collbradán Profile picture
Oct 26, 2021 13 tweets 6 min read Read on X
across the Scottish Highlands, Ancient Woods are falling apart following centuries of heavy browsing pressure. this thread provides a case study, and tries to make sense of why this ecological and cultural crisis is still widely ignored #wildtrees
our case study area is ~60km2 of open mountain and glen near Fort William. deer stalking is the main land use, and sheep are grazed in the southern glen (Glen Loy). no one lives here, and the area appears to be almost completely devoid of tree cover from above
this wasn't the case just a few generations ago: in the 1870s there was over 200Ha of woodland (green blocks) along with thousands of scattered trees (green dots)
this was a wild tree landscape (not planted) with 5 named woods:
🌳 Brian Choille, 'rough wood'
🌳 Cam Dhoire, 'the crooked thicket'
🌳 Coille an Ruighe Mhòir, 'wood of the big shieling'
🌳 Coille Meall Onfhaidh, 'wood of the stormy hill'
🌳 Fraoch Mòr, 'big heather'
fast forward to today and these woods have retreated by 80-90% (red = loss). why? each tree that died simply wasn't replaced, as every seedling that tried to grow up over the past 150 years has been eaten by sheep or deer
despite this, there's a still a lot of wildlife left where wild trees survive - fungal networks attached to roots, lichens and bryophytes growing on bark, insects feeding on deadwood, birds nesting in the canopy etc. but all of this is doomed if things don't change fast
something i've struggled to understand is why woods like this have been so ignored? i think part of the reason is prejudice - foresters perceived birch (often the dominant species) as a 'weed tree', ecologists have largely ignored woods with low canopy cover until recently
additionally, old maps were difficult to access in the past, so few people realised that these woods were so ancient (some poss wooded for 1000s of yrs), & land access rights were only formalised in 2005. this has set stage for a new generation to 'rediscover' these places
of course the back drop to this is that our woodland culture has been largely erased. the people who lived in this landscape and named and worked these woods were cleared from it. this in turn has allowed centuries of decline to go unnoticed
a problem is that the narrative for restoring landscapes in the Highlands is heavily focused on tree planting - an artefact of past conservationists & foresters largely ignoring wild trees and misunderstanding potential of natural regeneration (wild trees seeding themselves)
this can manifest in unhelpful ways - wild trees being engulfed within plantations, or Ancient Woods being left to fall apart while deer fences are created around new plantations.
even the idea we should fence areas off to deal with a landscape scale problem is unhelpful
what do we do? first we need to recognise that these places exist and that many are in a critical stage of decline. then we need to prioritise them and manage accordingly. often this will require significant reductions in landscape scale browsing pressure so young trees can grow
please give this crisis the attention that it deserves @MairiGougeon @lornaslater @DAJCameron, these woods are irreplaceable and cannot be allowed to deteriorate further. perpetuating the status quo is not a neutral option - it will rob future generations of these places

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More from @collbradan

Jul 19, 2021
this individual wild pine is, incredibly, shown on a map from the 1870s. i tracked it down and found lots of old pine stumps around it, indicating that its the sole survivor of a 2nd ancient pinewood in Glen Loyne. some thoughts... (thread)
the context the stumps provide is critically important - this isn't just a random tree, its the remains of something much greater. because of this, some of the other wildlife from the preceding wood may still survive here (eg. lichens, mosses, fungi & inverts growing on/in it)
the pine is the what drew me here, but the scattered birch and rowan are wild trees too - likely also survivors from the preceding wood. they provide further opportunities for old woodland associated species to cling on
Read 7 tweets
May 8, 2021
Cam Dhoire (the crooked wood), an Ancient Woodland in Glen Mallie, Lochaber

like so many now remote woods in the Highlands, this place has almost been erased - culturally by the expulsion of people from the Glen during the clearances, and physically by centuries of overbrowsing
the 2 are of course interrelated: much of the Highlands was cleared of people to make way for large scale sheep ranching, made possible by the extermination of wolves. without wolves or effective mgmt, deer now perpetuate ecological impacts of ranching even after sheep removal
consequently, places like Cam Dhoire are falling apart - for centuries sheep/deer have eaten all of the young trees, so when old ones die there is nothing to replace them. this is only possible because of earlier cultural erasure, which prevents us from responding effectively
Read 7 tweets
Feb 10, 2021
this shoulder of woodland may be one the richest sites for rare plants in Co. Derry. although a 'Site of Local Nature Conservation Importance', it is imminently threatened by quarrying - which is able to take place without ecological safeguards due to a planning loophole (thread)
why is this wood so rich? the trees here have grown up amongst giant boulders, which have likely provided protection from grazing livestock for centuries. as a result, many of the species here are absent from woods in the surrounding landscape
there are signs that the wood may be ancient (around since at least 1650):
🌳 many trees have large stools and multiple stems (pics 1&2)
🌳 old-woodland associated lichens are present (pic 3)
🌳 there's a high diversity of woodland wildflowers (pic 4)
@WoodlandTrust
Read 7 tweets
Dec 31, 2020
within 12 years, Scotland plans to create around 10 Glasgows-worth of new 'woodland', primarily through tree planting.

what if i told you that this could not only be done, but done better, *without* planting a single tree?

thread:
firstly, trees have managed to successfully plant themselves for at least 385 million years. they're actually really good at it! if they weren't, they'd not have made it back to Scotland after the last ice age.

we call trees planting themselves 'natural regeneration'
natural regeneration is the reason most ancient woods in the Highlands exist - they're made up of *wild trees*, descendants of those that recolonised Scotland after the ice age.

wild trees are generally more variable than planted ones (both genetically and in form):
Read 12 tweets
Oct 18, 2020
1) for the last 60 years, we've been funding a campaign to exterminate Europe's wildlife. through the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), hundreds of billions of euros of public money have been funnelled into destroying wildlife-rich meadows, woods, wetlands and rivers
2) while the precise formula has varied over the years, CAP essentially requires farmers to wreck nature in order to receive larger subsidies. agricultural intensification - responsible for so much pollution and wildlife loss - is one of CAP's core aims
3) CAP also favours larger farms over small ones, which twinned with intensification has driven down the number of people actually working the land.
in 1973 Ireland had around 263000 farm workers versus only ~85000 today (iiea.com/wp-content/upl…)
Read 9 tweets
Jun 14, 2020
in 2010 this was a lawn
since then, its been allowed to grow all spring and summer, followed by cutting and removing clippings in autumn/winter

*we didn't resow* - most of the plants you can see spread naturally when released from frequent mowing
if we had resown, we'd have unwittingly wiped out our (then unknown) population of adder's tongue fern - a rare plant of old grasslands

(centre of the pic, doesn't look much like a fern at all!)
Read 5 tweets

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