from Sunday Herald, 30 November 2014
A leaked plan by the game-shooting lobby to remove pine martens from woodlands around Aviemore in the Highlands has sparked fierce opposition from wildlife groups.
The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), a charity funded by landowners, farmers and sporting interests, wants to launch a trial next year to trap and relocate the iconic furry mammals, which are protected under law as an endangered species.
But the plan has been condemned as “deeply flawed” by experts, who fear it could open the door to the widespread killing of pine martens. It has also been rejected by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which owns two of the woodlands where the trial had been proposed.
A six-page internal document drawn up by GWCT scientists - and seen by the Sunday Herald - discloses a plan to get rid of 120 pine martens over six years from four Strathspey forests. It promises to release any females caught in traps “on welfare grounds” if they are suckling young.
Three of the forests – Rothiemurchus, Glenmore and Inshriach are owned by the Forestry Commission and one - Kinveachy - by the 13th Earl of Seafield. GWCT had to abandon plans to use two other woodlands - Abernethy and Craigmore – because of opposition from their owner, RSPB.
“Whilst humane killing of captured martens may be the easiest option, we intend to make martens available for wider marten conservation programs,” the leaked document says. “These may include reintroduction programs to England and Wales.”
The purpose of the trial is to test whether martens are harming the prospects of another endangered species, Capercaillie, by eating their eggs and chicks. These large birds have declined from 20,000 in 1970 to around 1,200, many of which share Strathspey woodlands with martens.
But conservationists suspect ulterior motives. They point out that landowners and gamekeepers have been increasingly pushing for the right to cull pine martens in order to protect red grouse so that they can be shot for sport.
The Mammal Society, which promotes science-based conservation, has written to the government’s wildlife agency, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), expressing “deep concern” about the proposed trial. Evidence in support of it was “poor”, the society said, and there were no organisations willing to take any relocated martens.
“If this trial were to go ahead it is very likely to generate immense negative publicity both for SNH and the Scottish government, not just within the UK but internationally,” the society concluded. “This will be particularly vociferous if the fate of the removed pine martens is to be culled. It will also greatly damage the reputation of Scotland as a destination for wildlife tourism.”
One of the authors of the letter to SNH was the chairman of the Mammal Society and a leading pine marten specialist, Dr Johnny Birks. “Instead of pursuing a flawed scheme to remove it, we should be celebrating the marten’s return to Speyside,” he said.
“Unlike our Victorian ancestors, thankfully we now understand that predation is a natural component of healthy ecosystems. Pine martens have coexisted in a stable predator-prey balance with capercaillie in forests across northern Europe for thousands of years.”
Pine marten predation was a peripheral factor in the capercaillie’s decline, Birks argued. “Predators frequently influence the breeding success of their prey, but this is a natural process and should not be used to justify the removal of one protected species to protect another.”
Duncan Orr-Ewing, head of species and land management at RSPB Scotland, dismissed the proposed trial as inappropriate and unnecessary. “We have not agreed to this happening onany RSPBScotland nature reserves,” he said. “We are proud that martens and capercaillie are found in our forests.”
In the leaked document, GWCT claims the backing of the Forestry Commission and SNH for its trial, and says the Cairngorms National Park Authority “may” be a partner. But all these agencies told the Sunday Herald last week that they had yet to decide whether or not to go ahead with removing martens.
Hamish Trench, the park authority’s conservation director, said there were “significant questions about any proposal for a trial removal of pine marten”. The commission insisted “the idea is still being developed”, and SNH maintained it was too early to take a view “on the merits of the work”.
GWCT argued that there was a need to better understand how predation was affecting the long term survival of capercaillie. “We take this threat to a splendid iconic Scottish bird very seriously and are discussing what form this research might take,” a spokeswoman said.
Pine martens: persecuted in the past, but now protected
In the past pine martens (Martes martes) were one of Britain’s most persecuted mammals. They were wiped out in large parts of the UK by landowners and farmers anxious to prevent them from eating game and poultry.
At the start of the 20th century, they only survived in remnant populations in remote forests in northwest Scotland. In recent decades, however, pine martens have expanded their territory, and according to the government wildlife agency, Scottish Natural Heritage, now number around 3,000 adults across much of Scotland.
Martens were given full legal protection in 1988, so it is an offence to kill, injure or trap them, or to damage their shelters. The only exceptions are if they take up residence in your loft, or you obtain a special licence from the Scottish government.
Famously elusive, martens prefer woodlands, where they live in holes in trees, old squirrel dreys or birds’ nests. Good climbers, they feed on small rodents, birds, eggs, insects and fruit. In the summer their diet can consist of 30 per cent blaeberries, turning their droppings blue.
They grow to 70 centimetres long, including a bushy tail, and are mostly chestnut-brown in colour, with a characteristic pale yellow bib on their chin and throat. They make shrill, cat-like calls in the mating season, have litters of three to five young in the spring, and live for around ten years.
The leaked pine marten proposal from the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust can be downloaded here (69KB Word document).
This story prompted a response from the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust.
If pine marten are such a problem for capercaillie, as the GWCT and SGA claim, then they need to answer a very pertinent question. In Deeside and Donside, which has quite a number of stands of ancient Caledonian pinewoods, but where many driven grouse estates predominate, pine martens are almost completely absent. This is in all probability due to historic and ongoing illegal persecution of this magnificent species, though obviously they would never admit this. However the surprising thing is that this is also the place where capercaillie are doing worst in Scotland, existing on the absolute brink of local extinction in the very area where pine martens are kept at bay.
Now let's turn to Strathspey, where pine martens are approaching normal densities of ecological balance without illegal human interference. Here capercaillie have their greatest stronghold in Scotland. Productivity of capercaillie chicks is, of course, slightly lower where pine martens are present, but they are still enough to sustain the healthiest numbers of Scotland's capercaillie population.
Why might this be? Why are capercaillie going extinct where no martens are present, and remain abundant where martens are present in their highest densities? This demonstrably reveals that pine marten eradication is not the solution for capercaillie conservation. Any attempt to argue otherwise is just a smokescreen for the hatred of predators, and martens in particular, which are a natural and necessary part of any healthy, functioning Highland ecosystem! Shame on SNH and CNPA if they even countenance such a flawed proposal by the GWCT!
Posted by: The Fulmar | 30 November 2014 at 12:08 PM