EP 20: "Rewilding" with Alan McDonnell from Trees for Life

[00:00:00] This is 63 Percent Scottish, a Scotland Appreciation Podcast.

[00:00:07] Welcome to 63 Percent Scottish. My name is Eamon O'Flynn and I am your host.

[00:00:11] When people think of Canada, they often think about Rocky Mountains, Blue Lakes, the frozen north, vast prairies and rugged coastlines.

[00:00:19] Our landscape is a key part of our identity.

[00:00:21] But many of the landscapes we engage with simply aren't what European settlers found when they arrived.

[00:00:27] Driving through the region I grew up in, Southern Ontario, I see farmland mostly.

[00:00:32] That's how I think of this area.

[00:00:35] But hundreds of years ago, the same land was a mix of old growth forests, younger forests, meadows and wetlands.

[00:00:41] When people think of Scotland, they often picture highland scenes, the mountains and glens, coastlines and islands.

[00:00:49] With some exceptions, the image isn't usually filled with rich, diverse forests.

[00:00:54] But that's what once dominated the Scottish Highlands.

[00:00:57] Caledonian forests filled with Scots pine trees formed a massive wilderness that had mostly disappeared by the 1700s thanks to human intervention.

[00:01:05] By the 1950s, only about 1% of the original Caledonian forest remained in Scotland.

[00:01:11] It's a tragedy to be sure, but these forests and their wider ecosystems aren't gone for good.

[00:01:16] Not if rewilding efforts are successful, at least.

[00:01:20] I read about rewilding efforts in the Scottish banner and it fascinated me.

[00:01:25] In part, my fascination was due to how it revealed a misunderstanding on my part of what Scotland's landscape was really supposed to look like.

[00:01:32] But also it fascinated me because it seemed like such a monumental task to restore it.

[00:01:38] To gain a better understanding, I reached out to Trees for Life, an organization at the forefront of rewilding efforts in the Scottish Highlands.

[00:01:47] They connected me with Alan McDonnell, their head of nature restoration.

[00:01:52] He has worked in conservation in Scotland for more than 25 years, first with Scottish Nature Heritage on Islay and in Argyle and Stirlingshire before joining Treats for Life.

[00:02:03] The perfect person to tell us everything we might want to know about rewilding.

[00:02:08] Welcome to the show, Alan.

[00:02:10] Trying to help to that. Thanks, Eamon.

[00:02:12] I hope all of that was accurate.

[00:02:15] Getting there.

[00:02:17] I still, even to this day, I see Islay and my brain cannot process it quickly enough.

[00:02:24] I came so close to saying Islay and I didn't though.

[00:02:28] I did it.

[00:02:29] I survived.

[00:02:31] I think we should probably start with the most obvious question.

[00:02:34] What is rewilding?

[00:02:35] Because I tend to think of rewilding as regrowing a forest from scratch.

[00:02:39] That might be a Canadian thing because we often think of like, you cut down a lot of trees and then you go and plant a lot of trees back.

[00:02:46] It's actually a really relatively common summer job for people here.

[00:02:50] But I think that's a really limited view of what's happening in Scotland.

[00:02:54] Yeah, I mean, rewilding is about nature.

[00:02:57] As a word, it's subject to all kinds of interpretation.

[00:03:00] But for us, it's pretty simple.

[00:03:03] It's about allowing natural processes to determine the future of the land.

[00:03:08] And so that's just quite a straightforward ecological proposition.

[00:03:12] I think on top of that, because one of the big differences about Scotland compared to Canada is just the space available here.

[00:03:23] And the people in those spaces are therefore crucial to the future of nature here.

[00:03:29] So for us, rewilding also has to have a role for people.

[00:03:32] People have been part of this landscape.

[00:03:34] They have been an influence on it.

[00:03:36] And so we need to find a future in which those people can move with the land.

[00:03:42] Nature comes back, but people are still part of these.

[00:03:45] And the communities that are here are still strong and vibrant and live with nature.

[00:03:50] It's about rewilding people as well as the land.

[00:03:54] And it's also kind of a broader ecosystem story as well, right?

[00:03:58] I mean, it's not just as simple as growing trees.

[00:04:03] There is an element of fauna as well as flora.

[00:04:09] There's the actual landscape itself.

[00:04:11] Sure. So as you're putting those natural processes back together, you're enabling them to rebuild that full ecosystem, which might be a high forest type of habitat and set of wildlife that goes with that.

[00:04:23] But in other places, it could be big, expansive peatlands, or huge blanket bogs that we have, say, in the flow country.

[00:04:30] High in the mountains, we've got different kinds of woodland, open grasslands.

[00:04:34] So that kind of patchwork allows nature to thrive.

[00:04:38] And if you've got enough of that habitat, then you've got room to bring back the species that in turn to kind of kick up those whole natural processes.

[00:04:45] So the keystone species.

[00:04:47] So rewilding, you know, a lot of our work is focused on key species like a keystone species like the beaver.

[00:04:54] And we're also now starting to look at what's a kind of harder social proposition, but an apex predator like the lynx.

[00:04:59] Mm hmm.

[00:05:00] We're bringing predation and bringing disturbance, bringing that kind of all those kind of natural things that some of these really important animals can do in these particular species.

[00:05:08] It's very much part of our vision.

[00:05:10] Interesting. OK.

[00:05:11] Is there a point where rewilding is impossible in a location or like where an ecosystem is too far gone?

[00:05:18] Or is it something that with enough time and effort and maybe money is always possible?

[00:05:25] What question?

[00:05:26] I think if you've got soil, you're good.

[00:05:31] You're good.

[00:05:32] That's what you do.

[00:05:33] You can come back from that.

[00:05:34] I think, I mean, actually, in a way it's quite a serious point.

[00:05:37] There are places where we're in danger of losing.

[00:05:39] Soil's not so much in Scotland but parts of the world.

[00:05:42] Soil's such a precious resource that we take for granted so much.

[00:05:45] But that ability of to, if you have soil, you can have plants.

[00:05:49] Mm hmm.

[00:05:49] Plants can grow back.

[00:05:50] If you have that, then you're creating shelter and food for insects.

[00:05:53] And then you've got the base of a food chain for both herbivores and for omnivores and carnivores.

[00:06:00] Because birds, mammals, everything else, you can build a full pyramid if you've got the soil that can sustain vegetation.

[00:06:07] My favourite, probably my favourite phrase about rewilding is by leaves we live.

[00:06:12] Because that really speaks to the way that a plant kind of is feeding nutrients and energy and resources back into the soil in a cycle.

[00:06:21] Mm hmm.

[00:06:22] And as that continues, the plant grows more, that nutrient store builds up and that soil becomes richer.

[00:06:29] Gradually and incrementally over time, then that system becomes capable of supporting more life.

[00:06:35] Mm hmm.

[00:06:35] And that's key.

[00:06:36] While that's going on, that's how nature kind of finds its way to grow and grow, evolve, change into different circumstances,

[00:06:43] and to start, I guess, to accumulate that kind of wealth of diversity, the biodiversity that entrances us so much, you know, when we're in nature.

[00:06:53] It is the, you know, something just occurred to me as you were saying this is, is just the complexity of bringing back an ecosystem like that, or, or kind of helping, helping bringing ecosystem back to where it might have been previously.

[00:07:07] What is that kind of timeframe that you're talking about here?

[00:07:10] Like, to me, it must, it seems like it must be a really challenging thing, because it's not something you can just do in a day.

[00:07:16] It's not something you can do in a year in a particular location.

[00:07:20] Yeah, in a way, it's the million dollar question.

[00:07:22] How long will it take?

[00:07:24] The glib answer is depends how far gone you are.

[00:07:27] Yeah, it's like working out, I guess.

[00:07:29] It sounds like it's...

[00:07:31] What kind of shape are you in?

[00:07:33] You can try that analogy too.

[00:07:35] I mean, for a lot of Scotland, those kind of hills you talked about that are kind of bare, there's maybe someplace we've just got one or two species of grass growing there and a few mosses.

[00:07:46] In the west of Scotland, it's wet, cold winters.

[00:07:50] And that's, you know, that's maybe if you've got trees starting to regenerate there, then, and they start to take hold, you get to a point where they themselves can set seed and that seed can grow.

[00:08:02] So that in itself is nearly a 10 year journey.

[00:08:05] Yeah.

[00:08:06] Just for that initial fithold.

[00:08:08] And then from there, it just slowly starts to gather pace.

[00:08:11] And that's the...

[00:08:12] So it's kind of that, that's, it's not a linear kind of rewilding development, restoration development.

[00:08:19] It's sudden bursts of getting to a threshold and then it's capable of working at much more systems, capable of working at a much greater rate.

[00:08:28] So, um, cheap answer is it depends.

[00:08:31] Um, complicated answers, 10 years.

[00:08:34] And if all the conditions are right, even quite often quite difficult parts of the west of Scotland.

[00:08:41] Um, I, I put some of my reputation on saying that you, you'd expect to see real progress in that time.

[00:08:46] The conditions are right.

[00:08:47] All right.

[00:08:49] Sometimes faster in other places, but, um, yeah, depends on the circumstances.

[00:08:53] Um, so what was my description in the intro of what happened in Scotland accurate?

[00:08:59] Like the places like Glencoe and the great Glen have tree cover at some point.

[00:09:04] They did.

[00:09:05] Yeah.

[00:09:05] Um, and you can go there and you can see that the remnants of that tree cover still one of the projects, one of my favorite projects we're doing is working on wild pine.

[00:09:15] And in that we're looking to find remnants of pine wood that aren't on the map, but people know about.

[00:09:22] Like, and they were on maps say 150 years ago.

[00:09:26] So we're looking at 19th century maps and finding there's a pine wood recorded there.

[00:09:30] If we visit that site, those maps were so good that you can go to, you know, if there's a little like Christmas tree symbol on that map, you can go to that point.

[00:09:39] Mm-hmm .

[00:09:40] Yeah.

[00:09:40] And then you can go to the landscape and still find a live pine tree right there, not exact coordinate.

[00:09:45] Interesting.

[00:09:45] So that's how good those maps were.

[00:09:47] And the chances are if there were native trees in that, in that landscape in the 19th century, they've probably evolved there since the, since the last ice age.

[00:09:58] Yeah.

[00:09:58] Because there was certainly in parts of the Highland, there wasn't a lot of planting and people weren't really planting native trees.

[00:10:04] So probably that's been a continuous presence.

[00:10:06] You've got that kind of ancient lineage and you can find that all around Scotland, sometimes in different levels.

[00:10:11] When we talk about forest cover, sometimes actually it's quite scattered trees and sometimes quite stunted trees.

[00:10:18] But yeah, tree cover is, you expect to find in a lot of, in a lot of Scotland, even out in some of the wind blasted islands.

[00:10:26] You know, there's tree cover there.

[00:10:27] I remember when it was on Islay dealing with kind of tree blasted oaks, wind blasted oaks right on the coast clinging on there.

[00:10:33] They were ancient woodlands that had always been there.

[00:10:36] And I was just about to ask about the islands as well, is what is, what did the islands look like before, before people started destroying these ecosystems?

[00:10:46] I mean, the islands is maybe where you can see it best, where you've, especially where you've got those, you have these little pockets of woodland left over that's kind of remnants.

[00:10:54] And you'll see boggy hollows and sometimes big kind of flatter areas with peatland growing across that.

[00:11:00] And then sometimes shallow soils or rocky outcrops growing through places in the hills and everything else.

[00:11:06] But you can kind of, when your eye gets into it, you can see, well, that's where the trees would have been.

[00:11:10] Often a patch of bracken might reflect where there's kind of mineral soil that probably held a woodland once.

[00:11:15] Hmm.

[00:11:16] Going back prior to grazing animals and everything else.

[00:11:19] So yeah, real patchwork.

[00:11:21] That's, and you know, it's kind of interesting to me.

[00:11:23] I hadn't considered until, until just now is just the, the historical element of what you're doing and, and needing to understand what, what these landscapes did look like and having to go back to sources and having, look at, needing to look at maps, needing to look at things that, that existed previously.

[00:11:38] It hadn't really occurred to me that that was, that was a part of it, but, but that's kind of fascinating.

[00:11:44] Yeah.

[00:11:45] It's really cool.

[00:11:45] Like detective job.

[00:11:47] Yeah.

[00:11:47] To some of the records here and see what might've been there.

[00:11:49] What human indications are there of the past?

[00:11:52] Yeah.

[00:11:52] Rather than sort of trying to extrapolate on ecological information only.

[00:11:56] Yeah.

[00:11:56] That's fascinating.

[00:11:57] Uh, are there specific species of trees or wildlife that, that Scotland has lost that, that, um, say trees for life would be focusing on?

[00:12:08] I don't think we've lost any tree species.

[00:12:10] I could be wrong.

[00:12:10] I'm not aware of any.

[00:12:11] I mean, there'll probably be maybe some really rare montane willows that I'm not aware of, but in general, all our main tree species have been here.

[00:12:19] It's just some are really rare now.

[00:12:21] Um, but because we've lost so much woodland cover we've lost, uh, we can support less wildlife with that.

[00:12:28] Um, and, and we have of course lost, uh, quite a range of animals.

[00:12:32] Uh, so like the links, the beaver was gone.

[00:12:36] Uh, we had brown bear and elk here going back, you know, since the last ice age.

[00:12:40] So again, that's, that's kind of human hunting.

[00:12:42] But some, um, that out of, out of our country now.

[00:12:45] Yeah.

[00:12:46] Human hunting and nowhere for them to live or grow.

[00:12:49] Um, real, real challenge.

[00:12:51] Uh, and are there certain, so you kind of talked about this is a bit already, but we can go into a little bit more is whether there are certain areas in Scotland that are the focal point of rewilding efforts, or is this something that's happening kind of across Scotland?

[00:13:04] Um, it is happening in patches and some places are renowned for it.

[00:13:09] Um, but it's also, it's happening more and more often.

[00:13:11] So it is, there are more people getting into it.

[00:13:13] Uh, they don't always want to call it rewilding, but certainly, um, there's more nature restoration at landscape scale going on with this kind of let's let nature come back and decide what to do with it.

[00:13:25] So, one of the most famous places is Glenfeshy.

[00:13:28] Uh, where the landowner there has reduced deer populations a long way and that has allowed pine wood to come back of its own volition.

[00:13:37] Um, over quite a wide area and the, and the first signs of that starting to move up hill as well are starting to come through.

[00:13:44] So that's, that's one of the places that's probably most talked about, um, Glenafric itself where trees for life was born or anything else that kind of work has been there, kind of thinking about that pine wood landscape since the sixties and seventies.

[00:13:58] Okay.

[00:13:59] So yes, a range of places where, uh, where people are up to, up to, up to good things.

[00:14:04] And so we've talked about, uh, you know, what rewilding is, what the, or maybe focal points as we just discussed, but how is, how is trees for life going about?

[00:14:16] So this is more like the, how, how do you do this?

[00:14:18] So how, how are you going about rewilding?

[00:14:20] Can you tell me what some of the initiatives are and, you know, like, as I'd mentioned in the intro, when I was introduced to this concept, I would, my first thought was like, this is a huge task.

[00:14:31] We've already talked about timelines being, you know, a decade, uh, kind of at the minimum, uh, for the most part.

[00:14:38] Um, you know, how do you go about the process of, uh, of rewilding?

[00:14:47] Well, some of it's come by is about kind of knowing the landscapes that we're looking to work in and knowing what's there and what we can come back from.

[00:14:54] So we place that emphasis on knowing where the, say the remnants of woodland are because that wouldn't has the history that it has.

[00:15:02] And therefore it has that inherited evolved diversity, say in the tree seeds, the genetics of the trees themselves and the woodland vegetation associated with that.

[00:15:10] And the insect vegetation, the insect fauna associated with that, or the soils that go with that.

[00:15:16] So being able to regenerate out from them and basically allowing that vegetation, the basis of life in a way, uh, with the soil, allowing that to set seed and grow itself and mature into, into new habitats and expand that way.

[00:15:31] That's really what, that's kind of our key natural process, that natural regeneration.

[00:15:37] What is key to enabling that is having herbivore pressure that is low enough to allow those plants to grow.

[00:15:44] Mm hmm.

[00:15:45] And some of those landscapes you talked about, um, look the way they do today because of centuries of high grazing levels, mainly by sheep.

[00:15:54] Yep.

[00:15:55] So sheep were brought into this country, um, farm at scale over large areas of the landscape.

[00:16:03] And basically every time there were so many there that every time a tree started growing parts of the landscape, it couldn't grow because the sheep would eat it.

[00:16:10] Mm hmm.

[00:16:11] Uh, now sheep numbers have dropped away quite a lot just in the last 20 years or so, um, due to economic changes.

[00:16:19] What we've seen is now is, is deer populations responding to that a bit.

[00:16:24] And whilst deer populations might not be making things any worse, they are, there's enough pressure there.

[00:16:30] Deer numbers are high enough to prevent many areas from recovering.

[00:16:34] Mm hmm.

[00:16:35] So we're looking to, to reduce that browsing pressure in different ways.

[00:16:40] The traditional way is to take an area of habitat and put a big fence around it and keep the deer out.

[00:16:46] Mm hmm.

[00:16:46] Um, that's proving increasingly expensive.

[00:16:50] Um, and also we're finding it not all that effective in reality because the fences start to start to let deer in after a few years.

[00:16:58] The pressure goes where it was and maybe you've secured one generation of birch trees.

[00:17:03] Yeah.

[00:17:03] And that's all you've got.

[00:17:05] Yeah.

[00:17:05] So the real difficult, one of the real difficult problems is to, is to look to bring that, bring, bring deer numbers down across a landscape in which lots of people are invested in having deer there.

[00:17:17] Yeah.

[00:17:17] So from their, from their point of view, their livelihoods are based on those deer numbers and the ability to hunt and take people to hunt those deer and enjoy hunting those deer is kind of, is kind of key to what, key to what they're about.

[00:17:29] Right.

[00:17:30] So, you've got strongly held emotions around that and therefore there's a long history of conflict between people looking to bring habitats back and people looking to maintain that, that way of life.

[00:17:41] Yeah.

[00:17:41] So, um, that's where we come to actually rewilding being a very human proposition and looking for ways in which we can move forward together.

[00:17:48] Can we restore nature at this scale whilst ensuring that these skills, which, by the way, we absolutely need in the future, can sustain themselves financially and as part of the communities that are left here as well.

[00:18:05] Because we're quite a relatively small country, there's a need to have the people and the land in a closer relationship.

[00:18:14] Yeah, of course.

[00:18:16] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

[00:18:17] And so, you know, right before we started recording for anyone listening, we're talking about Canada and just how vast it is.

[00:18:23] And so we have these vast wildernesses and I think it's a little bit easier to say, OK, well, there's a separation here.

[00:18:29] You have something like Algonquin Park, for instance, in I mean, I wouldn't say it's not even northern Ontario, but it's massive.

[00:18:39] And you can keep a real separation between settlement and wilderness in a way that I think would be extremely difficult in Scotland.

[00:18:49] Yeah.

[00:18:50] And I think as part, actually, there's fear here that that sort of approach will be taken.

[00:18:55] So we're going to exclude people from this big landscape in Scotland and some people would see that as desirable.

[00:19:01] I'm not sure anybody does, actually.

[00:19:03] But I think because there's a conflict here, then people like to hold on to what they've got.

[00:19:09] But instead of how could we work together to have what we both want and everybody wants actually in the future?

[00:19:15] Because both sides of this debate want these jobs to remain and both sides of this debate want nature to come back.

[00:19:22] We're just not very good at allowing each other to sort of see that common ground.

[00:19:27] Yeah, no, that's completely understandable.

[00:19:30] Where can listeners learn more about rewilding efforts?

[00:19:34] And is there any way for them to participate or support the efforts of Treats for Life?

[00:19:39] Well, our website's pretty good.

[00:19:41] There's a lot of background information on that, on some of the some, I guess, the background and the history to all of this and to today's ecology and the folklore.

[00:19:51] Comes with that really interesting, the cultural relationship with nature.

[00:19:54] Actually, it's been here, you know, since since the Gales were here and the Gaelic people that actually named the landscape that they lived in after nature by and large.

[00:20:04] So, yeah, I would recommend that.

[00:20:06] And if you go on there, you can see how you can volunteer with us, how you can support us as well.

[00:20:13] Plant trees with us or help sponsor regenerating trees.

[00:20:17] So, yeah, go on to treesforlife.org.uk.

[00:20:20] Awesome.

[00:20:21] All right.

[00:20:21] Well, thank you so much for joining us, Alan.

[00:20:23] And for those interested in finding trees for life online, I'll make sure we post the links in the show notes.

[00:20:34] Thank you for listening to 63% Scottish.

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[00:21:06] Goodbye.