By Mike Swan, Senior Advisor
Twenty or so years ago I struck up a slightly weird ‘friendship’ with a man who owned a few acres of woodland in Devon, where he lived in a yurt. He was not against shooting, and was positively enthusiastic about my passion for coastal wildfowling, but he hated the big commercial shoot on his boundary. Aside from issues over wounded birds and trespass to pick up, which led to our first meeting when he complained to the Code of Good Shooting Practice, he was also convinced that the keepers were illegally killing badgers.
This was in the days when government were consulting about whether to license badger culls to help fight bovine TB, and my man (I cannot even remember his name) took an active interest in the consultation responses. So, there I was at a country fair, when the phone went off and it was him: “I have just been reading the GWCT response,” he said. Then he read out a phrase that said that any cull must be “ruthless” or it would just be a waste of badgers’ lives.
“Does that mean what I think it means?” he said. Well, of course it did, and I said so, to which he replied that at least we were in agreement over that bit, even if he was fundamentally opposed to any cull.
I got to mulling this over, because I hear increasing comment about killing pests and predators during the breeding season, and the consequent risk of orphaned offspring. I fear that we are heading towards a situation where well-meaning people will push harder for legislation that would make effective predation control all but impossible, much to the detriment of conservation and biodiversity.
Now, please do not get me wrong: I am all for doing whatever we do in as welfare-friendly way as possible, but it must still be effective, or it is simply a waste of lives. So, for example, I am a strong advocate of using Larsen traps to catch crows and magpies right now, in spring. However, I am also of the view that you must start early.
For many years when I was running a wild partridge beat in my amateur sort of way, I would set out to scrounge decoy birds from friends any time from mid-March, when these two corvid species first get territorial. My ambition was to have all the established pairs on the patch removed by my birthday in the second week of April, well before the first crow or magpie egg is laid.
From there on, it is a case of picking up the lower orders, who have no territory, and therefore move in to try to occupy the vacancy. If you do the job efficiently and indeed ruthlessly, you will have these incomers wrapped up before their breeding attempt starts. And so the job continues on until sometime in June, when the partridges have hatched and are away from their nests into the relative safety of the growing crops. Meanwhile, actively breeding pairs of crows or magpies from over the boundary will not have tried to move in, because they have all that they need in their established territories.
So, if this is done correctly, there are no orphaned corvids. Start late, however, and that is exactly what you will have. Time and again I have fielded a late April or May enquiry from someone who is incensed about the havoc that the magpies are wreaking amongst the songbirds in their garden. They have heard that the Larsen trap is the answer and want to know the what, where and how, and in a hurry too.
My stock response is always the same: you are too late, the damage is already done, and if you start now there will be magpie chicks starving in the nest. They may not like it, but most people do see sense, and agree that they should get properly organised for an early start next year.
Getting to a similar place with mammalian predators is rather harder, but we can still do our best. So, for example, with foxes, night shooting is probably easiest in winter, when there is minimal cover to hide the beast, and a well-organised keeper will surely have the foxes down to a minimum before they start to breed. But vixens and litters move, so the space that has been created is likely to attract incomers.
If these are not mopped up pronto, the damage done by a vixen feeding a litter can be enormous, whether it be to wild pheasants, grey partridges, grouse, lapwings, curlews or a host of other species. If we do not follow up our late winter campaign into the key season of vulnerability, then our good works will be undone, and the whole exercise will have been pointless.
Lately I have delivered several training courses on the use of the GWCT mink raft, which is perhaps the greatest invention of the GWCT Predation team. For the uninitiated, this is a raft with a tunnel and a clay pad where any passing mink appears unable to resist hauling out, only to leave its footprints by way of a calling card. Once this happens, we slip a cage trap into the tunnel, and chances are the mink will be caught within a couple of days. More to the point, if there are no tracks there is no mink, so no point in setting the trap. It may take a moment for this penny to drop, but if you set traps when there is no mink out there, you can only catch non-targets.
Now, it is well known that predation by the American mink has been a huge driver in the decline of our native ‘Ratty’, the water vole. Removing mink using the raft has been a key to both recovery and reintroduction projects. Meanwhile, us providing training to Wildlife Trusts and the like has been a huge help in getting ordinary conservationists to understand a bit about the GWCT’s research into predation, and the importance of predation control more widely.
When delivering these courses, I pretty much inevitably get questions about trapping during the breeding season, and orphaned mink. Here again, my answer is to get going early; female mink trapped in February, March and early April will surely be pregnant, but young are rarely born before May. However, if we give up then, there is a real risk of recolonisation, and a female mink with up to ten young will use up an awful lot of water voles to grow her litter.
Time and again we hit on this same conundrum. Yes, we can do the bulk of what is needed to control predation without risking orphaning the young of the predators, but if we do not do the follow up, and keep the pressure on into the breeding season, then the whole project is likely to unravel, to the detriment of the wildlife that we are trying to conserve. We really do need to be ruthless over this, because anything less is going to be just a waste of predator lives, and that is morally objectionable.