed because recreation, development and agriculture have a higher profile.
The diminished power of the national agencies Would the problems faced by the efforts in safeguarding scheduled coastal sites from golf development in Scotland, or fracking in England, have had a different outcome with a national and powerful nature conservation agency? Long-serving staff I knew in the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts have negative views about the power and effectiveness of the agencies, which saddens and worries me.
Clump of ash trees, Snowdonia National Park.
Yes, there is so much to celebrate in the work of the non-governmental organisations and individuals in safeguarding our dwindling wildlife. The contributors to this book show the range and diversity of rewilding projects making a positive difference to benefit our wildlife.
The work never ends. National and local governments have policies and commitments to safeguard and improve our natural environments. They must, however, be constantly held to account and balance the pressures from so many other powerful interests.
