![[mail icon]](/images/envelopesmall.gif){kind=small}
email this page to a friend
THERE is a wonderful epigram used regularly in the august halls of British learning. When university academics fall out, it is said, the arguments are so bitter because so little is at stake.
This saying can be applied to many other walks of British life where people become so obsessed with their own personal interests that they are blind to any other views. In common parlance, they cannot see the wood for the trees.
This week, a two-year war started its summer campaign on the tiny Scottish island of Uist between Britain's biggest wildlife body, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and one of its smallest, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (membership: 11,000).
A hedgehog rescued from Uist
Photo courtesy of Uist Rescue
The cause of hostilities: the decision by the RSPB, backed by Scottish Natural Heritage, to try to exterminate hedgehogs on the wild island because they eat the eggs of thousands of ground-nesting seabirds.
They insist that the popular mammals must be killed, not transported to the mainland, because they could be a nuisance there too. So last year, the plucky little BHPS launched a Scarlet Pimpernel campaign to smuggle them off the island - a campaign which restarted this week as the hedgehogs come out of hibernation.
Now I happen to support both these bodies and have done so for many years. But I cannot help wondering if the RSPB Goliath is not over-reaching itself in pushing aside the objections of the David BHPS.
You see, I like hedgehogs, not just they are characters in a dozen children's books, but because they do a damn good job for any gardener: their favourite foods are slugs and snails and they are welcome on my allotment any time.
I like birds, too, and feed them regularly, particularly in the winter. But as an angler, I also like fish which, paradoxically perhaps, I catch to eat. And when it comes to protection, salmon, trout and sea trout seem to come very low down the list of priorities when it comes to the big animal welfare charities.
Here, I have a bone to pick with the RSPB because, once again, they have put the welfare of their avian friends above that of fish and fisherman by insisting that cormorants and some other fish-eating birds should be protected species.
In recent years, largely thanks to the over fishing of our seas, an increasing number of cormorants have been driven inland in search of food. And our North Country rivers and streams, once alive with trout and salmon parr, have become their favourite hunting grounds.
But these fish species are under threat as it is, because of pollution from farm effluent and sediment from bank erosion caused by flash floods, covering their gravel spawning grounds so that their eggs are swept away.
The salmon is teetering on the edge of extinction in many rivers - and would have died out years ago had anglers not started large-scale breeding programmes costing hundreds of thousands of pounds to restock them.
On the salmon river I fish, we have entered a voluntary moratorium not to kill salmon before June and then only to take a maximum bag of just three per season. And yet along our banks, cormorants make hay, feasting on trout fingerling trout and salmon parr, some of which we have so expensively reared.
Now here is a case of an un-natural predator taking advantage of man's protection. The cormorant should not be there in the first place. But should a water bailiff shoot one, the RSPB would be down on him like a ton of bricks.
Apart from anything else, fish and fishing play an important role in the rural economy. There are more than three million registered anglers in Britain and they spent a lot of money on tackle, fishing licenses, meals and B&B near good fishing spots.
So if poor fish are so low on the protection list, cannot people like RSPB officials recognise that rural business is an important element in the countryside and its wildlife they wish to protect? Time to see the wood and the trees - and help relocate the Uist hedgehogs.
Your views:
-
I, as you might have guessed, come from Benbecula where I have lived most of my life, and so know the situation regarding the Hedgehogs pretty well, that being from an islander's perspective.
Here are some facts regarding Hedgehogs in Uist:
Hedgehogs are an alien species to the islands - preditors
Hedgehog were introduced by incomers to the islands - by Teachers for use in their gardens
Hedgehogs are known to carry diseases which are dangerous in a closed environment like the islands
Unlike the Mainland, there are no natural preditors to control the Hedgehogs
Most of all they have decimated the Ground nesting bird population, which the island is famous for
Now, I am not a fan of the RSPB or the SNH (Scottish Natural Heritage), but for once these Quangos are doing what is right, after years of discussion and stalling. It was clear 10 years ago that there was a serious problem with the Hedgehogs, especially during the progressive springs where the "shreaks and calls" of birds like the Lapwing, Dunlin and Oyster Catcher were becomming less and less common. Now when you are brought up on an island, especially in a place like Uist, you become aware of the surroundings around you, and in a sense become in tune with nature, you strike a balance in the role which man plays in this environment. We are the protector and the maintainer.
The bird population in the Uists would not be so great if it were not for the successive generations that have worked and tilled the land. This is a concept that most incommers do not appreciate or adhere to, and instead generally railroad their opinion on us naive islanders. Quango's like the RSPB and SNH have upset the balance that once existed, but as I said before they are doing something right for a change. It is totally unreasonable to say that the hedgehogs should not be culled, and instead transported to a sanctuary on the mainland; surely this is just passing the problem on to somewhere else. Is it assumed that after a whole life of feasting on nutritious bird eggs that the humble hedgehog will move to a comparitively bland diet of worms? I am no qualified biologist, but it makes me wonder.
Surely at the end of the day, and in the public purses interest, the simplest, most effective solution is applicable, a general cull to control this alien species. It may not be liked by the people who live in the towns and cities, who have no concept of the Uists, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Afterall, it is at the end of the day the survival of the fittest.
Douglas MacDonald - > Isle of Benbecula, Western Isles, Scotland
