Woods in danger
March 2002
by Gus Jones
A report entitled From Wild Wood to Concrete Jungle, made public last month, presents disturbing facts which show planning across Britain is failing ancient woodland. Coincidentally, February saw the closing date for bids for Anagach wood near Grantown on Spey. Some of this much loved wood that nearly came to be clearfelled 10 years ago was planted with Abernethy pine in the 1760s.
Rich in character, Anagach wood has been likened to an exquisite work of art. The same could be said of a smaller and more immediately threatened native pinewood in Strathspey – School Wood in Nethybridge.
Development pressure here comes from Eagle Star, a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance giant Zurich.
Highland Council’s Local Plan controversially allowed for houses likely to be second and retirement homes and a business site in this wood, which features on the Ancient and Semi-natural Woodland Inventory. Although offered for sale in some building-plot sized parcels, no such allocation has been made in Anagach wood.
Shortly after acquiring School Wood, Eagle Star in 1986 set about systematically felling all the broadleaf trees. Thanks to local vigilance, this vandalism was halted in time to save some large willows impressively festooned with lichens. Some magnificent birches and other broadleaves like aspen, rowan and bird cherry along with tall juniper also survive to enrich this pinewood.
PRICELESS ASSET: Cynically felled ahead of planning – a large willow in School Wood in Nethybridge. photograph: Allan Bantick
Obviously house building would fragment the important wildlife corridor provided by School Wood, situated between two of the most important forests for capercaillie in Scotland. The proposed houses would also cut dead a woodland history that extends back to the end of the last ice age, destroying a habitat that is irreplaceable.
Next to Abernethy Primary, School Wood borders two approaches to ‘the forest village’ of Nethybridge, contributing to its wooded character. It supports red squirrels, crested tits, the sun-loving tiger beetle, wood ants and colourfully-named blood red slave-maker ants.
Capercaillie, otter, pine marten, and roe deer use the wood. Soils are as pristine as in the most undisturbed sites of Abernethy forest and the wood is home to a number of nationally-scarce plants.
One of these, only found for the first time last year in a damp and shady recess of the wood, is coral root orchid, also known from Braemar at a record altitude in Scotland.
Coral root orchid is extraordinary in obtaining its nutrients in several different ways – as a parasite, using sunlight like most plants, and as a saprophyte associated with a fungus.
The number of flowering spikes can apparently vary greatly from year to year; quite why is a mystery. Flowering spikes are short-lived and soon pass their best. Other orchids in the wood include lesser twayblade and creeping ladies tresses.
Crested tits can usually be seen in School Wood, betrayed at a distance by their cheery trill. Their tameness and lively curiosity are endearing features. Close up, thanks perhaps to their crest, they are somehow remarkably expressive.
This local speciality is the emblem of Abernethy Primary School and an appropriately Scottish logo for the Scottish Ornithologists Club. Cresties excavate a nest cavity and are just one of a host of creatures for which dead and decaying wood is important.
Cresties spread from Strathspey strongholds into plantations in lower Speyside from about 1860. In his book on the Birds of Moray and Nairn Martin Cook, who has studied them in lower Speyside, has reported that forest composed of mature, tall, smooth-boled trees appear much less attractive than when the trees are more shrubby with plenty of side branches. A profusion of low branches is also valuable for caper broods, enabling chicks with poor powers of flight to elude predators.
Where the grounds of Abernethy primary adjoin School Wood, wintergreen plants grow naturally. To have these unbidden is an exceptional privilege. Pupils have produced an illustrated leaflet about School Wood highlighting some of its wildlife, including the red squirrels.
Telltale litter of pinecones gnawed by red squirrels is to be found throughout the wood. Some pines have their bark gnawed, a feature which is more obvious where this has been sufficient to ring bark the tree or where the gnawed area has been colonised by sooty black fungus.
After storms earlier this year, when a pair of ravens were passing over the wood, a new crop of wind-snapped pines tops littered the forest floor. The gnawed areas of some were as black as the ravens. When you examine the point where such trunks have snapped, it is usually where past bark stripping has made its mark.
Nesting on the ground, capercaillie can be vulnerable and have accordingly developed some remarkable adaptations. Much as a lizard can readily shed its tail in the mouth of a predator, fright moult is a way a hen capercaillie can leave a dog or a fox just clinging to feathers. Once I observed a nest where a hen had lost an impressive number of tail and other feathers in this way, but had evidently come back to incubate. In due course she successfully hatched her undamaged eggs.
By often choosing to nest where there are overhead branches, capercaillie are better protected. On the ground, the tops of pines that have suffered wind-snap in part as a consequence of the gnawing of squirrels, can provide safer nest sites.
Where, as is often the case, it is just the top part of the tree that is snapped off, a pine will tend to grow out laterally. In this manner flat-topped pines develop providing a canopy structure that is attractive to capercaillie for feeding in.
It was the selling agents that likened Anagach wood to an old masterpiece. Amongst the offers due in by the end of last month will be one from the local community. Risks are high that others will outbid this.
There is nervousness that the estate will simply accept the highest offer and that ownership of the woodland could become fragmented.
If Eagle Star is given permission to build 40 houses and a business site in School Wood, something irreplaceable will be vandalised and another nail will be sunk into the coffin of the capercaillie in Scotland.
It is government policy to halt the decline and fragmentation of ancient woodland. School Wood, where the red light could be given to more holiday and retirement homes in a village already saturated with these, looks like being a landmark case in testing whether policy is being implemented.
Readers wishing to support BSCG’s efforts to save School Wood from development can send cheques made payable to
BSCG to BSCG appeal,
Fiodhag,
Nethybridge,
Inverness-shire PH25 3DJ.
Gus Jones is a wildlife biologist who trained in Aberdeen. He has worked with the Scottish Wildlife Trust in Strathspey and is convenor of the Badenoch & Strathspey Conservation Group.
This is an article from the March 2002 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.