An RSPB newsletter I read before leaving Scotland for Slovenia, referred to capercaillie as birds of the Caledonian pine forest.   This may now be the case in Scotland but wasn’t always so, as when capercaillie inhabited the mixed woodland on the Loch Lomond islands.

Capercaillie, while mainly found in the boreal zone,  are also distributed through the eastern Alps and down into the Balkans, where they live in very different habitats to the Caledonian Pine forest.  We saw this sign on the limestone  plateau above the Pokljuka Gorge, where beech began to transition to European spruce and there was not a Scots pine in sight.. There was, however, plentiful bilberry which, together with its associated invpertebrates, provides a crucial food source for capercaillie in Scotland.

While we did not see or hear capercaillie,  if it they can survive in the forests dominated by European spruce (also known as Norway spruce, Picea abies),  this suggests there is no reason why they shouldn’t also be able to do so in Scotland.  That they aren’t found in Scotland’s European spruce plantations and have steadily been disappearing from Scots pine plantations says something about the impact of how forestry is practiced in Scotland compared to  much of the Alps: drainage and densely planted monocultures instead of the species mix that results from natural regeneration; tolerance of high numbers of herbivores; clearfell.   Industrial forestry rather than Continuous Cover Forestry.  The loss of biodiversity, of which  capercaillie are just one small part, is the inevitable consequence,