The Scottish wildlife trust has just announced that plans to cull/control the breeding population of beaver in the Southern Highlands have been dropped for at least three years. I’ll comment in more detail about this in a longer post but having only ever seen a wild beaver once I think this is very encouraging.
Welcome to my blog; thoughts on wildlife, photography,anthropology, literature and philosophy.
By happy coincidence the latest issue of BBC wildlife dropped through the letterbox just as my new remote trophy camera arrived. There is a good feature on the consultation paper about reintroducing the lynx to some of the wilder parts of Britain; mainly the Scottish Highlands and the Southern Uplands. It is probably the most effective way to control the deer problem; if anywhere on the planet typifies Aldo Leopold’s idea that ‘a mountain lives in mortal fear of deer’, it is the Highlands. While it sounds a fantastic idea, there are obviously immense entrenched interests that could scupper any attempt. I’ve argued elsewhere that our perception of normality in natural habitats is skewed by the fact that very few of us in these islands have experienced the possible degrees of complexity of climax ecosystems, what professional ecologists call ‘shifting baselines’. What we see in the Scottish Highlands is an extraordinarily degraded habitat and much of that degradation is due to the huge numbers of deer. Trees for Life is a brilliant charity up in the Highlands that grapple with the issue. Read more about them here ; http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/about/aboutus.html
The idea that our overcrowded islands could support big cats is a tantalising one and having just come back from a trip to India specifically looking for cats, I’m struck by how special landscapes that still have big predators in them are. There have, of course been rumours floating round for years that there are big cats in Britain. I know two people who claim to have seen them. One is an old friend who lives in Dartmoor and the other is a guy from the Forest of Dean I recently shared a jeep with in Ranthambore National Park, in India. The problem with eye witness reports is that they are unreliable; our vision is pretty poor at judging size and distance, particularly at dusk and dawn when cats are most active. The recent case of the full scale police alert sparked by a toy tiger in Hampshire (see it here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXZ_p4RhPF4) is a case in point. So until there is firm evidence (scat, photos etc) I’m skeptical although of course ‘I want to believe’.
As for the trophy camera I’ve been after one of these for a while and plan to use it on a couple of projects this Spring. Firstly there is a badger sett that I’ve been watching now for a few years and while I’ve had some memorable evenings and even managed a few photos, I’ve long wanted to get a better record of how many adults and cubs there are and intend to use this to plan some better photos.Badgers are pretty wary and to get decent views you need to be above the scent line, which in this case means being up in the canopy. And that sounds like a cue for a meeting of the Dangerous Hair-brained Schemes Committee.
I’ll let you know how I get on.