A Work of Hope - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 151

birch and juniper. An orchid rare outside the exclosure - creeping
ladies' tresses - had proliferated here.
The old trees within the fence were now dying quickly. Several had
collapsed and would be left where they fell. The resin they contained
would prevent the trunk from disappearing for around a century.
Others had died in their boots and were now shedding their leafless
twigs. The dead trees would provide habitats for species which cannot
survive on living wood: fungi, certain lichens, beetles, pine hoverflies,
birds - such as owls, woodpeckers and crested tits - and bats, which
nest in holes in the rotting wood. As they decay, they release a steady
trickle of nutrients which other plants can use. 78
'I like to think the trees know they can go now, as they've done
their bit, and their children are growing up around them.'
Alan told me that they would exclude the deer for a few more years,
then they would reduce the height of the fence in some places, and let
a few in. 'Deer should be a part of this system, but not in such num-
bers.' When deer numbers were reduced across the Highlands, the
exclosures would be removed.
In places like this, where some living trees had clung on, the rewild-
ers could let nature do the work. In others, like the bare West Affric
estate, bought by the National Trust for Scotland partly as a result of
campaigning by Trees for Life, they had to plant islands of forest,
grown from the nearest seed sources, trying to replicate the patterns
and distributions in which trees might have grown there naturally, to
begin the process of regeneration. Alan's intention was to re-seed
native forests along the glens that struck diagonally across the High-
lands, then to connect them through passes low enough to lie beneath
the treeline. 79 He described the pine as a crucial species, which creates
the habitat required by much of the missing native wildlife. Some
would return naturally. Other species - from the wood ant to
the wolf - would have to be brought to the forests and released.
Alan already appears to have catalysed a gradual rewilding of the
entire watershed of the River Affric. This will, if the plans mature, create
a corridor of native forest twenty-ive miles long. 80 But this is just one
corner of the 1,000 square miles whose ecosystems he seeks to restore.
'One of the things I've learnt,' he told me, 'is patience. We're talking
about trees with a lifespan of 250 years or so. That's not so long. In