Only if you're a puffin!

The island has been uninhabited since it was evacuated in 1930. It was always very isolated, being significantly out from any other inhabited land and too small and harsh to support more than a couple hundred people at best. As contact became somewhat more regular in the 18th to 20th centuries, diseases brought to the island just about wiped out the population, and the last people there decided to collectively leave for the mainland

These days it's a nature reserve. You can go across and stay on the island for a summer, though! People go to help restore and preserve the village each year

It fuckin wimdy

It's against the deer, mostly. We killed all the wolves centuries ago and now there's heaps of antlery bastards that run about and eat every sapling

...that said, Hirta is its own case. There's been nobody living there to plant any trees for almost a century, and trees have seemingly never grown there. It's a pretty harsh and rugged place

It's a combination of too many herbivores with no carnivores to balance their population, and thousands of years of deforestation