>>1654987Too many red deer.
It's a problem. support for 'rewilding' growing but lots of opposition from both directions. PETA types incensed by the idea of a mass cull, and the hunting estates/country sports industry opposed because for them artificially high number of deer equals money. When Erick the dentist from upstate new York, who pays top dollar, flys in for his dream weekend of deer stalking in the Scottish Highlands they want to be able to garuntee him that 12 point red stag he's been dreaming of in the 2 days he's here. They can't do that with natural numbers of red deer.
The amount of natural woodland in Scotland is shockingly low, something like 2%. And efforts to regrow are very slow because the fucking deer browse all the saplings.
The majority of woodland we do have is non native Norwegian spruce plantations, which are so densely planted that nothing grows in them except for the spruce- monocultures. This has led to the reduction of many species.
But there is some success. In the cairngorms and in glen affric (the last picture, the forest it is out of shot on the left) they have successfully protected and expanded the natural Caledonian pine forests. They've done this by intensively shooting deer, much to the anger of the animal rights people, but what these idiots fail to see is by reducing the deer to normal numbers and regrowing the natural forest several other species which were in decline (and in some cases thought to be completely absent) have rebounded in these natural havens.
So ye, that's the situation here.
