Capercaillie’s struggles? The problem is loss of habitat and humans… not the pine marten

Movement low down on the pinewood floor, movement in a way that suggested something had changed.

One of the virtues of sitting still in front of a restricted view is you quickly notice when something is not exactly as it was the last time you looked.

Don’t move. Let nature do the moving.

A wise woman of nature once wrote this: “If you want to write with absolute truth and with the ease of a natural function, write from your eyes and ears, and your touch, in the very now where you find yourself alive wherever it might be… conceal yourself in the fields. Watch and be in what you see or in what you feel in your brain. There is no substitute even in divine imagination for the touch of the moment, the touch of the daylight on the dream.”

Her name was Margiad Evans, the book was called Autobiography and it was published in 1943.

Now, following her advice, eyes and ears had just seen movement low down on the floor of a Scottish pinewood.

Intensify the stillness, intensify the looking and the listening. Another movement, again dark and low down. What had not been there before was what looked like two mushrooms stuck to a fragment of dark wood, except that it was not the mushroom season and there was an unlikely glossy sheen on the dark wood. It moved again and rose a few inches, the mushrooms materialised into ears and the wood into the deep-brown face and black-eyed stare of a pine marten at 20 paces. Behold the touch of the daylight on the dream.

The movement had the stealth of wildcat, but then the sun caught peach-coloured throat and cream shoulders, and the movement also acquired the bravado and the downright beauty of pine marten.

There was the pointed stare, the struck pose that registered awareness – then, reassured by the stillness, the marten ambled away about its business.

It’s quite something to be one half of one of the oldest encounters in the story of the Highlands’ Great Wood, and you should resist the temptation to stitch “of Caledon” on the end of the phrase, for there is no such thing and I doubt if there ever was – and its present wretched condition of scattered fragments was never less great at any time in the last 10,000 years, since the Great Ice held sway.

But man and pine marten have been meeting each other in such terrain for millennia, except there was an era in which the Victorians were the principal villains when the pine marten was hunted, trapped, shot and poisoned to the verge of extinction. And it is not so long ago – within my lifetime – that what was left of the pine marten population was holed up in a desperate battle with extinction on the Sutherland coast.

Eventually, it was given a surreptitious and unauthorised helping hand. It responded eagerly and in time it prospered. Once again, man and marten can meet deep in the woods, from Sutherland to the Borders. But…

With nature conservation and Scotland, there is almost always a “but”.

So, bear all of the above in mind while I talk to you about capercaillies, the Cairngorms National Park, and a new strategy to assist the cause of critically endangered capercaillies – removing pine martens.

When I say there is almost always a “but”, that is because established practice within professional nature conservation and privately-run estates involves a species of “wildlife management” – which is another way of saying predator control, which is another way of saying paying men with guns to kill creatures that get in the way.

And “controlling” pine martens because they will sometimes take the eggs of ground-nesting capercaillies marks the point at which rewilding has finally taken leave of its senses.

In pursuit of its capercaillie policy, the Cairngorms National Park is, to quote its own website, “funding gamekeepers to reduce predator pressure over 8,500 hectares of core habitat”.

So, in order to preserve wildlife, the Cairngorms National Park is paying men with guns to kill wildlife.

Top of the hit list are the usual suspects – foxes and crows. And it seems to occur to no one in “land management” in Scotland that killing foxes and crows doesn’t work. It never has and never will.

What that policy does is create a vacuum, and what moves in to fill the vacuum is more foxes and more crows.

One of the funded gamekeepers is also quoted on the national park website, pointing out that, in addition to foxes and crows, pine martens and badgers also predate on capercaillie eggs, but “they can only be controlled under licence and only in very specific circumstances”. There is no mention of how many pine martens and how many badgers.

Yes, the plight of capercaillies is a very specific circumstance. But why is the life of a capercaillie more important than the life of a pine marten? When did we start ranking wildlife species that way?

The answer you will get is that the capercaillie is struggling and the pine marten is not. The missing words in that answer are “any more” – the pine marten is not struggling any more.

David Carroll, a naturalist, writer and artist who lives in New Hampshire, and so accomplished in all three disciplines that he was recognised with the McArthur Foundation’s American Genius Award, has written an essential truth in his book, Swampwalker’s Journal. He says: “The term ‘wildlife management’, often used in the environmental polemics of the day in reference to human manipulations, is an oxymoron. We should have learned long ago to simply leave the proper natural space, to respectfully withdraw and let wildlife manage wildlife.”

Capercaillies have been struggling in Scotland for decades. The species has been extinct once already and reintroduced, since when it has never prospered, and for much of that time pine martens were more or less absent.

Pine martens were not the reason for the capercaillie’s struggles then and they are not now. Neither are foxes, badgers or crows. Habitat is the reason.

So is relentlessly increasing human disturbance and humans’ dogs, relentlessly egged on by an uncaring tourist industry.

The habitat is too limited and too fragmented – and we did that.

Meanwhile, many professional nature conservation organisations are as culpable as the shooting estates that plague the landscape of Scotland. Licences for killing protected wildlife species or moving them out of areas they have chosen to live in are readily available.

Reintroduced species with, in theory, the strongest legal protection are being illegally killed and legally controlled by one means or another.

Too many beavers, cry the farmers. Too many sea eagles, cry the crofters. It is as ritualistic as it is knee-jerk as it is wrong-headed.

If the biggest national park in the country feels compelled to choose between pine martens and capercaillies, it is doing something horribly wrong.

The idea of letting wildlife manage wildlife is on no one’s agenda, when the truth is it should be on everyone’s. It is absolutely the only nature conservation solution that makes sense.

Our job is to repair and expand every native habitat, then watch how nature responds and learn from that. Reintroduction of species and thoughtful conservation of all the creatures of an ecosystem cannot be conditional.

Rewilding is only worth the effort if it is permitted to flourish on nature’s terms. Let wildlife manage wildlife.