Caledonia – Scotland’s Heart of Pine is a new conservation book published by Northshots and compiled by Niall Benvie and Peter Cairns. Making the case for the expansion of Scotland’s native woodland, Caledonia - Scotland’s Heart of Pine portrays a vision for Scotland’s wild forests and is published to coincide with the UN International Year of Forests.

Sky Line Pines

These isolated pines clinging to life on an exposed ridge pose a tantalising question: Do we accept them as the final bastions of a dying forest, or embrace their potential for becoming the foundation of a new wildwood?

Arctic Survivor

In many parts of northern Europe the mountain hare is a creature of lowland forests. Hares, along with wolves, were one of the only animals to able to adapt to the changing environment, their white winter coat providing camouflage from golden eagles - their principal concern to this day.

Pine Plantation

Modern industrial forests normally lack the biodiversity of ancient pinewoods but have nevertheless been a lifeline for pine martens and red squirrels amongst others.

 Arboreal acrobat 

Pine martens can survive in a poorly forested landscape but find most of what they need more easily in woodland. Legal protection and the cover provided by commercial forests have both helped pine martens return from the brink of extinction in Scotland.

Winter Wetland

A wild woodland doesn’t always conform to people’s idea of how it should look; in a vital forest, the horizontal trees are just as important as the vertical ones.

Pinewood Reflections

The mirror-calm, peat-laden waters of Loch Mallachie sustain little obvious life in early winter.Save for the trumpeting calls of roosting geese, the sound of silence can be deafening.

Red deer stag in pine forest

Without fences, deer numbers have to be kept at very low levels to allow forest regeneration. With no natural predation, that can result in a lot of work, and heartache, for stalkers. Whilst fencing (or not) might be an ongoing discussion, some biologists fear for the genetic purity of Scotland’s most iconic mammal. Where red deer share their range with the introduced sika, hybridisation is likely to occur. In time it is possible that only island populations of red deer - such as those on Rum - will remain genetically ‘pure’.

Rare, vulnerable and now treasured

Red squirrels are most at home in the old boreal forest where a variety of food from seeds to shoots and nestlings to toadstools sustains them through the year. Yet they survive too on the seed crops of spruce and pine plantations, a habitat in which their chief rival for food, the grey squirrel, cannot thrive.

Frosted Birches Glen Affric

Still regarded by many as an invasive ‘weed’, birches are pioneers of the wildwood. Mature birch forest is a biological powerhouse, a carbon store, a source of fuel, a larder, and a natural workout zone.

 Kamikaze Caper

While most individuals are very shy, ‘rogue’ birds appear every so often that are actively aggressive towards anything - people, dogs, horses or Landrovers - that comes into their territory. No one really knows why these testosterone-fuelled males behave this way, but when one flies towards you at head height, it is time to retreat.

Caledonia

What a mark of progress it would be if we came to value landscapes like this as much as we do economic growth, and that they didn’t always come off second best when the chips are down.