Spring has sprung at Rhemore. The peach tree in the polytunnel is in bloom, the tomato, cucumber and chilli seedlings are coming through, and the kale and chard plants I kept back last season are now in full growth. The grass cannot grow quick enough for the cows, but a sunny spell, as I write, is giving forth promising sprinklings of green.
This month saw results of two different kinds of monitoring on the croft. The results have been heartening in different ways, but also a reminder not to jump to conclusions too quickly or get seduced by a good story.
Alasdair used Rhemore as a training ground to teach the RSPB rainforest restoration team how to assess herbivore impact. I tagged along and enjoyed examining different areas, seeing the impact deer and cows have had on tree growth. Rhemore is cut in half by the Drimnin Road; the top boundary, above the road is commercial forestry; below the road, the croft goes down to the shoreline. Not much remains of the deer fence between the croft and the dense Sitka at the top, so lots of deer come in this way as it provides such good cover (we are now replacing the fence).
As a result, it’s the furthest away areas below the road, nearest the shore, that have seen the most regrowth. This starts off looking like scrub, thick with brambles, bog myrtle and willow. It takes a while for the rowan, hazel, and oak saplings to start showing through this. Some of these areas are so dense now, we’ve started letting in the cows for a few days each year to create a little space and break up the outer edges. One of Alasdair’s special skills is to quickly read a sapling and assess the level of growth and grazing over several successive seasons (as well as the type of animal that has done the nibbling) and it was great to learn how he does this. The young trees in the regrowth areas showed intense levels of grazing stunting most growth up until four years ago. This correlates with when we took on the croft. The previous owner had over a hundred sheep, we replaced these with just a handful of cattle and a local stalker now comes every year to bring down the deer numbers.
On March 14th Dr.Texa Sim gave a talk in Drimnin to present the results of a baseline survey she did for the community association of lochs and sounds (CAOLAS). Texa visited the croft several times to study the intertidal zone in a bay we often swim in, directly below the house. She took water samples and counted species using quadrats at different levels on the shore. She also looked at four other sites along the Coast of Morvern. We were delighted to find that Rhemore had more biodiversity than anywhere else she looked at. Texa also found a seagrass bed (which we already knew about). Seagrass is effectively an underwater meadow providing a unique habitat for many marine species. It’s a nursery bed for many creatures and is categorised as a priority marine feature. It was lovely to imagine the biodiversity on the shore at Rhemore having a direct correlation with what’s happening on the land, maybe even with our land management. At the talk, someone with many more years’ experience and wisdom than I, suggested the other sites might have been affected by the runoff from commercial forestry. But it could just be the topography of the site at Rhemore, as it’s a particularly sheltered lagoon and its original inclusion in the study was because, after spotting the seagrass on one of our daily swims, we flagged it as an area of interest.
It’s nicer to imagine that there are many other sites along the Morvern coast, right under our noses, we just haven’t seen.
CAOLAS have taken aerial photos of the Rhemore seagrass and have found patterns to identify other beds using drone photography, whilst Alasdair and I have been doing swims in different spots along the coast in the hope of finding more underwater meadows. Several more seagrass beds have already been identified using both methods. With so many outdoor swimmers in Morvern I’ve enjoyed imagining local residents swimming the whole coastline in high quality goggles. Just like going into a good wood, there are almost certainly many wonderful things yet to be discovered on our shoreline that have been there all along.
Leave a Reply