Looking for aliens on Orkney
In the decade since its arrival, the stoat has wreaked havoc on the islands. Huge expense is now being incurred to remove it
Ian Coghill assesses the stoat issue on the Scottish islands
The news that the Orkney Native Wildlife Project, jointly led by RSPB Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and Orkney Islands Council, had spent £90,000 on training six dogs and their handlers to hunt stoats is, of itself, a bit of a showstopper. It reminded me of the context and how this extraordinary business typifies much that is wrong with the conservation industry and its inability to see beyond the money.
The Orkneys was a mammal-free zone when glaciation ended some 10,000 years ago. Nothing without wings or fins could get there, until, that is, human beings, that forever restless and inquisitive species, arrived in Neolithic times and decided that a few of their domestic animals might do quite nicely here. Sometime later, a migrant boat, probably from the Low Countries, had another mammal stowed away on board and it too found the island conducive to its needs. These stowaways were common voles, a species widely distributed in continental Europe but absent from Britain, where we have field voles, bank voles and even water voles but not the common vole. When, several millennia later, it was noticed that the unusually large voles found on Orkney were different from the mainland versions, they were christened, perhaps not very imaginatively, Orkney voles and are now seen as a ‘native species’.
Being characterised as a native species is of vital importance in the modern conservation industry. Native species are far less likely to be subjected to lethal control by NGOS than ‘non-native species’. The RSPB, for example, kills just about every mink it can lay its hands on but will not kill stoats, irrespective of the damage they might do, because they are native and the things they prey on have evolved to live, if sometimes precariously, alongside them.
Well, that used to be the case but it has changed. This is because the stoats have done what the Orkney voles’ ancestors did, and what the black rat, the house mouse
and the brown rat have all done when they got the chance, and stowed away on a ship bound for pastures new. No one is suggesting that anyone was mad enough to introduce stoats to Orkney deliberately. What seems likely to have happened is that one or more pregnant female stoats stowed away, probably in a consignment of round bales, and found when they emerged that they were in a veritable promised land, full of oversize voles, no competition and no gamekeepers.
A PROBLEM ARISES
I first became aware that there was a problem, a small one at that time, when I met with some senior RSPB staff, shortly after I’d become chairman of GWCT in 2010. I soon learnt that many within the RSPB assume that because I shoot, my knowledge and potential usefulness to them is limited to killing things. Accordingly, they raised the issue of the Orkney stoat and exterminating them and, as a shooter red in tooth and claw, thought I ought to be able to help.
Unfortunately, it turned out that my suggested solution to the stoat problem was considered so unhelpful as to be unacceptable. My idea, perhaps not surprisingly, was that they ask the Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA) for the contact details of the best gamekeepers available and pay whatever it took to get one of them to come to Orkney, provide the keeper with everything he asked for and promised him a substantial bonus when he could demonstrate that the place was stoat free. This would not be cheap but it would probably have come in at a fivefigure sum. I was told, not for the first time or the last, that I didn’t understand. There was no need for lethal control, which would anyway be unpopular with their members, the stoats would be live trapped and released unharmed on the mainland.
POSING A THREAT
Time moves on and much to the project leaders’ surprise the plan to live trap the stoats and relocate them on the mainland did not turn out to be an unmitigated success. They were right, of course, they always are. I have to admit I didn’t understand. All I understood was that their plan was not going to work. But then they had picked the least efficient technique to deal with what was a serious and worsening situation. Whilst I understood that it would not work I have to admit that I had no idea how badly it would fail and how well the stoats would do. There are now a lot of them and they are all over the place. They present a huge threat to Orkney’s traditional
They pose a serious threat to the hen harrier population, through chick predation and competing for voles
wildlife assemblages, particularly to ground-nesting birds such as curlew, redshank and other waders. In the case of the islands’ important hen harrier population, the stoats pose a serious threat, both directly, through chick predation, and indirectly, by competing for the supply of Orkney voles that make up an important part of the hen harriers’ diet.
All this has produced a particularly difficult problem, especially for the RSPB. According to my reading of the charity’s bag data, nowhere in mainland Britain does the RSPB report killing stoats on its reserves; nowhere does it accept that killing stoats is necessary to protect ground-nesting birds; and it appears to have persuaded other organisations to follow this line.
PARADISE LOST
Now, if something isn’t done and done quickly, Orkney will go from being a paradise for ground nesting birds, including being a major source of hen harriers, to being yet another wader sink. Another place where the perfect habitat lures the birds into nesting but where, instead of fledging healthy offspring, they simply produce bite-size snacks for an efficient mammalian predator.
The problem is, if you have to kill stoats to protect ground-nesting birds on Orkney, how can you then maintain that you don’t need to kill them to protect the same birds on the mainland? The first answer is that the stoats are not native to Orkney. However, whilst that is a good reason for getting rid of the stoats, it doesn’t answer the question. A curlew is a curlew, whether it nests in Derbyshire or Orkney. These species are all exactly the same as those found on the mainland, they are not some flightless curiosity on a remote antipodean island. There must be another special reason or the RSPB and others might have to rethink their approach to mainland stoat control.
This gets us back to our vole. The unique reason why the stoats have to be killed on Orkney and not in Derbyshire or Suffolk is that they are preying on the Orkney vole. Thank God for the dear old vole, a rare native mammal about to be eaten by an invasive alien. So, it is different after all. The slaughter of the chicks of groundnesting birds is not the main reason for exterminating stoats, its the voles that were brought to Orkney by humans, albeit a long time ago.
It is a free country and you can believe that if you like, but forget the justification and think of the cost. When I heard some time ago that more than £60,000 was being spent as a consequence of the stoat problem on Orkney, I have to say that I thought it sounded relatively cheap. But that was before I discovered that the £60,000 was only to draw up the plan. The real figure was more than £6 million and, in the way of these things, will almost certainly rise again. After all, the £90,000 for buying and training six dogs and teaching their handlers what to do is only the
start-up cost. The estimate for the planned five years is £300,000. Interestingly, you could run seven packs of hounds for five years and have some change left out of £300,000, so it seems a bit pricey to me.
TIME WASTED
I have no problem whatsoever with killing stoats and I certainly support the idea of eradicating them from Orkney, after all, a decade ago, when there was a small, localised population, I suggested how it could be done quickly and economically. What I object to is the appalling waste of time, allowing the problem to get entirely out of hand, and the consequent outrageous cost. If the people and organisations involved had done the right thing a decade ago, the problem would not now exist – or, if it did, it would be at a level that was far more amenable to cost-effective control or eradication. The people and organisations who made the catastrophic decisions then are the same ones that are handling these jaw-dropping sums of money now. How can it be that the people who failed to do something when it was relatively easy are going to get £6 million to do the same thing when it is far, far more difficult?
One odd reason is that, to be fair to the RSPB, it did indeed want money spent killing the stoats a lot earlier but it wanted it to be someone else’s money. Just because the RSPB turns over £140 milion a year, clears on average £3 million every month in legacies and, last year, had an operating surplus of £12 million, does not mean that it wants to spend its own money protecting the ground-nesting birds of Orkney from alien stoats. It took as long as it did because that is how long it takes to get the money from the EU.
Another reason may be that if anyone else other than RSPB was doing this, all hell would break loose. Its celebrity vicepresident, Chris Packham, would be all over Twitter, raising his troops, accusing poor old SNH staff, yet again, of having blood on their hands, with all the consequences of death threats and protests. But as the RSPB are involved, happily none of this has happened. The fact that in the years leading up to its involvement it has, apparently, killed just one stoat and has watched as the situation deteriorated for nearly a decade, clearly makes it uniquely well suited to the task in hand.
In these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to ask if this pattern of behaviour has been noticed by the key players. Has SNH noticed that if the RSPB gets the money, there is little or no adverse comment from its vice-president and his fellow travellers, but if someone else gets involved or receives funding – or even permission to cull predators – the sky falls in? You don’t have to be bad to take the path of least resistance. Anyone who was moderately risk averse and averagely aware of social media could hardly be blamed for doing so, I might myself in their position, especially when you look back at the personal consequences of the alternative.
We seem to have reached a point that is both ridiculous and tragic. Huge sums of public money are being spent on conservation, often without any apparent concern for value for money or the delivery of real, sustainable outcomes. This money is being channelled into a small number of already rich and powerful organisations, that seem intent on excluding communities of place and interest from participation, let alone accessing any of the money they acquire.
They may, after all, be wrong. Perhaps I do understand.
The problem has been allowed to get out of hand, resulting in outrageous cost