Hello everyone, it's Anthony Chadwick from the webinar vet welcoming you to another episode of that chat. I am super thrilled to have David Hetherington on as our guest today. I first met, David, on a webinar, not one of our own, but for another association that we're talking all about links.
David is the author of a beautiful book about links which I enjoyed. He even signed the copy for me. I gave it to my daughter as a present.
And it's a fabulous book all about the possibilities of introducing the links back into the UK. I'm gonna let David introduce himself with some more background of what you've been up to, with, I think your PhD was on the introduction of links into the UK. I know it's not happened, we'll no doubt get onto that later on, but David, first of all, thank you so much for coming on and, yeah, I'd love to hear a little intro from you.
Thanks, Antony, and, yeah, thanks very much for, for inviting me along. So, yeah, my, my day job is I work for the Cairngorms National Park Authority as their woodland adviser. Although, part of my time at the National Park, I sit on the project management group of the wildcat conservation project called Saving Wildcats.
So I, I, I am still, slightly involved in the animal side of things in my day job. I would say that, I sit on the board of the rewilding charity called Trees for Life, which has been active in the highlands for the last 30 years or so, mainly, as the name would suggest in woodland expansion, but in creation, tree planting activities, although in the last few years, they've started to move much more into the animal side of things as well and have been involved, for example, in red squirrel, the introductions on the west coast of Scotland. And they've been involved in discussions about the reintroductions as well.
And then as you suggest, Anthony, my, in my spare time, I'm also quite involved in promoting what I would regard as kind of fact-based discussions about, the subject of, links for introduction and the potential for restoring links, to the UK, particularly here in Scotland. And I did my PhD at the University of Aberdeen a number of years ago, and now looking at the, the feasibility of links reintroduction in Scotland. And I've, I guess I continue to, to sort of, get involved in that discussion.
I, I kind of built up a network of contacts right across Europe, where I think it's been really important to look at how links interact with people and their, economic activities and, and indeed other wildlife across similarly, human modified landscapes. And that allowed me to publish the book The Links and Us, more recently with a very talented French photographer called Laurent Gin. It was a real honour to work with him because he's got a fantastic portfolio of images of wild links from the mountains of Switzerland.
So a combination of my words and his photographs, and some really nice production from the publishers as a result of them. I hope it's a really nice but informative. And balanced book.
So that's, that's what I do in a nutshell, if I could sum it up rather crudely, it's trees and cats, David, and, and the book, as I mentioned was fabulous, and I, I unashamedly feel happy to plug it for any of the vets or, or, or nurses or anybody listening in. It is a very, very worthwhile early Christmas present, planning early in April for Christmas or a birthday as I did for my daughter. And I know, David, we'll, we'll get a link on the end so people can actually click on.
To wherever so that they can, they can buy a coffee and you may even sign a few. Would you sign a few for us if people came forward and wanted to buy the book? Yeah, yeah, they can, they can buy the book online or they can get in contact with me either on LinkedIn, send me a message on that or they can drop me an email and I'll be happy to sort out personalised copies, signed copies for the same price as they're available online.
So yeah, that's all doable. That's brilliant. I, I think the book is really interesting because obviously, you know, as part of rewilding whether bringing beaver back into the country, as has already happened, some sort of slightly illegally, most of them on licence.
Or bringing the lynx in, there's always two sides to every story. I, I know the white-tailed sea eagles, some people would see them as I would a beautiful bird of prey. Other people see them as, you know, obviously killing livestock, and.
It's, it's getting that story that there are obviously always some disadvantages, but there's lots of advantages as well. I think that's really what the book was showing. I was particularly fascinated by the mention of, you know, how, how many sheep they kill, that's obviously a really significant thing for for farmers to consider.
And in fact one of the main countries where the sheep kill was quite high was Norway because of course the sheep live in the forest there, don't they? Because lynx are really . An animal that catches its prey in, in wooded areas, isn't it, rather than on farmland.
Yeah, they're an ambush hunter, and so they need cover to launch a surprise attack, so they need to get close enough, and the whole thing needs to be over in a matter of metres and a matter of seconds. And what I've found is, you know, people are not familiar with the links, and why on earth should they be used as an animal that hasn't lived in this country for centuries. It's got a pretty low cultural profile, you know, we, we all know about, you know, the big bad wolf in it, you know, dressed up as your granny and all this sort of stuff, and then they've got the three bears get a bit grumpy about porridge and, but we've got no cultural references to, to links, you know, no morality tales, fairy tales that are very rarely depicted on TV.
And so people plug the knowledge gaps with assumptions. And because lynx and wolves are frequently talked about in the same sentence, particularly when it comes to, you know, the discussions of rewilding and reintroductions, people, I think, start to describe how they think a lynx behaves and what they're inadvertently describing is a wolf or perhaps even a, a, a fox. And of course, lynx and wolves are very different animals.
Ecologically, they're different behaviorally, they're different. The relationship with people is very different. And so people just assume that, well, why on earth is a lynx going to go and chase a fast deer when they can just chase a slow stupid sheep.
And they'll just assume that the minute they're they're carted into this country, they'll run around ripping up sheep flocks. And of course, there's an element of, of truth to this. There is a risk to some sheep that lynx can, can kill them, and it does happen.
I know, let's not beat around the bush. Lynx can kill sheep. They do do it, and it would almost certainly happen here.
But to suggest that they would completely ignore the wild play and go after nothing but sheep, of course, is, is very far from the truth, as well. Of course things like this are really quite nuanced. And of course, these days discussions tend not to be very nuanced.
They're quickly quite, polarised and oversimplified. So the relationship between lynx and sheep is not a straightforward one. There is not a single relationship between lynx and sheep.
There are several different types of relationship between lynx and sheep and so much depends on, how we raise sheep in the landscape. So, for example, in Romania, Where people have always lived alongside large carnivores, lynx, wolves, bears, the shepherds there have never lost the ability to live alongside them. And it's all about really quite intensive shepherding.
And it's largely the wolves and the bears that people are worried about. But of course, the steps they take to protect their sheep from wolves and bears means that there's hardly any losses at all, to link. So there's 24/7 shepherding, there's the protection with livestock guarding dogs, there's corralling the sheep at nighttime.
So we used to do that sort of stuff here and in other parts of Western Europe, but of course, it's incredibly labour intensive. And, and as soon as we got rid of the large carnivores, we got rid of that, type of shepherding. So then, when you get to Western Europe where we lost the large carnivores, we gave up on that, and everything was fine.
We could be lazy if you like, you know, we didn't have to worry about our livestock. We put them out in the pasture and we'll keep an eye on them every few weeks or so. Nothing much bad is going to happen to them.
But then, of course, in more, more recent times, as we, we got our, our society value. Changed. We became more environmentally minded.
We began to understand ecosystems and ecology. We started to want to bring large carnivores back either actively picking up links from Eastern Europe and moving them back into Western Europe or things like wolves are just perfectly capable of picking themselves up and moving, you know, hundreds of miles to the west. Now that's happened with wolves, but links have had to be reintroduced and they're then being reintroduced into landscapes where we've given up on the intensive shepherding.
And and so places like France and Switzerland, what you'll find is that sheep killing does happen, but actually, it's a very small minority of the lynx population that actually does that. The vast majority of lynx are not interested in sheep, and, and their, their, predation is very focused on the wild stuff, particularly raw deer. That's the number one pre-animal, for, for lynx.
And then you, you get this third scenario. Which is, in Norway, as you've suggested, where they've got rid of all the livestock, guarding measures, the intensive stuff, because they got rid of the lynx, the wolf and the bear pretty much over most of, of Norway, and yet the, the large predators are now coming back. But crucially, from Li's point of view, the major difference between Norway and indeed everywhere else, including the major difference between them and Sweden right next door, is that they're grazing their sheep in the woodland.
There's 2.5 million sheep being grazed in basically lynx-infested ambush cover. What could possibly go wrong?
And so it's not just lynx, it's wolves, it's bears, it's wolverines, it's foxes, it's eagles, golden eagles are all preying on sheep to varying extents. And so there's a much bigger issue, with lynx predation of sheep in that landscape because they're much more likely to be interfacing. When sheep are grazing in an open pasture like they are in France or Switzerland.
Then there's very little interaction between the two, but you've put the sheep into the woodland where the links are. And I should say that deer densities in Norway are pretty low, far lower than we've got here in Scotland. And again, the science tells us that in Norway, where you've got high deer densities of 4 per square kilometre or more, then even if you've got a lot of sheep and links together in the woods.
You, you, the amount of, of sheep that are taken, I drops off dramatically. And I should say 4 per square kilometre in Scotland is a vanishingly low deer density. So that's kind of reassuring that even if we did graze, huge numbers of sheep in the woodlands, which we don't hear in Scotland, we nevertheless have an awful lot of deer, which is the thing that the, the lynx are really interested in.
So, and of course, the, the, the, the tractors about the idea of links immediately make comparisons with the worst case scenario, which is Norway. So, and the spotlight goes on, or see, this is what happens in Norway, if you release them here in Scotland, we would have the same problem. But actually, not sort of having links in the country or or wolves means that we have no the, the, the, the apex predator if you like, is ourselves.
And deer are a huge problem, aren't they? Deer will obviously destroy trees. Having said that, sheep, you know, obviously graze so intensively that they don't encourage biodiversity either, so we end up with a lot of national parks that are pretty to look at, but actually those rolling hills are very sort of monocultural and, you know, wildfire meadows are are massively down since the Second World War.
They seem to be. Bit of a resurgence in the last couple of years, but obviously if you have sheep on those areas, they'll they'll never really develop, will they? Yeah, I mean, we do have a lot of sheep in the UK for sure, far more than any other country in Europe.
And so, and that's something we do need to think about if we're going to talk about bringing back large carnivores. Some parts of the UK have way more sheep than other parts of the UK, and the highlands, well, you will certainly see sheep around, have much lower densities of sheep than, for example, the southern uplands of Scotland or indeed the mountains of Wales or some of the upland areas of northern England. So yeah, there are a lot of sheep around, but like I say, the evidence from, from Europe would suggest that where those sheep are grazing in open habitats, the risk, of lys predation is pretty low.
The vast majority of woodlands, for example, in Scotland don't contain sheep and. The vast majority of our sheep are not in woodlands. So yeah, there, there's a pretty low risk.
I mean, it's certainly where I'm, here in the Cairngorms, yes, we do have sheep in the hills. They're largely being grazed in, in much of the uplands in the Cairngorms, really, as a tick management tool for the grouse shooting industry. But we also do have quite a, a number of deer.
And even within the national park, we've got huge variation and exactly, you know, in densities and some bits of the park have got very few, red deer, for example. Other parts have got very high densities of red deer. So, it's quite a, a variable picture.
But yeah, sheep is, is, sheep grazing pressures can be, an issue in terms of preventing tree regeneration. And of course, increasingly, as part of government policies, etc. To address the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis, we're looking at woodland expansion, and, deer are in some ways, a pretty significant constraint.
And yeah, you, you mentioned deer can be problematic, you know, and for many people, they do see deer as a problem. Foresters, for example, might see deer as a problem, or, or at least some foresters. Other people, will value deer a great deal and see them as a valuable resource, part of their, their, their business, deer stocking commercially.
So not everybody will be, have the same opinion on deer, but I think it, it is going to be increasingly challenging, I think, to expand woodland to meet the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis or even. The, the timber industry's demands, you know, we, we need a lot of wood. We're a major importer of wood from abroad.
And is not right, should we be, you know, perhaps using more homegrown timber? Well, you know, deer can inflict serious, costs, both in terms of the, you know, the need to fence them out. That's expensive.
They need to pay people to shoot them, the damage to the actual timber crop itself. And perhaps having a year-round predator of deer in the woodlands might be a useful tool in the toolbox, for woodland deer management. And indeed, obviously having come out of Europe or the EU .
The cap policy was very much often around, you know, subsidy was based on the number of the number of sheep that you had on your farm, whereas now we're being encouraged more to go down that stewardship role of putting aside land for biodiversity for nature and things. And Having said that as well, links need quite a lot of space, don't they, to, to actually begin to create a viable population of lynx, because if you just put one or two links in, obviously you'll end up getting, too much into breeding and so on. So, is the Cairngorms big enough to, to have a, a sustainable population of lynx within it?
In isolation, no, they're not. I mean, despite being the UK's largest national park by quite some distance, it's twice as big as the next biggest one, which is the Lake District National Park. It covers 6% of Scotland, third largest national park in Europe.
It's too small to host by itself a viable lynx population. And as you say, links, require huge areas that are kind of order of magnitude, and perhaps even two orders of magnitude bigger in the amount of land that a single links needs for its home range. They're solitary animals, they're territorial, and there's, you know, gender is something that drives a whole range size.
So males have, even bigger territory sizes than the females, and they will exclude other males from their, their territories or home ranges, but they may well encompass two or three female home ranges within them. So the animals like say a solitary, but when it comes to the breeding season, obviously, then they'll get together for a couple of days. If they can find each other in that big landscape.
The other determinant on the size of home range and therefore, the density of links in the landscape is the availability of prey. So if you've got links living in an environment where there are very few gear and very little other food around, then the whole ranges can be enormous. So there was one male lynx in Norway and northern Scandinavia has got pretty low environmental productivity because it, you know, there's less solar radiation, that's switch to the growth, etc.
Then there are fewer deer around and one male link was found to be patrolling an area of over 4000 square kilometres. Which I think is probably the biggest home range reported for wild feeded anywhere on Earth. And that's getting on to the size of the Cairngorms National Park, one single link.
But if you go further south into more productive areas like say Switzerland, then you'll find that maybe a male home range might be 200 square kilometres, a females perhaps maybe 100 square kilometres, that sort of idea. But still, this is way lower density than things like foxes or wildcats or pine martens. So they really are rattling around in the, in the, in the landscape.
You're never going to be tripping over, loads of links. So in order to have a viable population. In somewhere like the caring grants would actually have to be part of a much bigger population that ranged across the wider Scottish Highlands.
And my PhD research from a number of years ago showed that based on the availability of suitable, well connected habitat and the prey densities within that habitat, the Highlands could probably support something like 400 links, and you probably need something like 200 links for long term viability. No, that's fascinating and, and obviously, You know, going back and looking at the trees for life and so on, you, you almost need to. As you say, connect those various areas with trees and so on to allow the links to, to be able to move sort of privately around the landscape as well.
Yeah, I, I think as, as we expand woodland, and, and woodland is definitely expanding here, both in the Cairngorms, and nationally, we're seeing more and more woodland that's undoubtedly going to make more of the landscape, suitable for lens. And of course, the woodland deer will follow in hot on the heels of the trees, of course. So all the ingredients are going to be there for lengths, which isn't to say that, you know, that links tremble with fear the minute they get to the edge of the woodland and look out at that, that wide open landscape.
They, they will use, open landscapes as well, but they just spend far less time in it. They generally are using open landscapes as the cross between areas of woodland. And so having more woodland cover, particularly in a way that strengthens the forest habitat network across the country, I think will make things, better and better for lynx in the long term.
And like I say, there's going to be plenty of deer living in those landscapes in due course as well. Once, once the trees have grown up and things that deer fences come down, then deer will take advantage of that new habitat. And of course we, we probably have an obligation where one of the least wooded countries in Europe, I think we may be the the least wooded country in countries in Europe.
So, so there's a responsibility there and of course this will also help with our, our carbon targets as well, won't it, as we, we're, we're planting more trees, although obviously it takes some time for that carbon to be sequestered, doesn't it? Yeah, it's quite a complex subject, you know, woodland creation for carbon. And, and I think it's, it, it's too easy to, to kind of simplify and say, hey, planting a tree is great for carbon.
Well, it depends. It depends on the tree. It depends how you grow it and, and, and exactly what type of soil it's growing on.
If we're, if we're planting trees. On very carbon-rich soils, with lots of invasive ground preparation methods, you're ploughing things over, over, you know, excavating things with a digger and disturbing the soil and then hack it in this tree, which grows really quickly and, and, and in theory, will sequester carbon annually, although it may well take quite a few years before you undo the damage, that you've done with the soil. Then if you're then going to cut it down again, and sort of 30 years later, and then that timber product gets used for something.
Well, for say biomass, or it gets used for a wood product that has a short lifespan such as a pallet, then you've not necessarily captured a great deal of carbon. Obviously, if you're planting it in a sensitive way or, or even better, allowing natural regeneration to ensure that nature is putting the right tree in the right place and it's allowed to grow for a long time and sequester a lot of carbon, or if it is cut down used for timber it's perhaps using construction, where it's going to have a long lifespan, and yeah, it can be really great for carbon. But you know, woodland expansion for me is not all about carbon.
It's about all the other things that, that woodland gives us, and we know that certainly here in the Cairngorms, woodland is disproportionately significant for biodiversity. We know it punches well above its weight, in terms of delivering for biodiversity. And whilst we live in a climate emergency, we also have a biodiversity crisis.
It's also woodland is, is somewhere that we like to spend our time. It's part of the green gym. It's, it's a sort of soothing landscape for many people that we can.
Recreating, it contributes to the landscape and of course, it provides us with a range of products from timbers, you know, to berries to mushrooms. So there's all sorts of reasons why we need to look at woodland. It's kind of horses for courses, I suppose.
But here in the Cairngorms, we're really keen to see woodland delivering on as many fronts as we can and actually native woodland, we're an unusual part of the UK or certainly an unusual part of Scotland. We're the only area where the majority of the woodland resources actually made up of native trees. 6 spruce, for example, is relatively scarce in this part of Scotland, certainly compared to other parts.
And we do have commercial forestry, and it has to a large extent utilised the native Scots pine and it, and that, so the culture that use of Scots paint for timber has actually does create quite a nature friendly environment. So it's a double win there. And we do wish to see more woodland in the national park.
So going forward, the landscapes are going to be changing quite a bit and they're already quite dynamic change going on in the park as people respond to the various, emergencies and crises, but also, of course, respond to the various government policies and the various financial mechanisms that can help pay for that. And, and the carbon market is a, is a major driver for that, it would seem these days. Yeah, and of course when you look at Sitka spruce, it's, it's a more sterile environment, isn't it, because the, the native animals aren't there anymore because the native animals for Sitka spruce are somewhere else and, and our own animals don't seem to come into us.
I suppose that's also what you were saying about putting the right trees in the right places as well. Yeah, I mean, sick spruce, I guess, are not as biodiverse as some other types of woodland, and partly it's, it's to do with the fact that it's not a native tree. It's native to North America.
And as you suggest, a lot of the species associations that would normally have in North America won't exist here. And, but it's also got a lot to do with the way it's grown. It's, it's atypically grown, as a bit of a monoculture, very tightly packed, in rows, and it, it, once it grows up, it can create a very dense, sorry, dense and dark understory, which makes it really difficult for, for plants and other species to exist, which isn't to say it's a complete desert.
There are certainly species that benefited from, from sickusspruce and that will live quite happily in there. Some fairly generalist woodland species will take advantage and we've, you know, loads of woodland bird species will live in a, in amongst the sita spruce environment. But it's also grown in such a way that it's, a very mixed, aged landscape, not necessarily within a particular stand of trees.
It will be quite even aged. But you'll find that there's a patch or a, or a compartment of mature trees right next to an area that's been recently felled. So it's, it's quite open and grassy.
And there'll be another compartment nearby which where you've got young trees where the grass has come up quite a bit. So you do find this, spatial variation. In, in, in the growth stage of the, the sitka, and that can brings about different ecological conditions that favour different species.
And we know, for example, in, in young sitarus, when the trees are still only a few metres tall, that raw deer numbers can be really high in there. And so despite being a bit of a monoculture of North American trees, the deer will take advantage of it and therefore, any reintroduced lynx population will quite happily move into the North American trees and take out whatever deer are there. Some of them could be Japanese, of course.
So that lynx are not fussy about nativeness. They don't really care if it's dripping with rich fungi and lichens. They're looking for protein and they need to cover to launch a surprise attack.
So they're not particularly fussy in that regard. You were talking before about obviously having native trees coming in the right place. Do you think there is within this regeneration and this reforesting agenda, is it important that we, we let nature take its course like has happened at NEP, or do you think we need to manage things and, and be really involved in the process?
What, how does that fit in? Should there be a bit of a mixture of both, or, or what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, it's probably horses for courses.
I think in landscapes where there's already woodland, and there's quite a different, you know, there's an array of different species that you've got a seed source, then I think we should be looking, to expand woodland through natural regeneration, you know, why not? Then it could probably be done. In a very competitive way, and I mean, financially competitive way from doing, you know, planting and, and, and fencing, which is, you know, deer fencing is used a great deal to protect young woodlands here, and that's incredibly expensive.
And there are sustainability issues about using metal fencing and it getting carried in by helicopter or whatever it is, you know. That will all have a carbon footprint as well. Whereas, you know, nature could be doing all this for nothing.
We, we don't have to go and buy plants from a nursery and then pay somebody go and put them in the ground. Nature does that for nothing. But of course, critically, we need to make sure that the grazing pressures, will allow natural regeneration to happen.
And of course, in some places we've either got livestock, or we've got deer pressures that are too high to allow that. So, I mean, I think here in the National Park, we see there's probably a place for different methods according to the particular local circumstances, but I think we would like to see more natural regeneration, taking place because I think we see lots of benefits to that. But equally, there may well be some tree species that are not well represented in the current seed source or or tree species that don't necessarily regenerate all that well.
And we might need to spread them around a little bit. We know, for example, the aspen trees are really good for biodiversity, but they tend not to, to set seed terribly well, and we might need to create strategic seed sources of them, plant them around in among some of the regenerating, you know, pines and birches that we can see much more commonly, and, you know, just, you know, kickstart things a little bit. But it is worth saying that the amount of natural regeneration we've got going here in the Cairngorms is, is quite impressive to see.
We've got a number of states, particularly in the core of the national park. That have decided to expand their remnant native woodlands by controlling deer, rather than using planting and fencing. And indeed, in the year between November 2019 and November 2020, Scottish Forestry, which was formerly Forestry Commission Scotland, approved something like 1400 hectares of new native woodland expansion by natural regeneration.
And to put that into some context, in the UK context, that's the same amount of woodland expansion that happened in 2019 by all methods, including planting for the whole of England. And this is what happened just by natural regeneration in one third of the Cairngorms National Park in a year. So there's a lot of it going on.
It's really impressive to see it and people who've been to some of these landscapes. Recently, but hadn't been there, you know, in the intervening, you know, 20 years, or blown away by the massive difference, in, in, in what's happening to the vegetation. And I, and I think that is going to bring all sorts of, biodiversity benefits because like I say, woodland punches well above its weight.
It's a minority habitat here in the Cairngorms. It's only about 15% of the park, and yet about 45% of the rare and endangered flora and fauna in the park are living in woodland. So we know it's important.
And of course, it can do all sorts of fantastic things like shading our rivers and water courses and keeping the temperature of the water down. And we know that rising water temperatures is a serious issue for a lot of aquatic life like salmon and freshwater pearl mussels. And so having nature-based solutions to climate change, such as, as woodland, I think it is something we need to be looking more and more at.
And just finally, I, I was reading with interest your latest LinkedIn post and as we mentioned before, David's always worth following on LinkedIn or or connecting with, particularly if you want one of his books. You, you spent several hours picking up plastic guards from, from trees which are not great from a biodiversity perspective, but also just stick around for so long, don't they, they. You, they don't decompose or anything.
No, they don't, and that was a byproduct of, of the, the pandemic and working from home and having to take local exercise every day for about half an hour just to keep myself ticking over. I was kind of walking the same route and progressively getting more and more fed up looking at the same tree tubes, essentially polluting this otherwise nice native woodland. And I think the woodland had probably been planted.
About 30 years ago, so that the tree tubes were still evident, you know, they were long past the sell-by date. They were no longer needed. These trees were bursting out of these things like, you know, the incredible Hulk, you know, bursting out and, and it's what a mess, you know, they, they were either still clinging to the trees or in some cases they were still in 11 piece and the the tree had long died or, or I think most of them were actually lying in the undergrowth.
You don't immediately see them until you start walking through the wood, you realise there's bits of plastic poking out everywhere. So I, I kind of dedicated about 10 to 15 minutes every day in my half an hour walk to picking these things up, and I would head back home with about a dozen of these things underneath my arm. And now my garden shed, it's pretty much the case that you open the door, they start start spilling out.
I've got loads of them. Now I should say I've done this with the permission of the local landowner who I think is maybe slightly abashed that he hasn't done anything about it for the last 20 years. He is now very grateful and we are between us, we are investigating what the options are to get these taken away and recycled, because I would, I'd be lost to see them go to a landfill site.
So it's great that they're no longer in the woodland, and, and I have to say it makes a big difference from a landscape point of view, a visual point of view that it looks a much more natural wood now. Fortunately, that type of tube isn't the type of plastic that disintegrates into microplastics, but there are certainly are other tubes around that if you, when you start breaking up, they disintegrate into little bits and that's much harder to get out of the environment because they're, they're fragmenting and going into the soil. And who knows to what effect that's going to have for the centuries to come.
I believe the National Trust are now creating or using biodegradable ones, so at least that seems to be a problem that . Is being sold, but as you say, so much nicer, don't use them in the first place, but watch out for the for the grazes in the area who are obviously causing the damage in the first place. Yeah, yeah.
No, we do have lots of grazers whether it's rabbits or hares or even voles, you know, it can have an impact as well. But, but deer is a big issue and much of the, the, the woodland creation here is on a pretty large scale. And so tubes are not actually used all that often.
The vast majority of the young planted trees in this part of the world are protected with fences rather than with tubes. But of course, that has its own visual impact and its own sustainability, issues, like I said. So, but yeah, here's hoping that some of these more biodegradable options work.
And of course, just because it works in the south of England doesn't necessarily mean they work in the Cairngorms where a, the weather is pretty horrendous at certain times of the year. And also the B, the trees grow much more slowly and we'll need the tube for longer. So we need to road test these things up here as well to see if they're just as effective as elsewhere.
Brilliant, David, that's been fantastic. It's been so interesting, chatting to you. We will leave a link at the bottom for your, LinkedIn or your email, and then if people do want to have a look at the book, and buy the book, then I would thoroughly recommend it.
Well, thank you very much. And thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate the fact.
