Scotland<\/a>, says the stoats\u2019 greatest advantage is they have no predators on Orkney. \u201cThey\u2019ve nothing to control them: we\u2019ve no foxes, and very few buzzards. We\u2019ve seen this all over the world. That stoat population would\u2019ve kept going until it had removed everything,\u201d she says, holding a laminated map of Orkney with thousands of red dots marking the trap network.<\/p>\n\u201cWe saw it before we started eradicating them. There were stoats running between people\u2019s legs, stoats in people\u2019s kitchen cupboards, there were stoats in people\u2019s lofts.\u201d<\/p>\n
In well under a decade, they had spread across 58,000 hectares (143,260 acres). A feasibility study said that if they spread across all Orkney\u2019s islands, it would be financially and logistically impossible to control them. So the project, which will last for at least 10 years, has been given a \u00a316m budget and 46 staff.<\/p>\n
Stoats penetrate the burrows of voles, search out eggs and chicks in thousands of curlew, lapwing and hen harrier nests, and also hunt along Orkney\u2019s extensive shoreline for seafood, feeding off starfish and urchins.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere we\u2019ve got a perfect disaster where we\u2019ve loads and loads of food year-round,\u201d Sankey says. \u201cNothing to control the stoats and lots of native wildlife to lose, and a tourism economy that kind of depends on it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy did we start all of this? Orkney is less than 1% of the UK\u2019s land area, but we\u2019ve around a quarter of all Arctic terns and hen harriers, about a third of Arctic skuas, and we\u2019re the only place with Orkney voles. So there was a lot to lose, basically.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Orkney Native Wildlife Project has a network of about 8,000 humane lethal trap boxes and Europe\u2019s first stoat detection dogs. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The latest survey data suggests the project has succeeded. Since it began in 2019, there has been a 1,267% increase in the chance of curlew hatchings, a 218% rise in vole activity and a 64% increase in hen harriers numbers. Hen Harriers are heavily persecuted by gamekeepers on the UK mainland, but now Orkney is home to 160.<\/p>\n
\u201cAgainst a background of a massive population decline, particularly of curlew and lapwing, we are managing to stabilise the population in Orkney,\u201d Sankey says.<\/p>\n
Sourced from New Zealand, where conservationists face an uphill battle to remove millions of non-native predatory mammals, the AI system is supplemented by thermal binoculars and drones, says James Geluk, the project\u2019s lead technologist and a New Zealander who has worked on an eradication project near Wellington.<\/p>\n
The thermal detectors are far more sensitive to movement than the trail cameras normally used by conservationists, he says. They operate perfectly in darkness and send live alerts in real time after video footage is uploaded to a cloud server. The AI has learned to distinguish stoats from otters and voles.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a much more accurate monitoring tool than a usual trail camera would be,\u201d Geluk says.<\/p>\n
After six years of concerted trapping efforts, including the interruption of lockdowns during the Covid crisis when stoat numbers soared again, the RSPB hopes to begin the \u201cmop-up\u201d phase in December \u2013 a threshold that will be reached after the eradication of 95% of stoats.<\/p>\n
They estimate there are only about 100 pregnant stoats left on Orkney. \u201cWe are all conservationists who work here,\u201d Sankey says. \u201cNone of us are here because we want to kill an animal. We\u2019re here because we want to protect the nature of Orkney.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At first, the stoat looks like a faint smudge in the distance. But, as it jumps closer, its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-224841","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}