Vote opposes new conservation area
ARGYLL and Bute Council has voted not to support the Scottish Government’s plans to designate the Inner Hebrides and Minch a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) for Scotland’s smallest cetacean, the harbour porpoise.
Meeting in Kilmory Castle, Lochgilphead, on Wednesday last week, the council’s planning committee unanimously endorsed its officers’ response to a public consultation from Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), due to close later that day.
Councillor Robin Currie told the meeting: ‘We might as well put a ‘museum centre’ sign around the UK and say: ‘No one enter’. Do we support the SAC? No.’
Councillor George Freeman added: ‘The trouble is no- one will be able to do anything in the waters around Argyll and Bute.’
An EU Habitats Directive prohibits the deliberate killing, capturing or disturbance of the marine mammal in European waters, but this is not thought sufficient protection. So UK governments are also legally obliged to designate SACs to protect its habitat and prey and five more are planned in the waters around England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
SNH’s scientific study has identified a 13,539 km² site encompassing the Inner Hebrides and the Minch - 13.8 per cent of the harbour porpoises’ habitat in west of Scotland waters - as home to 31.4 per cent of the species’ population. An eight week consultation to designate the area stretching from Islay to Lewis a SAC began on March 23.
SNH argued that ‘large sites are ecologically more sensible for wide-ranging species that can move over large distances’ and concluded: ‘ we are confident the evidence is sufficient to designate the site’.
But while Argyll and Bute Council recognised this ‘important species warrants conservation’, it held the harbour porpoise ‘is already protected by a range of measures’. The council withheld overall support, it said, ‘based on concerns over the scale of the site, number and extent of existing designations and uncertainty over management advice’ which ‘may become more restrictive’.
However, it added: ‘The scientific evidence to support the proposal appears to be appropriate in relation to the selected criteria and current management advice suggests that activities are unlikely to be significantly affected in economic terms.’
Arguing on behalf of the SAC, campaigner Jean Ainslie wrote to The Oban
Times: ‘There needs to be areas where there cannot be a fishery which can destroy [the harbour porpoise]. Tangle netting is an unacceptable method of fishing and has a horrendous bycatch.
‘Tangle nets were left set on the seabed to catch crawfish. They also kill porpoise, seals and dolphins. Porpoise, like us, are air breathing mammals, the nets are ‘invisible’ to their echolocation so they become trapped and unable to reach the surface they drown.
‘Observer studies on fishing boats have recorded 7,785 porpoises caught in the North Sea and 2,200 in the Celtic Sea. A study in Barra some years ago found that two boats fishing with tangle nets killed 107 seals in just two months – they caught more seals than crawfish.
‘Although banned at present, it could conceivably come back at some stage. Protection as proposed would mean that this type of fishing could not come back within the SAC.’