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

townships are to-day.

      Sometimes these coastal townships were places of such extreme exposure and poverty of soil that after a hundred years of hand-to-mouth existence the crofts have gone empty. The sight of such a derelict and decrepit township (Plate VIIIb) is a most saddening and disturbing thing. It does not present the ruin of a civilization by sack or natural catastrophe, but the quiet failure of simple folk to obtain subsistence from their environment. In other places, the shift to the coast has proved almost a salvation, for the people have found a mild, sheltered and early climate, and natural resources in fish and seaweed which have enabled them to live much better than they could have in the inland glens. These coastal crofting communities vary greatly in habits and thus in their influence on local natural history. Some have a shore from which they can fish, others have a rocky shore or no aptitude for fishing and they turn their energies inland to breeding sheep. It is an unfortunate characteristic of many of the crofting townships, whether fishing or pastoral, that the small quantity of arable land is being neglected, and the vegetational complex of rushes and sedge is creeping in to both unoccupied and occupied crofts.

      The coming of the sheep finished the process of changing the face of the old Highlands of the time of the forests. Large areas of birch scrub were burned. Where the birch trees were larger they were cut that their bark might be exported for tanning material for sails and rope. I know of one sheep farm in the North-West Highlands (now back to a famous deer forest) where the shepherds were paid in part with the value of birch bark which they themselves had to cut and peel while they were in the hill. The flockmaster’s firestick was a destroyer of ground cover over hundreds of thousands of acres, for even where the pine trees had been cut a new growth of birch was taking place which might yet have made a less bare Highlands than we know to-day. Every spring some patch of heather or purple moor grass (sometimes known as flying bent grass or Molinia coerulea) would be burnt and seedling trees would suffer. Much birch was cleared in the 19th century by the bobbin-makers working for the cotton mills of the Lowlands and Lancashire. The pirn mill at Salen, Loch Sunart, was the principal reason for the establishment of that settlement.

      The sheep themselves, as we shall see in the next chapter, are the destroyers of a habitat in which scrub trees such as birch, willow and rowan are a part (Plate 23a). Regeneration in places where they reach beyond a very low density is impossible, and even the many flowers of the countryside disappear beneath their ever-questing and selective muzzles.

      Even the sheep have not been quite the last straw in man’s despoliation of the Highland forests, because his railways have happened to run through some of the last expanses. The old Highland Line (now L.M.S.) running through the Grampians and Strath Spey has been the cause of burning a good many acres of the ancient pine woods. This incidental destruction is hard to bear in a time when we have come to treasure the few remnants of primitive sylvan beauty. But I would say this: we still do not take enough care. Every year or two there are fires in Strath Spey which take away more and more of these beautiful trees. The present Laird of Rothiemurchus, discussing the question of national parks with me, said that 3,000 acres of wood had been burnt in his lifetime. If some of the last remnants of the forests are to become the property of the nation, each one of us must be conscious of his personal responsibility in preserving them.

      The destruction of the forests meant the end of a habitat for much other wild life which thereupon became extinct, was compelled to change its habits or was reduced to a very low population which would be in danger of extinction from other and often obscure causes. It has come to be generally understood nowadays, that the animal population of a region is not static. There is constant fluctuation in progress. But the purpose of this chapter is not to dwell on this natural rising and falling of numbers, so much as to mention the more startling events such as actual extinctions, retrogressions, resurgences, and introductions of new species within the area of the Highlands. The list of such events and movements is a considerable one.

      The causes of extinction may be various but in the main, as has been said, the active disturbing factor is man, and as one looks through the list, the losses of the last 200 years are large in proportion to those of the previous 10,000 years.

      Changing climate is an immensely important mover of species and when climate changes in a relatively small island such as Britain, extermination is often the fate of land mammals which cannot readily adapt themselves. Again, if man is present and the animal of fair size, he may speed the influence of climate.

      The lemming and the northern rat-vole may be taken as examples of changing climate being the dominant factor in exterminations in the Highlands and in the country as a whole. They must have disappeared with the advent of the warmer Atlantic climate and the extension of forest growth. Vestigial arctic climates such as that of the 4,000-foot plateaux of the Cairngorms have been insufficient to maintain the lemming, which occurs in similar country in Norway.

      The giant Irish elk (Megaceros hibernicus) disappeared in prehistoric days also, probably before the advent of man. Climate was an active factor, but the organism itself was heading for disaster. The biological principle of heterogonic growth was at work in extravagant fashion. The evolution of antler form and weight had no particular relation to function, but was a concomitant of increasing body size and followed a different growth rate. The great annual drain on the constitution of the Irish elk, of growing 80–90 pounds of bone tissue, was too much in an age which was changing from that of the rich pasturage of the Pleistocene. Whereas the red deer grew smaller in every way, and thus adapted itself, the giant deer apparently died in all its glory. It is thought that the northern lynx persisted in the Northern Highlands until man came, but soon afterwards it became extinct. The species was probably in decline with the rise of the warm Atlantic climate, but was given the final push into extinction by Neolithic man. Bones of the northern lynx were found near the hearths in the limestone cave of Allt na Uamh near Inchnadamph, Sutherland. Ritchie says this is the one appearance of the species in Scottish history.

      The brown bear was probably never a numerous species in the Highlands. The assumption of its disappearance in the 9th–10th centuries means that man must have been responsible, for climatic change had long ceased in its more violent forms and the destruction of the forests had scarcely begun.

      The reindeer inhabited the Northern Highlands well into the historic period. The rise of the Atlantic climate may have reduced its original numbers, but had it not been for man’s influence it would probably have survived as the woodland type of the species. The destruction of the forests must have greatly restricted its range and finally its extermination must have been due to direct hunting. The Orkneyinga Saga mentions the hunting of the reindeer by Rognvald and Harald of Orkney, and the date assigned to the event is about the middle of the 12th century, but the species was extant later than this.

      The elk (or moose) persisted in the north until rather later than the period of the brochs, defensive stone towers which were built about the 10th century, and given up when the Norse raids developed into conquest, i.e. about A.D. 1000–1100. Man, by direct hunting and the indirect means of destruction of forest which had then begun, was the cause of its disappearance by about A.D. 1300. Legends of a large dark species of deer are common in the Highlands.

      The beaver was found in the Highlands until the 15th–16th centuries, Hector Boece mentioning its existence about Loch Ness, and its being hunted for its skin.

      We may consider next a group of three diverse creatures which are extinct as wild animals of the type they were in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, at which time they disappeared; but which still lived on in domesticated forms or crosses with other domesticated stocks. The wild boar would be found wherever there were oak woods and would impoverish the flora therein by its constant delving. Its domesticated descendants persisted in the West Highlands and Islands until the middle of the 19th century, at which time swine ceased to be kept as a general practice. The conversion of the people to an extreme type of Presbyterianism engendered a Judaic attitude to the pig, and numbers fell away rapidly after the 19th century conversions. Any fresh pigs to come in were of the improved type from England, where the quick-fattening Chinese pig was altering the form of the old “razorbacks.” The great wild ox or Urus, surely the most magnificent member of the northern fauna, also disappeared through hunting and the clearing of the forest, but its blood may be presumed still to run in the veins