A short history of Scotland's lost species 1: The Elk

When Hercules the bull elk escaped from his enclosure on a private Perthshire estate in 2014, eventually being recaptured several miles away by the side of the A9 trunk road in the southern part of the Cairngorms National Park, he was the first free-ranging member of his species to wander the Scottish Highlands for a very long time.

 We know from bone remains found from Dumfriesshire in the south to Caithness in the north that the elk (or moose as it’s known in North America) used to inhabit Scotland. The most recent radiocarbon date (from a bone found in the estuary of the River Cree in SW Scotland) is around 4000 years BP, so it's often described as having gone extinct in Scotland, and the UK in general, at that time (it's funny how often the most recent carbon date for a species is equated to its extinction date!). Around four thousand years ago is also when our climate appears to have taken a turn for the wetter, so it has been suggested that elk died out naturally because of an unsuitable climate.

However, the elk is still a widespread and common species in many parts of Northern Europe today, including in some very rainy parts of Norway, and is recolonising areas where historical deforestation and over-hunting pushed them out.

So it seems pretty unlikely that the Scottish elk died out 4000 years ago because of climate change, and much more likely they disappeared because of human pressures, quite possibly much later. In fact, faint traces of elk do linger on in Scotland’s cultural memory.

There was a word for elk in Gaelic, a language that has only been spoken in Scotland over the past 1500 years or so. This word, lon, is not dissimilar to the Welsh word elain, meaning fawn, or the French word for elk, élan, or the Dutch word for elk, eland (which was then used by Dutch settlers in southern Africa to describe the large antelope species they found there, just as English settlers in North America, who’d long lost their cultural memory of what exactly an elk was, used the word ‘elk’ to describe another very large deer species they encountered there. The Native American word moose is now used to name the species that most Europeans would recognise as an elk).

There is even a reference in a poem called 'Bas Dhiarmaid', which appears in the early 16th century Book of the Dean of Lismore, to the calls of 'deer and elk' resounding in Glenshee (today on the southern boundary of the Cairngorms National Park, a few miles east of where Hercules was recaptured). However, the small number of supposed references in bardic poetry to wild Scottish elk has to be treated with a little caution, partly because lon can mean a bird, as in lon-dubh meaning ‘blackbird’. However, there are more reliable medieval references to elks in a ballad called Laoidh a’ Choin Duibh (The Lay of the Black Hound), which opens with a hunting scene. Here the given context makes it clear that lon does not mean a bird, as it describes the buirich or roaring of ‘Fhiagh agus Lon’, deer and elks, before going on to describe how, at the conclusion of their hunt, the protagonists ate ‘Eun, Fiagh, a’s Lon’, or ‘birds, deer and elk’.

There's a lot of meat on an elk and no doubt they would have been favoured quarry for human hunters. And in a country that became so spectacularly deforested as Scotland did (reduced to just 4% woodland cover by the late 18th century), it's not surprising that a horse-sized browser of woody vegetation such as willows, birch and aspen, became extinct, albeit not, it seems, 4000 years ago.

Perhaps, then, not so very long ago, there were still parts of the Highlands where the autumnal hills and woods echoed not only to the roaring of rutting stags, but also to the distinctive grunting of bull elks advertising their presence to potential mates and rivals alike.

Photo credit: Peter Cairns, Scotland: The Big Picture.

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