A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 123

stock as by wild animals and plants. Like the belief that natural sys-
tems are always controlled from the bottom up, now shaken by the
discovery of widespread trophic cascades, a number of hypotheses,
great and small, could turn out to be false as food webs are allowed
to recover.
Alan pointed me to another curiosity. Pushing through the moss
and lichen in the exclosure were pine seedlings. Where did they come
from? The textbooks, he told me, assert that pine seed tends to travel
about fifty metres from its parent tree. But this, he argued, cannot be
true of all the seed. At the end of the last Ice Age, pines recolonized
Britain from the south. If it takes twenty years for a tree to produce
cones, which then spread its seed fifty metres north, Scots pine would
not yet have reached London. Yet within 500 years of its return to
England, it had arrived in the Lake District. The seed-bearing trees
closest to the exclosure were a mile away, and none of the forest crea-
tures that might have carried the cones lived here. Pine must have a
means of dispersal that ecologists had so far missed.
It was hard, at first sight, to imagine how it could travel such dis-
tances: pine seeds are heavy and their wings are slight. Alan pointed
out that when, in the spring, the pine cones crack open, the Highlands
are often covered in snow, whose surface melts and then freezes. They
are also racked by gales, as I was painfully aware. The shape and
smoothness of the seeds suggest, he said, that they might have adapted
to ski over frozen snow. I noticed that the saplings in the exclosure
mostly grew from crannies or from under large rocks, places in which
the seeds might have wedged after skidding over smoother land.
As if to reinforce this idea, the wind howling over the moor sud-
denly armed itself with frozen snow. Even when I turned my back to
the wind I felt as if it were passing straight through me. Then the bliz-
zard stopped just as suddenly and a rainbow arced over the moor. It
flashed off again, and just as abruptly we were hit by a squall of rain
and hail. Alan, oblivious, had found a heap of black grouse droppings
and, stooping over them, had started explaining the ecology of the
species. Fascinating as I am sure it was, I decided that I had had
enough weather for one day.
As we drove past the little glen, we saw one of the eagles again, plan-
ing across the wind. Alan said this was a good sign: if it was holding