Natural History in the Highlands and Islands. F. Darling Fraser

islands are covered with very fine grass which feeds a few sheep. The difficulties of gathering and getting the sheep to and from the boats are likely to be the cause of even this usage being discontinued. The lighthouse is the only inhabited place in the Flannans and to get ashore there can be a ticklish job.

      Then to the north and north-east of the Butt of Lewis are Sula Sgeir (Plate XXIIIa) and North Rona (Plate XXIVb), forty and forty-five miles away respectively. There are no beaches on these islands. Their natural history will be described in greater detail in Chapter 10. Suffice it to say here that Sula Sgeir is a gannetry, and like North Rona, St. Kilda and the Flannans, is a station for Leach’s fork-tailed petrel. It is doubtful whether we should be justified in calling Leach’s petrel one of the rarest British birds, but its breeding places are so few and so remote that it is unknown to all but half a dozen naturalists.

      We have come to the end of our arm-chair tour of Highland country, from the frontier zone of Perthshire and Angus to that other frontier, the oceanic zone of the Atlantic. I have given but a glimpse of what is without doubt one of the finest scenic and faunistic areas in the world. Whether it survives as such depends very much on the good will and active, participant care of British people. Any area of natural history which is adjacent to a highly populous industrial region is in peril from that very proximity, but there is always the point of view that men’s minds become awakened to natural beauty and the right of wild life to existence for its own sake, and then the proximity may be to the advantage of wild life and the wild places, in the same way that no country sparrows or moorhens are as tame and safe as those of St. James’s Park.

       CHAPTER 4

      THE HUMAN FACTOR AND REMARKABLE CHANGES IN POPULATIONS OF ANIMALS

      IT IS of the very nature of humanity to alter the complex of living things wherever man is found. Man must be considered as part of the natural history of the earth’s surface, however unnatural he may be. Of course, all animals alter the rest of the complex of living things in some way or other, but none does it with reflective intention as man does, and, I might add, none does it with much less regard for consequences. The animal, lacking the power of reflection, is as much at the mercy of its environment as the environment has to endure that particular animal; but man has power quite beyond his own physical strength; he can make the desert bloom, or ultimately fill an oceanic island with the beauty of bird song, and equally he makes deserts as spectacularly as any horde of locusts.

      What has man done to the Highlands and Islands and what is he doing? Something of that story will be discussed in this chapter, but not so much as might be desired. Professor James Ritchie, now Regius Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh, has written a large volume entitled The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland. It is an interesting and often depressing story, but Professor Ritchie would probably be the last to suggest that he has told the complete tale. There is much of the story we do not know or are only just learning how to infer and deduce. And our methods of recording are never complete enough to mark down, for future minds to work upon, the doings of the present generation of men.

      Scotland, and the Highlands particularly, have nothing like such a long human history as England has. The last glacial epoch prevented that, for Scotland was under the ice thousands of years after man had inhabited the south of England. The tradition apparently established at that time has persisted with remarkable tenacity, because many people still seem to think that the north of Scotland endures arctic conditions in winter—which is a pity, considering the picnics this writer has enjoyed on a New Year’s Day, and the times he has taken his siesta in comfort in the sun on a Highland hill in December and January!

      It is generally accepted then that the Highlands as a whole have a human history of but a few thousand years as against tens of thousands in southern England, and it is possible that such areas as West Sutherland and the north-west corner of Ross-shire did not know man until two or three thousand years ago. When man first came to the Highlands the sea was 50 feet higher than it is at present. His kitchen-middens appear near the 50-foot raised beaches in various places such as Colonsay, Mull, Islay and Oban. He was a hunter and fisher and knew no arts of husbandry. One wonders what large effects early man can have had, because a small population of hunters taking life only for its own subsistence, and not for any export, would hardly bring to extinction many of the animals we know were present at that time. It is probable that natural causes were much more important in changing the natural history of the Highlands in those days. A few degrees’ change of temperature for a period of years, for example, whether up or down, would work very great changes in the tree line and the specific constitution of the forests. The mountain tops would appear from the ice or disappear under it again for considerable spells, and everywhere the vital factor of moss growth would be affected. The growth-rate of sphagnum moss under optimum conditions has, in the deduced history of the Highlands, felled forests as surely as the fires and the axes of mankind.

      The biggest effect man has exerted on the history of the Highlands has been in the destruction of the ancient forest—the great Wood of Caledon. This has happened within historic time, partly between A.D. 800 and 1100 and then from the 15th and 16th centuries till the end of the 18th. Even our own day cannot be exempt from this vast tale of almost wanton destruction, for the calls of the two German wars have been ruthless (Plate 7a). Much of this priceless remnant in Strath Spey and Rothiemurchus has been felled for ammunition boxes and the old pines of Locheil Old Forest went up in smoke during Commando training. These facts should never be forgotten as one of the consequences of war, and if nature reserves ever become a reality in the Scottish Highlands (as something distinct from National Parks, which are lungs for the people and playgrounds), the authorities should go to a great deal of trouble to bring about regeneration of the true Scots pine which is a tree different in many ways from the sombre article commonly grown in plantations as Scots. The true Scots pine (Plate 17) of the old forest is a very beautiful tree: its bottlegreen is distinctive, and so is the redness of its boughs; the needles are very short and the shape of the mature tree is often much more like that of an unhindered hardwood than the commonly accepted notion of a pine. A long clean stem is not necessarily typical. The true Scots pine is not easy to grow now, and when it is suggested that the authorities should be prepared to go to a lot of trouble to bring about its regeneration, it is because care and patience will be needed in addition to willingness. Regeneration, however, is a subject for a later chapter; we are now woefully concerned with destruction and its effects.

      The old forest consisted of oak at the lower levels, with alders along the rivers and in soft places, and pines and birches elsewhere. Pines clothed the drier portions and birch the higher and the damper faces of the western hills. The true Scots pine is a relic in the ecological sense, and where fire or the hand of man swept away an expanse of the old pine it was birch which within a year or two provided the new growth. An excellent example of this opportunism of the birch is to be seen at Rhidorroch, above Ullapool, Ross-shire, where the early felling line is clearly marked, pines above and birch below, the opposite arrangement to what would be found in nature. The oak forest has nearly all gone, Argyll and southern Inverness-shire being the main parts where it is to be seen to-day in any quantity. Scarcely anywhere is it being taken care of, or regeneration active.

      Nairn (1890) says that the great Caledonian Forest extended “from Glen Lyon and Rannoch to Strathspey and Strathglass and from Glencoe eastwards to the Braes of Mar.” The imagination of a naturalist can conjure up a picture of what the great forest was like: the present writer is inclined to look upon it as his idea of heaven and to feel a little rueful that he was born too late to “go native” in its recesses. But probably it was not so idyllic; the brown bears would have been little trouble, nor would the wild boar, and perhaps the wolf would not have given too many sleepless nights, but there would almost certainly have been more mosquitoes than at present, and malaria would have been a constant menace to our enjoyment of this primitive sylvan environment and its rich wild life.

      The main trouble between A.D. 800 and 1100 was the Vikings, whether Danes or Norwegians. They were a destructive and parasitical folk, however colourful and well organized the civilization of the North may have been. Sometimes they set light to the forest