Capercaillie Breaking-Point

I’ve been back and forth to Strathspey over the last few weeks. As part of an unexpected commission, I’ve been asked to pull together videos and interviews with a range of gamekeepers and estate managers on the subject of capercaillie conservation.

It’s not the first time I’ve stared into this particular can of worms; I’ve worked with capercaillie before, but I’ve often found it hard to invest myself in their cause. I’m a lowlander, and it’s unlikely that capercaillie have been living wild on the hills of my home for many centuries. When I go to spend time around these birds, I’m filled with delight and fascination. They’re extraordinary creatures; I love them, and I’m proud to have spent more time in their company than almost anyone else I know, but they’re not mine in any sense that I would recognise black grouse – they’re not speaking my language as a curlew does. Capercaillie belong to a distant world that I hardly understand, and they reinforce a sense of Scotland in all its crazy, unintelligible diversity. The nearest capercaillie to my desk in Galloway is more than four hours away by car; that’s not far in global terms, but it’s a transformational distance in a nation where two sides of the same hill can be unrecognisable. 

Capercaillie conservation is famously controversial, but while I have clear views on many of the issues involved, I tend to stay out of the arguments. I don’t feel entitled to contribute, and my heart goes out to the handful of people who really understand these birds. Their area of expertise has become a battlefield where conflicting interests clash and squabble over points of ideological difference. It doesn’t help that capercaillie are associated with “ancient Caledonian pine forests”, an ecosystem that is often touted as the original condition of Scotland from which all modern habitats are a deviation. There’s a clear sense in some quarters that these birds stand beyond conservation norms; that we shouldn’t meddle in the old pine forests. But others espouse a contrary sense that we’ve always meddled in the old pine forests, and that without proactive help, we’ll quickly lose the species altogether. This basic dichotomy divides modern rewilding from traditional conservation, and it’s clear that capercaillie are a specific flashpoint in this respect.

Over the last forty years, pine martens have become a significant predator of capercaillie in Scotland. That’s only natural, but with birds on the back foot and martens expanding and consolidating their gains across the country, it’s hard to find a sense of balance. A recent report commissioned by the Scottish Government found that “predation is a significant contributor to variation in breeding success. Increases in some nest predators (notably the pine marten) in recent years are likely to be contributing to the decline in capercaillie breeding success and hence population size”. That’s nothing like a footnote from some obscure appendix in the report; it’s two elided bulletpoints from an executive summary. In the actual report, these words are published in BOLD text. It means that pine martens have been identified as a major driver of capercaillie decline, full stop.

For many gamekeepers and land managers, this document has been a long time coming. They’ve been saying that pine martens are an issue for years, but their voices have been ignored. As one extremely authoritative gamekeeper told me last week, scientists refused to accept his observations in the 1980s because they were not supported by any hard data. This man has been heavily involved in gathering that data for several decades. The Scottish Government’s report finally confirms that he was right to have concerns, and it’s only fair that he should feel a sense of vindication. As he said himself, “I only wish it hadn’t been my life’s work to prove it”.

Here’s where I feel slightly entitled to dip my toe in the issue, because I recognise that challenge from my own work with wading birds. I’ve been told that there is no data to prove that badgers are an issue for lapwings. My response has been to gather that data. In some ways, that’s a progressive piece of dialogue, but it only works if there’s trust on both sides. I have to believe that if I am proved right, things stand a chance of changing. In the same way, now it’s become clear that pine martens are contributing to the decline of capercaillie, conservation organisations have a responsibility to act. But there’s an emerging sense that they won’t; already the goalposts are being moved, and there is more talk about genetic viability of remaining capercaillie stocks, climate change and recreational disturbance.

Of course there is a storm of resistance to any proposal that martens should be culled to protect capercaillie. The predators have the same level of legal protection as their prey, and any move to manage their dynamic would require a change in the law. In certain ecological quarters, this idea goes down like a lead balloon. In fact, it seems like some people are so wedded to the purity of the Caledonian ideal that they are able to accept the loss of capercaillie in Scotland as a form of sad but inevitable wastage associated with habitat transition and climate change. In practical terms, it’s clear that any cull would have to be carefully targeted, selective and timed to achieve maximum clout. There’s no talk of anything like a national “open season” on pine martens, but some people already say killing even one of these predators under any circumstances would set an unacceptable precedent.

It doesn’t help that some of the people who do most for capercaillie are gamekeepers, and the birds themselves are grouse. Nobody has been shooting capercaillie for thirty years, but they’re technically gamebirds. I often get a sense that any final extinction of capercaillie would be a chance to stick the boot into the old guard; the bad guys in tweed – particularly since part of their solution endorses the repellent credo that conservation sometimes includes killing.

The Scottish Government’s report is crystal clear, but it’s clear there are dust-clouds of obfuscation gathering around the core issue of predator control. Several major stakeholders simply don’t want to face this truth. Instead, they persist with the impossibly naïve cliché that “nature will find a way”, while others are saying that control needn’t mean lethal control, and perhaps it’s possible to trap and relocate specific martens which pose problems. There are even those who wonder if it would be possible to implant martens with contraceptives to reduce their numbers, or teach them to feed from deer carcasses instead. I appreciate the sentiment here, but many of these suggestions stem from a sense that we need to exhaust every other option before we can begin to consider lethal control. Even if they do work, some of these methods may need to be trialled over several years before they can be rolled out. There’s a feeling that key decision-makers are playing for time, battling to postpone or subvert the final realisation that there is really only one way out of this situation. And while that truth is deliberately ducked and avoided, the capercaillie rolls steadily into oblivion. 

Another gamekeeper I met last week agreed that there might be value in some of these non-lethal ideas. He’s taking them seriously, but with the current population of capercaillie in Scotland reckoned to be as few as five hundred individuals living in the wild, now is not the time to start thinking up new solutions. He reasons that maybe when there’s five thousand capercaillie, we’ll have enough to play with. We can look at ways to find a better balance so that we aren’t  forced to manipulate this balance forever. I don’t think anybody I’ve spoken to really wants to kill pine martens, but with capercaillie on the final brink of extinction, this is not a normal situation. It’s clear that in this case, normal rules of engagement no longer apply. We act now, or we lose something very special.

I took the picture at the top of this article on Deeside under licence from SNH in April 2015. I took 37,000 photographs with that camera over four years, but this is hands-down the most monumental.