Wild Land News no 63, Spring 2005

Large herbivores munching the uplands of Britain Article

David Jarman ruminates on the issues raised at a National Trust for Scotland conference

This may sound a rather stolid, plodding subject for a day conference (OK, the title said 'shaping' not 'munching' but, sorry NTS, glaciers shape the uplands, not cattle). But it proved a fascinating and often spirited event - many thanks to SWLG for sending me along in February.

Both Richard Luxmoore and James Fenton of NTS open on our cultural attitudes to landscape - while many in Scotland want to see regeneration of our lost woods (since Fraser Darling taught us to see the open uplands as 'wet deserts'), in the Lake District 'scrubbing up' post foot-and-mouth is seen as a grave threat to valued landscapes.

Too much of the day gets bogged down in lowland European forests (thus contravening EU subsidy rules on avoiding concentrated trampling impacts. Anti-trampling rules are apparently a threat to our tourist industry; why? because they mean you can't keep Highland cattle around fixed feeding stations by scenic lay-bys - but we digress). David Bullock of The National Trust bravely makes a link to our interests by suggesting that climate change is rapidly blurring the lowland-upland distinction, and even more bravely saying this process cannot be reversed, only adjusted to - the goal is to allow species to migrate north freely.

There does seem to be a recognition that the old Scottish forests were less extensive, more open, and more fluctuating than is popularly imagined. After their first rapid colonisation in the dramatically ameliorating climate and on the bare mineral-rich ground as the ice disappeared, the forests would always have struggled to regenerate. The 'large herbivores' would have seen to that. It seems that regeneration was episodic and localised, often after storm, flood, rockfall, and (in the case of Scots pine) fire. Two other factors were new to me:

thickets of thorny scrub protect seedlings from browsing - the upland equivalents might be bramble patches, juniper, leggy heather, even dense bracken, although James doubts their efficacy.
wolf and lynx lairs deter winter grazing around them, offering natural 'safe havens' for woodland survival; David notes that wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone has seen a resurgence of aspen forest around dens. Again, James points out that forest cover in Scotland had declined to 4% by 1700, while wolves were still present.

All these triggers for natural woodland regeneration are scarce if not vanished. To mimic them, we cull, we de-stock, we put up fences. And where we exclude grazing, the ground vegetation quickly goes rank, and wild walking off the path becomes miserable. A mile of tussock grass and rushes is quite a penance, like wading through treacle - as in many parts of the Loch Lomond National Park.

So where do we go now, with large herbivores controlling so much of what we see in our wilder uplands - and how we enjoy roaming them?

Cattle - these were once great aurochs, taller even that David Bullock's shoulder, and with formidable appetites and predator-resistance - but only ever on the lush lower ground. Fraser Darling saw domestic cattle as the saviour of Highland ecology, especially under shieling transhumance. David suggests them as one answer to my 'penance' problem - they graze down dead molinia tussock in winter, rather like hay, and the deer profit from it with a fresh bite in spring. But with the past spread of peat, and with wetter winters predicted, it is unclear how high cattle might range. If cattle are important, we need to ensure that the new Land Management Contracts for hill farming fully recognise both their ecological and access benefits.

Sheep - surprisingly little was said about the sheep. Jos Milner, with experience in Letterewe and Norway, sees sheep and deer as partly interchangeable in terms of carrying capacity - but the present gentle decline in sheep numbers (after peaking in the eighties) may not lead to increasing deer numbers, as sheep help to optimise vegetation productivity. If we can overcome our cultural 'Clearances' aversion to sheep, they have their wild antecedents - which keep St Kilda neat and green today, as James points out. The domestic variety are easily manageable with unobtrusive fencing, and it would be good to see more 'wild' sheep looking after themselves on the uplands, as they do in Scandinavia (maybe with some wild shepherds, not the quadbike variety.) Sheep help keep the hills naturally free to roam, and they are little threat to regenerating trees once they are up a few feet.

Goats - the plague animal of Mediterranean demonology (see an admirable book by Dick Grove and Oliver Rackham which wittily slays many comparable myths there) is only mentioned as a pest. Dick Balharry rued the futility of removing exclosure fencing after twenty years of successful regeneration at Letterewe, only to see it all wasted by goats, in the absence of active wolf lairs. But glimpsing true wild goats in the hills, as I have done with David in the Galloway mists, and in Kintail passes, is one of the great wild land experiences.

Deer - our last large native wild mammal has been much maligned, again perhaps as an abreaction to cultural imperialism - indeed I once applauded 7:84's The Cheviot, the Stag, and the black black Oil to the rafters. In Perth, a tide seems to be turning. Why - as Mike Daniels (DCS) puts it - should wild animals eating natural vegetation be construed as damaging? And as Jos demonstrates, heavy culling is ultimately futile: deer numbers are governed by carrying capacity, which is controlled by climate, vegetation, and competition (mainly by sheep). Natural predation doesn't reduce populations much, it keeps them healthy - deer numbers control wolf numbers, not vice versa. Wise human 'predation' likewise harvests them sustainably. At Letterewe, Jos reckons a 90% deer cull would be needed to regenerate all the oakwoods without fencing, because they grow where the deer congregate in bad conditions. The overall deer per hectare density is irrelevant.

Another of those great hill experiences is to see the deer drifting over the brow into the shelter of a glen in winter, amidst snows and smoking mists, never more memorably than a few Decembers back in - where else - Glen Feshie. To think on my walk across Letterewe one distant Spring, on seeing all the birch regeneration along a ravine rim freshly eaten back down to the level of the heather, I had imagined hiring a helicopter to exterminate the marauding herds.

How do we restore our native woodlands then? Wholesale exclusion fencing (as is now happening in core forest areas) is bad for deer welfare, and for the overpressured ground above the fence. Rotating pocket exclosures, as advocated by Jos (10% of the woodland area for 20-30 years) and by Philip Ashmole (Borders), may be a fair compromise, but not in remote areas of wild character. Perhaps we have to readjust our expectations of how well wooded the uplands were, not in their first glory, but after the Atlantic wetter climate phase set in, and might be now that man has come to dominate the land.

As the day closes, James Fenton says he fears he is living on another planet from the rest of us (see his own story and tell us if he is) - with Drennan Watson quick to confirm his suspicions. But support comes to hand from a promising quarter - young Dutch ecologist René Lavoncier (Banchory). Visitors to Scotland like him can better appreciate our open heathery 'wastes' - we don't need another Scandinavia here. As for my wading-through-treacle problem, he thinks that ungrazed tussock would just be a stage in a succession towards arctic heath - in 50-100 years time, bit late for me. Others suspect that while this might happen in the drier east, a wetter and milder west could just get more and more impenetrable - as today near sea level (try ascending the Pap of Glencoe from Loch Leven at Caolasnacon), so progressively higher up.

Keith Miller (JMT) poses a key question - what would an upland Scotland landscape driven by large herbivores look like, without our interference? In a post-event e-debate, James suggests that taking Jos's figures of deer carrying capacity (~20/sq.km) and the density needed to allow woodland regeneration (4-8/sq.km) it would be largely open. He goes on to argue that, in terms of global not local biodiversity, our large tracts of heath and heather are rare and far more important than artificial native woodlands. As a pragmatist and tinkerer by inclination, I am being dragged rather reluctantly in his direction.

While James sees our open uplands today as relatively natural, best left to fend for themselves, I still wonder if they have not been so impoverished by mismanagement as to be beyond unassisted recovery. An open, naturally rotating woodland pattern, call it a savannah or a mosaic as you like, with (say) 20-50% tree cover has a lot more opportunities for one of those freak events or special factors to occasionally rejuvenate a patch of it than a bare landscape with only small isolated patches of wood clinging to crags, islets, and perilous places less frequented by large, happily-munching herbivores.

But I for one want to see plenty of those (relatively wild) herbivores in our uplands, for their own delights, and to help keep the terrain negotiable for us stolid, plodding humans.