Big predators for the Small Isles?
AS A HISTORIAN, I am often asked why rural Scotland attracts so many wacky characters and their quirky schemes.
Is it because many of today’s politicians and absentee landowners, who have the wealth and influence to impose their beliefs on us, think we are careless and neglectful of our environment, or simply that they see the land we live in as some vast, empty laboratory in which they can play God?
It would take more than half a page of The Oban Times to list all the freaks and follies that have been foisted on the West Highlands and islands in the past 200 years.
If these were confined to pub and dinner party chatter they would be harmless but, when government agencies start indulging self-delusionists and romantic visionaries by encouraging them to meddle without due regard to the loss of a recognised country way of life or an area’s cultural heritage, then questions must be asked.
The latest fashionable wheeze is ‘rewilding’, which means restoring an area of land to its natural uncultivated state and reintroducing species of wild animal which disappeared hundreds of years ago. At its most extreme, rewilding implies zero-intervention by humans, but no matter how hard anyone may try, it is almost impossible to find unaltered landscapes in Europe, including Scotland, that have not been interfered with by man.
Sadly, most wilderness fans tend to forget, or ignore this, because it doesn’t fit their ideology of recovering Eden. Even in remote areas, reintroduction of certain elements of a fully-functioning ecosystem is impossible, because key species are extinct and so a substitute has to be brought in.
A new conservation organisation set up by Paul Lister, owner of Alladale Estate in Ross-shire, is once again pushing against the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, which gives everyone rights of access, by advocating the reintroduction of dangerous predators.
The European Nature Trust (TENT) has joined forces with a London-based group to promote Lister’s dream of having wolves running wild on his 50,000-acre Highland wilderness reserve.
TENT’s full consultation paper, published by Community Land Scotland, claims that, thanks to hundreds of years of human pressure, the Scottish Highlands has lost most of its original native forest cover and several indigenous animals. The solution, it says, is blanket woodland, guarded by large-scale predators such as lynx, wolves and bears.
On the Morvern peninsula and elsewhere in Argyll, thousands of acres of some of the finest food-producing land in Scotland are already being cleared of sheep and cattle. Deer are being slaughtered in their hundreds; high fences, funded by eye-watering Forestry Commission grants, are going up without the applicants being means-tested, and speculation about which species will be introduced, is rife.
Local people are beginning to ask why deer that have lived in the region for the past 10,000 years are being sacrificed for a species which no one will see until they start killing domestic stock and ground-nesting birds, which are already in decline.
Two weeks ago, a leading UK newspaper carried a biased article on rewilding in which Paul O’Donoghue, chief scientific officer for the Lynx Trust, is reported as saying that there is a stone on the island of Eigg with a lynx carved on it, implying that these beasts once lived there.
The slab, one of two fragments of a cross-shaft of late ninth century date, has been studied by staff of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. They say it shows a hunting scene depicting a horse and rider, hounds, a bull, eagle, boar and a lion. The eagle is probably a white-tailed one but what Dr O’Donoghue thinks is a lynx is a lion clearly identified by its mane. Lions were popular with early craftsmen not because they were present at the time, but for their biblical connection.
Despite all the twaddle about lynx, references to them are extremely rare in Scotland. They do not appear in Gaelic literature and, in all the prehistoric sites that have been excavated in the Highlands in the past century, I can find one mention only of a lynx. This was allegedly the skull of a northern lynx, one of six species of the Eurasian lynx, which turned up more than a century ago in a cave near Inchnadamph in Assynt.
Why is an important British daily newspaper, based in London, bolstering the case for introducing lynx to the West Highlands and Islands by drawing attention to the Eigg carving? Does the editor believe the ensuing fracas will increase his sales, or can it be the directors of the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust, who have surpassed themselves in getting all manner of grants since they acquired the island in 1997, have entered into a pilot scheme with the Lynx Trust?
TENT claims huge annual sums could be generated by rewilding through part-time jobs, school experience programmes, visitor accommodation and nature-friendly consumer products.
And why not? On the face of it, the islands of Eigg, Muck, Rum and Canna, with their caves, sheep, rabbits, deer and few humans, would make ideal homes for lynx. More importantly, once released, they would be unable to escape.
Another haven, which would lend itself to a few predators, is the uninhabited Shiant Isles in the Minch owned by Tom Nicolson, son of old Etonian Lord Adam Nicolson, who spends a few weeks a year in Morvern.
Adam is a well known writer, noted for his wonderful book, Sea Room about the Shiant Isles, in which he disarmingly describes himself as an ‘English toff’. Nicolson, who is a self-confessed rewilding enthusiast, managed not long ago to ease £900,000 from RSPB Scotland and SNH for an eradication scheme to clear an estimated 3,600 rare black rats thought to have arrived on the main Shiant island from an 18th-century shipwreck. At £250 a pop, that’s serious cash.
Stalkers, farmers and crofters are rightly worried about large carnivores attacking and killing sheep, but seem confident that rewilding will not happen. Unless they join forces with other professional land-users, it will undoubtedly slip through.
The armed forces have always maintained Highlanders prefer to be led rather than to lead, but when they do produce a leader, he is usually exceptional.
The martial spirit has almost gone from these parts. If the dreamers are to be stopped, farmers, crofters and naturalists living among us – many in tied cottages – will need to put aside their fear and modesty and speak out.