Birch woods spreading on Invermark Estate, Angus Glens

This birch woodland alongside the Tarf Water on Invermark estate in Glen Esk in the Angus Glens is regenerating nicely, producing a very natural woodland edge that will be good for black grouse and other wildlife.
This is not under any grant scheme. In 2005, several of the estates in the Angus Glens decided that they would fence out deer over a huge area to reduce ticks and hopefully rejuvenate their grouse moors. On the back of this, several of the riparian woodlands are obviously now spreading, taking advantage of the window of opportunity allowed by a reduction in overall grazing pressure to get away in a pulse like this.Native woodlands can expand quickly when suitable conditions arise for them. In this case, the motivation for a reduction in grazing was something else entirely, but this is the result. This just emphasizes the point that all land uses are inter-connected, and changes in policy in one area can have knock-on effects elsewhere. We are sometimes conditioned to thinking that changes in land practice produce negative results, but that is not the case here.