Seeing red

What do you do when one protected species appears to be causing the demise of another?

One of the nicest things about living and working in Scotland is the almost universal concern we have for our wildlife and wild places. This is essential if we are to maintain a country as beautiful as this and with such a wide variety of flora and fauna. However, it’s also inevitable that this concern often results in deep and lasting conflict between interested parties.

Nowhere is this more the case than in the issue of which animals and birds should be protected and which should not. Take t he case of the red deer: from the top of officialdom there is increasing pressure for this iconic animal to be classed as little better than vermin and to be treated accordingly. At the other end of the scale there are creatures that governments and powerful lobby groups have decreed must be protected at all costs, no matter what their effect on their habitats or on other creatures.

This unbending attitude frequently causes quite astonishing contradictions. As this column has noted before, the situation regarding the capercaillie and the pine marten is proving enormously taxing in deciding which creature will flourish and which will be allowed to wither away. Both caper and marten are protected, but the question now being asked is whether the latter is helping to wipe out the former. And if it is, should it remain protected?

Official Scotland, as well as the wildlife ‘industry’ that effectively calls all the shots with the government, is hoping desperately the issue will go away, while at the same time looking for something else to blame for the dramatic decline in caper numbers.

I was very grateful, therefore, to be presented with some extraordinary evidence that may well shed light on the problem. It came from a reader, who had better remain anonymous given the excitability, to put it mildly, about such matters. He relates how, over four days in 1936, his father shot no fewer than 98 capercaillies on a Perthshire estate. Now, if official figures are correct, that figure represents around one quarter of the present caper population. My informant tells me capers were plentiful in north Strathmore, around Cortachy in Angus, and even in the woods of the Sidlaw hills, in the 1960s and ’70s.

However, because of a rapid decline in numbers, estate owners brought in a voluntary ban on shooting capers in 1985. But the decline continued. In 1991, he tells me, a survey of leks north-east of Crieff found 31 calling cock birds, but by 2000 they had all gone.

In 2005 that capercaillie were added to Schedule 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which gave it the same protection as eagles, goshawks and buzzards. But still their numbers fell. Scottish National Heritage and the RSPB blamed deer fences, which they said the birds flew into, killing themselves, and so had miles of such fences removed. This appears not to have made much difference, given that rampaging deer were held to have spoiled much of the vegetation that provided the capers’ habitat.

So why has the decline continued? Could it be anything to do with predation by those other protected species, notably buzzards, goshawks and, especially, pine martens? It’s difficult to imagine the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds permitting the control of one lot of birds, even if they are hastening the extermination of another feathered species. Thus, it would appear the once-extinct pine marten is getting all the blame. But if it’s protected by law, too, what is Official Scotland to do?

My expert urges basing the rescue operation on the Cairngorms National Park, where much of the remaining caper population now lives; trapping and transporting the raptors and martens to other areas; and banning all dogs from the area during the birds’ nesting period.

As he wisely declares: ‘Another year or two of discussions, conferences, working groups and hand-wringing and it will be too late.’