Creag Meagaidh

One year at Creag Meagaidh a Redwing sang all summer from the ancient Alder wood and Ringed Plover chicks scampered along the beach on Loch Laggan. Another year a Red Grouse brood scattered on the path just as the Birch and Willow gave way to montane heath. On the crunchy lichen-covered slopes Dotterel chicks scampered away from my feet following the calls of their parent. I camp in the mowed field just by the car park when I visit, the Swallows and House Martins that nest up at the house chatter away overhead and Song Thrushes belt out nonsense all night long. There will be other tents pitched nearby - sometimes a lone adventurer flings down an impossibly small tent from a bicycle pannier, unravels a frying pan and cooks up a delicious looking dinner with minimal fuss; other times groups of trendy looking characters arrive from Glasgow or Edinburgh to spend an hour bickering about how to put up some cheap tent from the high street, pull out a pack of beers, and brashly talk all night about their great highland adventure. The next morning that lone adventurer will have stashed away their tent and bagged the Munros before the city folk have stirred from underneath their sagging tent.

This year we walked through the Alder wood in the late afternoon and a Tawny Owl swooped past our head from one branch to another calling furiously. We were curious for a while, then spotted a fluffy white Owlet sat on the forest floor not far from the path amongst the wood sorrel. We pondered for a moment what ought to be done - it would be lucky to last the night on the ground with foxes and pine martens about. I picked it up but couldn’t reach the nest hole so I plonked it in the tree as high as I could. It wrapped it's stumpy wings around the branch and hugged it tight until we'd gone and the adult calmed. Perhaps a Pine Marten got it that night anyway; perhaps it will go on to find it's own territory in the expanding woodlands, raise broods of its own and establish it's own dynasty for a fleeting moment of ecological time.

A few weeks later I met with a group of rewilders who scolded me for my belief that many species are dependent on human interventions and that without those interventions our nature would be poorer. They were certain that were we to remove humans from the equation then nature would recover and flourish. They knew my bird was Curlew so they told me I ought to go to Scandinavia where the Curlew nested in forest bogs and no-one needed to kill any predators because the ecosystem was in balance without human intervention. They hadn’t seen it themselves, and they didn’t know exactly where, but they were pretty certain of it all. And anyway, weren't our ground-nesting birds fine before gamekeepers arrived - hadn’t Foxes and Curlew evolved alongside each other for thousands of years?

These were genuinely held beliefs which were expressed in good humour, so it was an entertaining hour or two. They seemed to be genuinely surprised that I was knowledgeable about ground-nesting birds and certain that we currently have no alternative to predator control delivered at a large-scale if we want to hold on to these birds. We worked hard to find middle-ground: they were more accepting of my position once I made clear that the over-abundance of meso-predators could be attributed to human activities. Of course they were keen to pin it all on Pheasant releases, but I worked hard on the idea that it is a bit more complex than that.

Creag Meagaidh was a former sporting estate that was almost sold to a forestry company in 1983 - the plan was to cover it with Sitka Spruce as so many other important ecological sites were in Scotland in the 1980s. The plans were publicly opposed with such vehemence that at the last minute the site was bought by the Nature Conservancy Council and it became a National Nature Reserve. The site has always been unfenced but deer have been controlled to allow the Birch, Rowan and Willows to slowly expand up the glen that winds up towards the glassy loch, above which Ring Ouzel call from steepling, rocky corries. The habitat is no good for Curlew but there is a decent Black Grouse lek on the horse pasture, and the high plateau does well for Dunlin, Golden Plover and Dotterel. The deer control helps these birds too: further south at Ben Alder the summit plateau is regularly visited by a large Red Deer herd and the soil enrichment from the deer droppings has turned much of the nutrient-poor lichen plateau that Dotterel need into a grassy field.

It had seemed right to set the young owlet on a branch and I don’t suppose the rewilders would have scolded me for doing so, even though I was intervening in a natural process with no good reason. Those Tawny Owls were nesting in a natural cavity in an ancient tree with all the ensuing jeopardy. What right did I have to intervene? That Owlet could have been the meal that kept a Pine Marten alive; now it could snatch the life out of tens of thousands of voles. Quite how and why we feel it is right or wrong to intervene in ecological processes is as much a matter of emotion rather than any objective principle. The lethal control of deer across the UK is widely seen as a necessary conservation intervention with many benefits and so we don’t question the intentions of people who shoot deer; we don’t assert that deer and trees have evolved alongside each other for thousands of years, and we don’t say that trees were alright before deer stalkers turned up.