Looking for aliens on Orkney

In the decade since its arrival, the stoat has wreaked havoc on the islands. Huge expense is now being incurred to remove it

- IAN COGHILL

The news that the Orkney Native Wildlife Project, jointly led by RSPB Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and Orkney Islands Council, had spent £90,000 on training six dogs and their handlers to hunt stoats is, of itself, a bit of a showstopper. It reminded me of the context and how this extraordinary business typifies much that is wrong with the conservation industry and its inability to see beyond the money.

The Orkneys was a mammal-free zone when glaciation ended some 10,000 years ago. Nothing without wings or fins could get there, until, that is, human beings, that forever restless and inquisitive species, arrived in Neolithic times and decided that a few of their domestic animals might do quite nicely here. Sometime later, a migrant boat, probably from the Low Countries, had another mammal stowed away on board and it too found the island conducive to its needs. These stowaways were common voles, a species widely distributed in continental Europe but absent from Britain, where we have field voles, bank voles and even water voles but not the common vole. When, several millennia later, it was noticed that the unusually large voles found on Orkney were different from the mainland versions, they were christened, perhaps not very imaginatively, Orkney voles and are now seen as a ‘native species’.