Galloway Forest Park wildfires were ‘the size of Edinburgh’

LARGE AREA IMPACTED

Now that the wildfires over the Galloway and East Ayrshire hills have been put out, we're hearing the area affected is as large as Edinburgh.

The first blazes were reported this time last week and burned for four days.

Forestry and Land Scotland Regional Manager John Dougan says this is the biggest fire he’s dealt with:

“It’s a huge area and of the order of 35 squared miles plus, so it’s really huge. To give people some understanding of that it’s a similar magnitude to like a really big city in Scotland like Edinburgh. It’s a really huge area that’s been burnt.”

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

One of FLS’ concerns is how severely impacted the environment was.

“It particularly impacts things like ground-nesting birds, small animals, reptiles - things that obviously have a limited amount of mobility to get away from fires, and also over the longer term, it’s destroyed the habitat that they use over a big extensive area.

“If you think of large animals such as deer or a hare or something like, they’d be able to escape a fire, but a smaller animal or a reptile, it’s unlikely they would be able to escape the same so it’s likely they would have died in the fires.”

LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY

In an interview with Greatest Hits Radio, Dougan shared concerns about the setback this could cause for the environment:

“For things like ground-nesting birds that use these places to breed and raise their young, those places aren’t there anymore so they’ll have to find somewhere else if they can, but if they can’t, it will probably have an impact on the population that will be in those areas, and it’ll be years before they can recover.

“We’re taking stock right now of the level of damage. We’ll assess what we can potentially do but obviously, some of the damage it’s just a question of time. Nature needs time to heal itself and needs time to grow. But it will certainly have an impact for many years to come before it’s fully recovered.”

An extreme warning remains in place for today.

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