A springer spaniel and a black labrador are part of a team that is successfully removing stoats from the Orkney Islands as part of a project to help its wildlife – especially ground-nesting birds and rare rodents – recover.
The dogs’ remarkable sense of smell has been the key attribute as conservationists from the Orkney Native Wildlife Project (ONWP) have successfully tracked down and removed more than 6,500 of the small predators, which are not native to the Scottish archipelago.
The weasel-related carnivores arrived in Orkney in around 2010 – it’s not known exactly how or from where.
The islands are a haven for ground-nesting birds, including hen harriers and waders such as curlews, lapwings and oystercatchers, partly because there are no native terrestrial mammalian predators. The stoats were impacting these birds’ reproductive success rates.
Stoat removal began in 2019, and it is already starting to have a positive impact, says RSPB Scotland. For example, hen harrier nesting success (success is defined as at least one chick fledging) rates have increased from 36 to 82 per cent between 2019 and 2023.
The total number of hen harrier pairs also appears to be increasing. There are now an estimated 105 pairs on Orkney, compared with 74 in 2019. Despite being relatively small in size – less than 1 per cent of the UK land area – Orkney holds 16 per cent of the entire British population.
Curlew and oystercatcher nesting success rates more than trebled in the period 2019-23, and signs of Orkney voles (an endemic subspecies of the common vole, a species not otherwise native to the UK) increased by 200 per cent in the same time frame.
A partnership between the RSPB Scotland, the Scottish Government’s wildlife agency NatureScot and Orkney Islands Council, the project has worked with more than 900 landowners, conducted more than 350,000 individual trap checks and utilised the equivalent of eight years in volunteer hours.
The dogs will continue to play their part, both in flushing out any remaining stoats and checking cargo coming to Orkney. “This is a success story for conservation against the backdrop of a nature crisis that is pushing more of Scotland’s wildlife to the brink,” says Annie McCall, director of RSPB Scotland.
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