There’s a little red-breasted bird who takes an interest in what you are doing in your garden. It’s a Robin and they usually make me feel cheerful. But this month, while I was cutting willow down in Kirkcaldy Walled Garden in the late afternoon, there was a robin who did not like what I was doing. His sharp little eyes seemed to flash at me. In fact, I stopped and went home without doing all that I had had time for - there was something about the bird’s manner that gave me the fear.
If you see someone cutting down a tree - do you get upset? Do you think the person cutting down the tree should feel guilty? Well, yes and yes and I know a little bird that agrees with you. But this month it is possible to cut down some trees and, with the help of rewilding, not feel upset or guilty about it. Let me tell you how.
January’s activity doesn’t exactly feel like environmental action. Armed with secateurs, long-handled loppers, and even saws, we took to the big, wavy willow trees and reduced them to stumps. If we laid the branches end to end, we’d have about 2.5 kilometers of willow growth—that’s quite a lot of branches. At this time of year, young forests look small, the summer’s lush canopy is gone, leaving behind bare, spindly branches and empty spaces that make everything seem desolate - and there’s me sawing away at what’s left, making it worse. It takes a strong dose of nature-based reflection to convince me that January’s mass mutilation of willow trees makes any ecological sense.
The before-and-after photos tell a stark story—cutting willow is a dramatic process. It certainly doesn’t look like a tree would welcome such treatment. To strip them down in the bleakness of winter, leaving behind stacks of cut rods and stakes, feels almost barbaric. Anyone watching might assume it’s a commercial operation. I probably look like some kind of rural criminal, and not just to robins.
But that’s not what I am, as I explained to some very earnest environmentally conscious dog walkers. I asked the dog walkers to think of me as the ghost of a woolly mammoth or the ghost of a giant Pleistocene deer. After all, such industrious cutting would have been a regular occurrence when megafauna roamed the Earth. Willow evolved alongside these massive herbivores, its branches sticking out from the snow as one of the only available sources of winter grazing.
Of course, the dog walkers walked away shaking their heads and making pointing gestures towards their temples as if they had just remembered something. And that was too bad because I wanted to also tell them about Pleistocene Park and Russia’s most cited Earth Scientist: Sergey Zimov.
For 36 years, Zimov has been reintroducing large herbivores like bison, elk and yak to a very remote part of Russia, attempting to bring them back to Pleistocene levels. Pleistocene Park, is a pioneering project that has earned a spot in Project Drawdown’s Top 100 climate solutions. Zimov argues that the numbers of large herbivores need to be much higher than they are to combat global warming and importantly, to stop the permafrost melting. He believes that the vast forests of the north only exist because the mammoths are absent. Without large herbivores to keep the landscape open, the permafrost will melt. His vision is to transform the silent taiga forests into a noisy tundra steppe, filled with grasslands and scattered thickets of trees. In his view, this is the only viable way to protect the permafrost layer. If the permafrost melts, the climate crisis will be far, far worse.
Pleistocene Park
Anyway, please watch the two-hour Pleistocene Park documentary linked below.
In the Pleistocene, we also had woolly mammoths in Scotland. Rather than seeing myself as an ecological criminal this month, I am the ghost of a mammoth. Ripping out last year’s willow growth as the mammoths did. Now I can feel proud of these before and after photos, I am with winter’s bleakness and I am with the woolly mammoths! I am re-enacting some part of some greater ancestral ecosystem. If that does sound dellusional, well too bad. To make knowledge useful, we need to think with ecosystems and see what works. It’s the right thing to do even if it looks like the wrong thing to do!
Note: Pleistocene Park’s campaign to restore huge herds of megafauna can’t be replicated here in Scotland because Scotland doesn’t have a permafrost layer to protect. I’m simply enjoying thinking about their project and reflecting on the fact that willow really can “take it” being cut down to a stump every winter.
Anyway, what else is there to fill this relatively slow month? Well, I’ve been taking some pupils outside into the campus to build dens. In the absense of decent trees on campus the building of dens is difficult. So we decided to… you guessed it… plant some willow to help us.
The Volunteering Matters Action Earth sponsored tree planting and willow den creation event was postponed due to a storm (made worse by climate change) but it enjoyed amazing shorts and t-shirts weather (no doubt attributable to climate change) on Saturday 1st of February. Two of our largest dead trees were down because of the storm which gave us branches to make into stakes for the willow den and we had a good mix of people attending. We planted over 200 trees and made some more progress on the willow enclosures which are spreading across the site. Young people are now able to create a den in Bat’s Wood much faster and with less difficulty than before now they have a solid shell of willow to inhabit. In a few years, I think it’s going to look pretty cool - as long as we hack it back every year.
And so, the cycle turns. What we cut down, we also plant. What seems destructive in winter finds renewal in spring. The stark, cut-back willows will soon erupt in fresh green shoots, just as the young trees we planted will take root and grow. It’s a reminder that landscapes are never still—they shift, they adapt, they demand a certain level of intervention.
January’s work may have felt like action against nature, but it was, in truth, an act of alignment. We aren’t just hacking at trees; we are shaping an ecosystem, playing our part in the long rhythms of disturbance and regrowth. The ghost of the mammoth lingers.
For now, we wait. The willow stumps will sprout, the dens will take form, and the young forests will rise. By summer, the evidence of our winter’s labor will be hidden in a more dense, humming green. And when next winter comes, the secateurs and handsaws will return, and the cycle will begin again.
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