Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 104

longer absorb the concussion of light. I wrote now with the pen
wedged in the palm of my hand, as my fingers could no longer close
round it.
Here the bark of the ancient birches was corrugated like the cracked
surface of a lava flow. The old pines had slowly heaved great rocks
out of the soil, and now clutched them in their exposed roots, dan-
gling over the ridge on which they grew, as if they were about to hurl
them into the valley. The twigs of the great oaks were so heavy with
lichen that at first I thought they were in leaf.
Beside the path was a glittering black dome, perhaps a yard across
and two feet high. When I looked closely I saw that it was covered in
large shiny ants, swarming furiously. There were so many that I could
not see the nest beneath them. They had polished black heads, tawny
collars, swollen abdomens striped black and pewter. Alan told me that
these were wood ants. They were absorbing energy from the sun
through their dark bodies.
'They will bring the warmth back down into the nest. When the sun
goes behind a cloud, they slow down. If it stays behind the clouds, they
return to the nest. Wood ants are solar engineers. They always build
their nests with the main slope facing south: you can use them to ori-
ent yourself. They need a mixed woodland to survive: pine needles for
building their nests and birch or aspen for the aphids they milk.'
And there, close to the nest, were the pale green trunks of aspen,
their bark pitted as if it had been blasted with shotguns. Like the
other species of the old forest, they had aged without progeny for
many years, but now the volunteers who worked on the estate had
placed guards around the suckers the old trees threw up, in some
places as far as fifty yards from their trunks. The suckers grew much
faster than seedlings could, as they could draw upon the network of
roots: even in this harsh land, the young shoots could rise by over a
yard in ten weeks. The ants had already been seen tending and taxing
the aphids which feed on the sap, extracting the honeydew they
secrete. 31
Aspen, favoured by deer, is now rare in the Highlands. Trees for
Life had been mapping its remaining stands, protecting the suckers
and cutting root sections to propagate and grow in places from which