PROTECTING ORKNEY’S WILDLIFE

Orkney is a special place for wildlife. In particular, our mild climate, treeless landscape, and scarcity of native predators makes these islands a haven for ground-nesting birds.

Orkney is one of the last places in the UK where large flocks of curlew are still a common sight, while one in five British hen harriers grace the skies above our islands.

Despite being less than one per cent of the UK landmass, Orkney’s cliffs house 12 per cent of the UK’S breeding seabirds, while the Orkney vole is found nowhere else in the world!

Sadly, all of this is threatened by the arrival of an invasive predator. Stoats are native to the UK mainland, but were first recorded in Orkney in 2010. While we don’t know how they got here, we do know how damaging they can be. When stoats were introduced to New Zealand in the 1800s, they drove three species of ground-nesting bird to extinction, all within 100 years. Stoats are voracious predators, and need to eat the equivalent of one whole Orkney vole every day, just to survive.

The Orkney Native Wildlife Project was set up to prevent a similar tragedy from befalling Orkney. Since 2019, the project has been operating a network of 7,000 humane, lethal trap boxes across Orkney. The team is assisted by Europe’s first stoat detection dogs, who help our trappers to pinpoint the location of the stoats, and prevent their spread to other islands.

So far, invasive stoats have been contained to the Orkney Mainland and linked isles — no mean feat, as they can swim up to three kilometres in the sea. The project operates a rigorous “biosecurity” programme in the stoat-free isles, to make sure they remain safe havens for native wildlife.

To date, the project has removed over 5,000 stoats from the county. This has coincided with a marked improvement in the number of un-predated curlew nests, and promising signs in the Orkney vole count. This, we hope, will have knock on benefits for species which rely on them for food, such as our iconic hen harriers and short-eared owls.

Despite this progress, there is still some way to go. We operate a public stoat sightings system, which has been hugely successful to date. To protect the wildlife which makes Orkney such a wonderful place to live and to visit, we need residents and visitors alike to keep reporting their stoat sightings.

Beyond community support, the project is made possible by the project partners: RSPB Scotland, Naturescot, and Orkney Islands Council, with funding from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, EU LIFE, and the Scottish Government’s Nature Restoration Fund.