Anyone who thought they understood the principles of conservation grazing – using livestock to maintain a habitat in a biodiverse form – had something to learn on our Celtic Rainforest walk on 28th March, courtesy of the RSPB’s Julia Harrison who is the lead for the LIFE project in the Cambrian Mountains.    It seems so simple in principle! Identify the area you want to restore – in this case, some 30-40 year old oak woodland on the steep slopes of the upper Tywi valley; send in some goats or cattle to eliminate the suffocating ground cover of bracken, bramble and excess regenerating tree saplings; and stand back to await results.

In practice, things can be so much more complicated.  A small group of Bagot goats, sent in to get the brambles and smallest saplings out from an area of overgrown oak and make it easier for cattle to penetrate, lasted less than a month before starting to go feral and escape.  (They were rounded up).  The replacement Boer goats couldn’t take the harsh mountain conditions year round even with custom-built rain shelters, so require careful stock management through the year.  The Welsh Black cattle which were the first choice for heavy grazing liked the shelter of the woods, but not the brambles and holly, spending their grazing time instead in the more acceptable pastureland, so Highland cattle had to be brought in to back them up in the tougher areas.   And in recent years the local population of roe deer seems to be taking a hand, uninvited, as well!

The definition of temperate rainforest is not a hard and fast one, with views varying from “any woodland with sufficient rainfall (and hence potential for biodiversity)” through to “passing an acceptable standard of biodiversity  of the indicator mosses, lichens and bryophytes”.  The latter of course means that any woodland which has once had that level of biodiversity but does not at present, which will be many, is excluded, leaving large areas which would richly reward conservation efforts falling outside the category which might attract project funding.  This is a conservation conundrum faced by many habitats: degraded peat, for instance, does not support the same biodiversity nor hold as much carbon as healthy peat; but if we as a society elect to ignore it on that basis, then it becomes acceptable to degrade further when as a scarce and multi-benefit resource it should be restored as widely as possible.

A further conundrum arises from the definition of woodland.  The Elenydd in the centre of the Cambrian Mountains today includes large areas of conifer plantations which, being woodland and in an area of suitable rain, could in principle be categorised as temperate rainforest. Indeed, on the west coast of Canada and the United States, woods made up of these very species – in their native habitat – are indeed biodiverse, supporting many species of mosses and lichens and the creatures which live on and under them.  But does it follow that on a different continent, divorced from their native assemblage of species, conservation is the appropriate response? (Not to mention of course that most of these trees will be harvested and hauled away to make paper pulp and similar softwood products at around 40-50 years of age, long before there has been time for a stable assemblage of species to establish itself around them).

We did not reach conclusions on any of the hard questions; and we did endure a brief but very heavy hailstorm, eliciting a certain sympathy for those unhappy Boer goats.  But overall, we came away with a deeper understanding of what the Celtic Rainforest project is aiming to achieve, and the hope that now the trial-and-error phase seems to be concluded, the oak woods will soon be flourishing with the hundreds of different species that every schoolchild is (or should be!) taught that they can support.  Many thanks to Julia and the RSPB for their valuable time.