Page 21 - BBC Wildlife Volume 36 #12

With wolves, lynx and bears

long gone, red deer have had

plenty of time to proliferate,

creating the 'deer problem'.

Enter stage left: the rewilder. Increasingly,
large chunks of the Highlands are being
managed not as traditional sporting estates
but as sites for landscape-scale ecological
restoration. At the forefront of this emerging
trend is Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish
entrepreneur, who bought the 42,000 acre
Glenfeshie Estate in the Cairngorms 10
years ago and has subsequently acquired
several further landholdings. This has given
him custodianship over 200,000 acres – all
badged under his company, Wildland Ltd.
The history of Glenfeshie is not so
different from that of other Highland
estates. For 200 years or more, the land
was valued according to its potential for
deer stalking, grouse shooting and salmon
fishing. Fencing was widely used to keep
deer away from commercial forestry
plantations but, on the floor of the glen,
remnant ageing Scots pines retained a
toehold in the shallow soils.
Dick Balharry, the eminent countryman,
recognised the imminent loss of these
Pa nt ng: A amy veteran trees back in the 1960s, and
openly condemned the effect of high deer
numbers, pointing to a complete absence

December 2018 BBC Wildlife 21