Reintroducing Predator Species

Last year, and the year before thinking about it, I made a few postings regarding a plan to reintroduce Beavers back into the British countryside. This weekend that will come to fruition. The Beaver family were collected from the wild in mainland Europe last year and have been in quarantine to ensure that they were not just healthy but were not carrying and Illnesses that would harm other wildlife. Therefore, in Britain we will have the start of a Beaver population after over three hundred years.

There is some opposition to this happening, yet all of the arguments against them are based upon myth rather than their actual habits and behaviour. I just hope that the sceptics can be won over and see that the Beavers will be an important part of the conservation web. By felling trees along the waters edge, they will be doing naturally work that many landowners pay hundreds if not thousands to have carried out.

While it will be a long while before I will be seeing Beavers in my area, unless I move, I hope that the reintroduction goes well. As my regular reader will know, I am lucky enough to live in an area where Red Kites have been successfully reintroduced, yes today has been a Red Kite day! That's a day when I see one of these magnificent birds. What makes you think I am Bias? However, back when I had just moved to the village, it was still a challenge to see the Red Kites every day. At that time I witnessed some behaviour that I had not expected to see and I was told to keep quiet about. The behaviour I witnessed was a Red Kite taking a (grey) Squirrel that I was attempting to photograph by leaving peanuts out for the squirrel.

Why was I told to keep quiet, as the information being given out was that Red Kites are carrion feeders and did not take live pray, what I saw was inconvenient and could have led to persecution of the birds. Unfortunately persecution is an euphemism for illegal killing of these protected raptors.

While I can understand the motives behind being asked to remain silent, in the long term, not being open about predators killing their food damages the aims of conservation. If a family have a pet rabbit and they know a Red Kite could take it, they will normally take precautions. A few weeks ago when observing a Red Kites nest, with fellow birders, I was told of a pet rabbit being taken by one of the Kites. Also other birders have seen the Red Kites taking live prey. Therefore, honesty is important in ensuring that the community does not turn against the conservation effort of reintroducing any species to an area.

Equally the community needs to be honest about any losses or damage that a reintroduced species has caused. In the West coast of Scotland where Sea Eagles have been introduced again after the lasts was killed in 1916, there has been a minority that have claimed that the White Tailed Sea Eagles are taking Lambs. As the largest Bird of Pray in Britain, with a wing span two to three feet greater than a Golden Eagle, they are capable of taking the lambs. However, as I have previously posted the numbers just do not add up.

With claims of two to three hundred lambs being lost in a six week period and only fifteen birds in the area, there is clearly something happening but it can not be the Eagles. Just one hundred lambs would be more than enough to feed the entire population of White Tailed Sea Eagles for a whole year.

However, to the credit of the RSPB and SNH (Scottish Natural Heritage), they are carrying out research to discover if the Farmers and Crofters claims are true. Personally I can tell you that while one or two may be taken by the Sea Eagles, that there is another explanation for this disappearance of lambs.

First is simply russelling, a quaint word for stealing sheep. Coincidently and completely off at a tangent, in my families Scottish heritage back in the sixteen hundreds I had an ancestor that was hung for stealing sheep. The other part of my heritage is Jewish, so with me you get two stereotypes for the price of one.

The other reason for the lambs disappearing is that the Farmers and Crofters are selling the animals into the black market. As in Europe all animals have to be tagged so that they can be traced along the food chain, an excuse had to be found for hiding two or three hundred lambs disappearing.

In the illegal Black Market for meat there is not the food hygiene standards of a registered slaughter house and unfit animals can enter the food chain from this source. So a minority of farmers will use this route to avoid financial losses if illness befalls a flock. However, it is these shady dealers that also enable russelling to take place. As simply no one would steal an animal unless they could profit from doing so.

I have done my research here and I have evidence that the trade exists in the city closest to where the Sea Eagles are. What equally makes me suspicious is that the lamb losses are concentrated in one relatively small area. Further when I have seen the farmers being interviewed on television, their claims are clearly exaggerated. One Farmer claims to have sat and over the course of one hour witnessed, at close hand, a lamb being taken every ten minutes. Now no farmer I know would just sit and watch his livestock being taken like that without making some attempt to stop the predator. The farmers was on a Quad bike too. As a Naturalist I know enough about animal behaviour, including the two legged rat (human), to know that it is possible to stop even a large bird of prey from taking lambs by charging towards it with a Quad Bike or by chucking stones.

While I know that the farmers will be losing some livestock to the Sea Eagles, the exaggerated claims of losses are as justified as the expenses claims of many MPs.

That is not a cheap joke either, as last year there was a serious suggestion that the Lynx should be introduced into Britain as a way of controlling Deer. If that were to happen and I personally would be in favour of this, farmers would have to be compensated for the inevitable loss of livestock. Therefore, we do need the farmers to be honest about livestock losses due to predation.

While there are no plans for the Lynx to be introduced yet, I can see many benefits not all of them obvious either. In Yellowstone National Park the reintroduction of the Wolf helped change the behaviour of the Elk so that the Elk were not damaging other habitat. This predator prey relationship has been shown to be true in all habitats and all parts of the food chain. Therefore reintroducing the Lynx would start changing the behaviour of the Deer. As Deer numbers are at a record high and are causing damage in some places too.

As with any animal population, if numbers rise to high then that animal can cause problems. With the Deer not having any natural predator, the Wolf and Lynx having long since been persecuted to extinction in Britain, there is nothing to control Deer numbers. While there is some hunting of Deer the breeding success of the Deer is faster than numbers culled. Here in Britain many people are adverse to eating Bambi, I blame Walt for that. Therefore much of the venison that is harvested from culling is exported to Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Therefore there is a need to control Deer numbers and as the Lynx is the natural predator, a reintroduction would benefit the environment. It would also benefit the Deer as it will be the weaker individuals that would be taken by the Lynx.

In Britain there is a widespread problem of Bovine Tuberculoses and Deer are effected by this. Recently I posted that I saw a Deer that had a growth. That is not the only one that I have seen that appear to have TB lesions. While Badgers are ubiquitously blamed for spreading bovine TB, there is growing evidence that Deer are in fact the carriers that are reinfecting cattle. Therefore the reintroduction of the Lynx could help reverse the increasing cost to the nation of dealing with TB.

While there has to be a sensible balance in these reintroductions, and while there will be occasional losses of livestock by farmers, the overall benefits do appear to be greater than any real losses. Also while in Britain we want and expect over nations to save their habitats and endangered species, we need to accept that only by accommodating predators back into our countryside can we expect other nations to protect top predators like Tigers, Bears or Wolfs.