Scotland Removed 96% of the Deer — What the Forest Did Next Was Insane

In the year 2018, four organizations in Scotland made one of the most remarkable public commitments in the history of European conservation. They promised to restore 60,000 hectares of highland landscape on a timeline that stretches to the year 2216 – 200 years, 8 generations. A forest project that begins now and will keep unfolding long after every person who When scientists first studied the early evidence, they expected modest results – a few more pine seedlings, a slight bump in songbird counts. But when ecologists returned with 30 years of data from the Cairngorms, they found something that quietly stunned the British conservation community. Native woodland was expanding, without fences, without large-scale planting, and across an area three times the size of Glasgow. How did a handful of people, working with no apex predator and almost no ploughing, do what decades of expensive forestry schemes across the United Kingdom had failed to do? The answer is one of the most hopeful stories in modern conservation. And it begins with a question most short-term societies are afraid to ask. What would you do if you knew you would never see the results? This is the story of Cairngorms Connect. The largest contiguous habitat restoration project in Britain. A 200-year vision unfolding in a country that, for most of the last three centuries, had lost much of its native woodland and is now slowly, deliberately, choosing to bring it back. A wet desert. Centuries ago, the Caledonian pine forest covered vast stretches of the Scottish Highlands. Bog and birch wove through the glens. Red deer moved in smaller herds, balanced by wolves and lynx. Beavers shaped the rivers. Capuchyle, the largest grouse in the world, drummed in the understory at dawn. Then came centuries of timber extraction, then sheep, then deer for sport. The wolves were gone by the late 1700s. The lynx had been gone longer, possibly for a thousand years. The beavers were hunted out by the 16th century. In the 1700s and 1800s, the highland clearances reshaped the human landscape too. Tenant farmers and crofters were moved out of the glens. By the time the Scottish ecologist Frank Fraser Darling wrote in the mid-20th century, he described much of the highlands as a wet desert. The Caledonian pine forest, by the early 2000s, occupied roughly 1% of its original range. And this raises one of the most fascinating questions in modern restoration. Each generation accepts the depleted nature it inherits as normal. So when we say we are restoring something, which century do we choose? There is no perfect answer. But for the people at Cairngorms Connect, the answer became clear once they started reading the soil and the seeds. The forest wanted to come back. It just needed permission. 500 deer in one glen. In 2004, something remarkable happened in a single glen. The estate was called Glenfeshie. The land had been overgrazed for generations. Pine seedlings could not survive past the first few centimeters before they were eaten. The vegetation was collapsing. In a single coordinated operation, Scotland's Deer Commission and the estate called over 500 red deer. It was, and remains, one of the most difficult interventions in the history of the project. Some called it slaughter, others called it the only way. The honest answer is that everyone involved knew it was hard, and they did it anyway because the alternative was watching the soil keep eroding off the hillsides. Then the trees began to come back. Within years, on land that had not regenerated naturally in living memory, Scots pine seedlings appeared on the hillsides. Birch, Rowan, Aspen. The science later confirmed what people on the ground were already seeing. According to research published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Gullet and colleagues in 2023, deer densities in the Glenfeshie area fell from over 35 animals per square kilometer in 2000 to between 2 and 5 per square kilometer by 2021. On the neighboring RSPB land at Abernethy, the numbers were even more dramatic. 45 deer per square kilometer in 2003, falling to 1.9 per square kilometer by 2020. A reduction of roughly 96%. And the damage to tree seedlings, which the researchers tracked year by year, halved in a single season. From 7% in 2019 to 4% in 2020, Glenfeshie became the proof of concept, the pattern other estates would follow, the foundation of what would later become Cairngorms Connect. A promise no one will see fulfilled. And this is where the story becomes truly interesting. In 2014, four partners formalized that pattern into a coordinated landscape, Forestry and Land Scotland, RSPB Scotland, NatureScot, and Wildland Limited, a private estate company that had already been quietly leading the way at Glenfeshie. Together, they controlled 60,000 contiguous hectares. In 2018, they went public with a single, audacious commitment. They would restore this entire landscape across a 200-year horizon. Why 200 years? Not 50? Not 500? The number was not chosen for politics, or symbolism, or funding cycles. It was chosen for biology. A native Scots pine takes roughly 200 years to reach old growth structure. Blanket bog accumulates at the rate of about 1 mm per year. Montane scrub, the high-altitude shrub layer that has almost disappeared in Britain, may require centuries to re-establish. As one of the project's artists-in-residence, Elizabeth Reeder, put it, 200 years is longer than most future planning scales, but it is small in ecological terms. The project's published milestones now stretch to 2045, 2065, and 2216. There is something profoundly humble in this. The people designing the project know they will not see it finished. They are not trying to. They are simply doing the part that has to begin now, so that something can be ready for the people who come after. How do you govern a project across eight generations, in a country where most political cycles last four or five years? Nobody fully knows yet. That is part of what makes the project a kind of experiment in long-term thinking itself. They decided not to plant. What makes the Cairngorms' approach so unusual is that they decided, almost from the start, not to plant. Most large-scale UK forestry restoration relies on tree planting. Seedlings raised in nurseries, driven to site, hammered into the ground inside plastic tubes protected by miles of deer fencing. Cairngorms Connect chose a different path. Their principle was simple. If deer pressure was reduced sufficiently, the native trees were still there in the seed bank and they would return on their own. From the existing seed sources. Without fences. Without nurseries dictating species. Without the visual evidence that humans had been there at all. The Gullet Study of 2023 is the scientific anchor for that choice. 30 years of field data across the four partner landholdings showing native woodland expanding almost entirely through natural regeneration. The authors wrote that the data showed a consistent, large-scale expansion of native woodland without the use of fences and with minimal planting. By 2022, the project reported 1,132 hectares of new woodland. Nearly 3,000 hectares of non-native conifer plantation removed. Over 500 hectares of peatland restored. So if you have to manage the deer so carefully to enable natural regeneration, is what you are doing still natural? It is a fair question. The honest answer from the project itself is that they prefer the term ecological restoration. They are restoring the conditions under which nature can do what nature does. The trees. The soil. The water. The species. They take care of the rest. The gamekeeper who spent 43 years. Now this kind of work is not without tensions. And the most honest version of the story has to include them. Scotland has somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million wild deer, according to NatureScot. The official recorded annual cull exceeds 100,000 animals. NatureScot has estimated that 50,000 additional deer must be culled each year to meet the country's biodiversity targets. For estate workers whose livelihoods depend on stalking, this is a real concern. The Scottish Gamekeepers Association has expressed worry about the pace of culls. Their vice-chairman, Peter Fraser, who spent 43 years on Invercord Estate, has said that the rate of change is reshaping traditional estate economies. Those concerns are valid and they are part of what makes long-term landscape restoration genuinely hard. And there are voices on the other side too. The conservation watchdog Parks Watch Scotland has argued the targets should be even lower. The evidence from Glenn Fesche and Mar Lodge suggests woodland regeneration sometimes requires densities as low as two to three deer per square kilometre. In ecosystems like Yellowstone, this kind of regulation happens naturally through wolves. In the Cairngorms today, it happens through skilled stalkers working under careful management plans. Is that a workaround or simply the version of restoration that fits the country? Scotland is now. That is one of the most interesting questions in modern conservation. And different ecologists give different answers. What everyone agrees on is that the forest is coming back. The Danish billionaire owns half the project. There is another part of the story worth telling honestly. It has to do with who owns this land. Anders Håk Povilsen, the Danish billionaire who controls the brand Bestseller, began buying Scottish land in 2006. By the mid-2020s, his wildland limited held roughly 220,000 acres across Scotland, making him the largest private landowner in the United Kingdom. Of the 60,000 hectares inside Cairngorms Connect, more than 31,500 are his. Over half of the project area is privately owned. This raises a question that Scotland is actively having. Should so much restoration depend on private wealth? It is a real conversation and it is part of why land reform is being debated in Scotland right now. But it is worth noting what observers across the political spectrum have acknowledged. Wildland's aggressive deer reductions on Glenfeshy produced the very evidence that made the rest of the partnership possible. Even some land reform critics, including the writer Eilidh Robb at Tortoise Media, have described Povilsen's record as one good example among many bad ones. The land reform scholar Magnus Davidsson has reminded us that the highlands are not a land that is empty, but emptied. Not wild, but cleared. Which is why projects like Cairngorms Connect are starting to think more carefully about communities too. Tree nurseries that double as community spaces, local volunteer programs, artists in residence engaging with cultural memory. The land is healing. The bigger question of who it belongs to is still being worked out. And that is okay. Some questions take generations to answer. No wolves, no lynx, one grouse left. What about the missing pieces of the ecosystem? The wolves are not on the table for reintroduction in Scotland. The Eurasian lynx, which last lived in Scotland over a thousand years ago, is the most discussed candidate. Research from the Lynx to Scotland project suggests the highlands could support roughly 400 wild lynx. In February of 2025, First Minister John Swinney addressed the National Farmers Union Scotland conference and made clear that lynx reintroduction is not currently on his government's agenda. The conversation is ongoing, with the Scottish Greens proposing legislative amendments, and most ecologists believe it is a question of when, not if. In the meantime, something else is happening that is quietly extraordinary. Beavers were reintroduced to the Cairngorms in December of 2023 after a 400-year absence. They are already shaping the rivers again. The first ripple of a much larger story. And then there is the Kappa Kaili. The largest grouse in the world. A bird so dependent on mature pinewood that it serves almost as a living indicator of forest health. The NatureScot survey of 2021-2022 estimated only around 532 birds remaining in the United Kingdom. 85% live inside the Cairngorms National Park. This is the urgent part of the project. The forest is being built for the long horizon, but the Kappa Kaili needs help now. Targeted habitat work, predator diversion experiments, fence collision reductions of around 80% on some sites. The race is real, and the people working on it have not given up. There is one more uncertainty, and in some ways it is the most fascinating. The ecosystem. Cairngorms Connect is restoring is broadly the one that existed in the Scottish Highlands 4,000-8,000 years ago. A boreal oceanic pine forest adapted to cool, wet, relatively stable conditions. But the Cairngorms sit at the southern edge of that boreal range. Climate projections suggest that by the year 2216, the region may be warmer and wetter than it is today. Does the target need to change? This is one of the most interesting open questions in long-term restoration anywhere in the world. Based on what we know, the partnership is not promising. The year 2216 will produce the exact forest of 8,000 BCE. They are promising it will produce a forest. One that by then has been free to adapt. A living system, not a museum exhibit. That is, perhaps, the wisest thing about the whole project. The trees are already growing. So what does Cairngorms Connect actually amount to? 60,000 hectares of Highland Scotland under coordinated restoration. Over 1,000 hectares of new native woodland regenerated naturally. Hundreds of hectares of peatland restored. Sequestering carbon at a rate the Cairngorms National Park Authority estimates at between 2 and 14 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per hectare per year. Red deer reduced by more than 90% in some areas. Beavers reintroduced after a 400-year absence. Over 5,000 species recorded inside the project area, around 20% of them nationally, rare or scarce. And a public commitment that runs to the year 2216. There are critics. The ecologist James Fenton has argued that Scotland's open moorland may itself be a kind of natural climax community. Most of the scientific consensus disagrees, but the question is part of what keeps the field thoughtful. What can be said with confidence is this. Cairngorms Connect is the largest contiguous habitat restoration project in Britain. It is doing something that most short-term policy cycles are structurally unable to do. It is making a promise across eight generations in a society that rarely plans past the next election. That, in itself, is a kind of quiet revolution. In 2004, a single deer cull at Glenfeshy killed over 500 animals. Two decades later, the woodland on that hillside has come back. The seedlings are there. The bird counts are rising. The peat is being re-wetted. In 2018, four organizations in Scotland made a public promise that no one alive today will ever see fulfilled. And we think that is one of the most beautiful things happening in modern conservation. Eight generations, 60,000 hectares. A forest that begins now and ends long after every person who signed the founding documents is gone. So we will leave you with one last question. What does it mean to plant a forest you will never walk through? Cairngorms Connect is doing it anyway, and the trees are already growing. But Scotland is not the only place where one human decision is reshaping a forest. In our next video, we travel to Poland, to Bialowieza, the last primary forest of continental Europe, where no one has planted a tree in thousands of years. Where the European bison was brought back from just 54 individuals in captivity. And where a government has, just recently, declared war on the very idea of leaving a forest alone. If 200 years of Scottish patience sounds bold, wait until you hear what a thousand years of doing nothing did to a forest almost no one has ever seen. Before you go, which question in this video made you pause the most? Tell us in the comments. Tell us where you are watching from. And if you know another story like this one, share it. Subscribe to Make Tech Future. The Highlands have 200 years of work ahead. We have a few minutes to see how it begins.