A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 122

We continued up the stony track until we found ourselves among
the last lenses of snow filling declivities in the blasted, treeless moor.
We left the car. It was bitterly cold. I had made a mistake in assuming
that April in the Highlands of Scotland would resemble April in the
high lands of Wales. The wind raked through my inadequate clothes.
I felt almost naked.
We walked up onto a ridge where tiny twigs of dwarf birch, no
higher than my knee, still struggled against the deer. We crawled
around in the heather with the wind at our backs, identifying it among
the myrtle it resembled. Dundreggan has the greatest concentration
remaining in Scotland, but by comparison to the dense dwarf birch
tundra I had seen in the Norwegian Arctic, this was unimpressive. The
moor was hard and bristly, like an upturned yard brush.
Beside the ridge, Trees for Life had built a large exclosure in 2002,
by agreement with the previous owner, to see how the land responded
where the deer were excluded. As soon as we stepped into it, I could
feel the difference. It felt like walking on a winter duvet: the flora here
was soft and spongy. Already a thick sward of pale reindeer lichen,
sphagnum and deep grass had formed. The dead stems of bog asphodel
still clutched their seed cases.
The land inside the fence was littered with survey poles and transect
marks. The scientists Alan worked with had already made discoveries
that overturned accepted wisdom. Ecologists had assumed that dwarf
birch grows best on boggy land. But here, in the absence of overpopu-
lated deer, the researchers found that it did better on the rocky ridges:
other surveys had found more of it on boggy land only because the
deer were more reluctant to venture there. Similarly, scientists assumed
that the aspen which grows further down the glens prefers steep
slopes. But its distribution also appears to be an artefact of overgraz-
ing: as soon as the trees were given some protection, the researchers
at Dundreggan discovered that they grew more vigorously on level
ground.
Rewilding experiments are likely to present stiff challenges to cur-
rent scientific knowledge. Many of the places ecologists have studied
have been radically altered by human intervention, and many of the
processes they have recorded, and which they assumed were natural,
appear to have been shaped as much by people and their domestic