Embracing Wildness

Was the rogue release of four lynxes in the Cairngorms National Park actually a missed opportunity?

- Jim Crumley

CAST your mind back to the second week of January, when the provisional wing of the conservation movement in Scotland reminded the rest of us that progress towards meaningful wildness is stuck in the mud. The nudge in the ribs manifested itself in the form of four lynxes that turned up unannounced and uninvited in the Cairngorms National Park.

The conservation establishment seethed. The head of Edinburgh Zoo denounced "rogue wilders". The lynxes were trapped, destined for a future of a kind in Edinburgh Zoo, all except for one that died before, during or after the process of trapping.

If you delved too deeply into the priorities of the professional conservationists who denounced the release, you would find that it embraced "cross-sectoral stakeholder consultation" via a Lynx Focus Group that talks to "farmers, conservationists, gamekeepers, foresters, tourism operators and others" - which is why nothing gets done, which is why there are "rogue wilders".

Being neither an employee of a professional conservation organisation nor a gamekeeper nor a zookeeper, nor a farmer nor a forester, and not a rogue wilder either, but rather a writer with nature's interests at heart, I had good grounds to be seething too for the sheer wrong-headedness of the treatment of the lynxes.

The conservation establishment has a short memory; arguably a selective memory. It has either forgotten, or does not care to be reminded, that beaver reintroduction in Scotland has only prospered because the efforts of the provisional wing in the Tay catchment eclipsed the official trial in Argyll which was hesitant, hamstrung by bureaucracy, and plagued by problems of inbreeding because the beavers were all recruited from the same source. The Tay releases had no such worries and were apparently secured from a number of sources by people who know where to get stuff.