We need a clear strategy for delivering predator control
How many foxes do we need to kill in order to raise the productivity of the species we’re conserving?
By Patrick Laurie
I’ve hardly shot a fox this year. For reasons which aren’t very clear, they didn’t turn up in any of the normal places throughout March and into April when I am usually working hard to bring their numbers down; nothing seemed to come together this year. Even with my thermal scope and spotter, I hardly saw a single fox until June and the start of July.
That’s when I was suddenly flooded with cubs in all kinds of unexpected places, and this only seemed to confirm that they had been around all along – they had just been working in different ways. When I have asked my local friends and neighbours if they have been similarly confounded by their foxes, they have shrugged. For them, it’s been business as usual.
I do a great deal of work on foxes to support my local curlews and lapwings, but as the numbers of both have declined over the last 10 years, the effort has often begun to feel futile. Up on the hill where my grandfather farmed, we used to kill between 90 and 110 foxes every year. That was a lot of work shared between several of us, and it has to be said that most of those foxes were caught in snares along fences – a practice which has been illegal for the past decade.
Once that ban came in, the number of foxes we killed dropped substantially. Those foxes were still there – we just weren’t catching them. On a much smaller area of lowland farmland where I live now, it was normal to kill between 30 and 40 foxes each year, but even after changes to the law on snaring, this number was affected by a whole range of factors, particularly who else was shooting and where.
This year I have shot six young foxes and three adults – and yet when I have been visiting gamekeeper friends in Angus and Aberdeenshire, they’ve been amazed by this number. They’re used to shooting three or four foxes in a year, largely because they’ve got numbers down to such a tiny figure across such a wide area that all they’re doing is keeping the door shut.
This is relevant to waders because in a fragmented, intensively managed landscape like Galloway, predator control is rarely a matter of keeping the door shut. Foxes exist in such abundance that it’s difficult to make any inroads on their numbers – particularly where there are few full-time gamekeepers delivering predator control to a standard that would be recognised on grouse moors.
I was trained as a gamekeeper by a legend of the old school who took me under his wing on his 50th year in post. He ran an excellent pheasant shoot for his boss on the hills above Kirkcudbright, and he absolutely believed in the importance of year-round predator control for all wildlife on the estate. He had a particular enthusiasm for the ringed plover which bred on the shore below his house, but he also adored the grey partridges which still lived in the rough grazing around the upland areas of the estate.
He wouldn’t tolerate a fox or a crow, and while his predator control activities escalated when poults went to the wood in July and August, he was just as likely to be trapping and shooting predators in February.
He had been in post for so long that his retirement was noted in the Galloway News. In his wake, a syndicate took the shooting and I guess that many readers will recognise what happened next – because of course there is no real imperative to manage predation outside the rearing and shooting season. The new team of keepers did nothing from February to July, then they shot a few foxes to protect poults in their pens.
It was still ‘predator control’ per se, but it wasn’t predator control as it had been. In due course, the plovers were gone and the partridges vanished. Knowing that some estates go further on cost cutting and mitigate predation simply by putting more birds down, it’s obvious that while gamekeepers can support a flourishing of wildlife, it’s not a given.
Some shoots add nothing – and since there are legitimate claims that excessive releasing of pheasants and partridges can damage biodiversity, there’s a fair chance that some shoots do more harm than good.
What does effective predator control look like?
There are a hundred ways to think about the subject of predator control, but what I’m doing here is dancing around a few examples of how and why it’s such a complex subject – because while there is evidence to support the value of predator control, it’s a tricky thing to implement.
Notwithstanding several noisy critics who do all they can to lambast gamekeepers, I sense that the general public is more open to conversations about predator control now than they were 10 years ago, particularly when it comes to protecting species like curlews. The trick is not necessarily recognising that we need it or getting people to support it – the trick is in actually doing it.
That question has been in the back of my mind over the last six months as I have travelled around Scotland visiting wader conservationists from the Mull of Galloway to Sullom Voe, with a few sneaky trips to Wales, the Isle of Man and the Republic of Ireland. It’s always seemed clear that people want to do predator control, but they want to do it effectively.
Which brings us back to the question of what effectiveness looks like – how many foxes do we need to kill in order to raise the productivity of the species we’re conserving? In terms of funding predator control, how do we fund somebody like me who usually shoots X number of foxes in a year when, in a year like this one, no foxes show up? If I was being paid a set amount to kill a set number of foxes, I would be out of business through no fault of my own.
As it stands, certain funding streams in Scotland enable farmers to get paid for predator control – and the government is antsy about this, not on welfare grounds but more because it’s almost impossible to gauge whether this money is being well-spent. In a world of straitened circumstances and tightened belts, everything needs to be justified – and predator control is bloody hard to justify.
One farmer might shoot three foxes in a spring and call it predator control. Another might shoot a hundred and still not relieve predation pressure to a point at which his lapwings might thrive. It’s quite common around here for farmers to let people shoot foxes with a lamp or with thermal scopes at night time – but is this predator control when it’s just a leisure activity undertaken two or three times a month?
Some gamekeepers work around the clock to reduce fox numbers and never get there – is it realistic to imagine that a few weekend warriors are going to extirpate foxes from a landscape when (if we’re completely honest) they’re doing all their shooting from the window of their trucks, and rarely setting foot outside.
We’ve been tied up with the effort of proving the point about predator control for so long that we haven’t planned for the situation in which we now find ourselves. Lots of people argue in favour of predator control and I agree with the sentiment – but now we’re ready to have the next conversation.
How is predator control going to work? The gamekeeper model is certainly effective, but it can’t be rolled into a landscape as patchy and fragmented as lowland Galloway – and besides, who would pay for it? If we want farmers to do this work, we need to pay them instead – but they don’t have the time and many don’t have the skills (or the equipment).
Travelling around Scotland, I have been surprised by how many farmers can’t tell the difference between rooks and carrion crows, and by how many people don’t have shotguns or rifles. It’s also been obvious that gun ownership is not a qualification in its own right – just because people have the equipment required to deliver predator control, that doesn’t mean that they have the skill, dedication or persistence to deliver it.
A comprehensive strategy
If we’re serious about delivering predator control, we need to start presenting civil servants and ministers with a clear plan about how it could work, detailing who is shooting what and where, when and why. The same logic applies to the issue of badger control. Much as I agree with the concept of culling badgers to support wider conservation, the culls in the west country showed how much time and work are actually required to kill badgers in any meaningful quantity.
I have spoken to lots of people who want to control badgers – but faced with a choice between staying at home or sitting out until 3am at a badger sett, I’d guess that most people would choose another glass of wine and an evening in front of the telly. That’s not a criticism – it’s just reality.
We’re beyond the point at which “any dead fox is to the good.” Predator control cannot be about just walking out and shooting whatever fox you see at whatever time of year. Some people advocate for predator control on the basis that we should “kill as many as we can – we’ll never kill them all,” but that makes others nervous.
I know from experience that it’s easy to remove the majority of foxes from an area – but the final few are often the ones you needed to get from the start. I’d guess that the act of shooting fox cubs in August adds precisely nothing to the UK wader conservation effort, and unless you’re rigorously and systematically targeting breeding foxes in February and March, you’re hardly going to touch the sides of the issue – and that’s before we talk about crows and stoats and rats.
This is not to be defeatist or to criticise plenty of good predator control. The fact that I have been paid by the government to gather information on predator control suggests that it’s being taken seriously by people who can make a difference.
But this is not a test or a hypothetical – I’m asking pragmatic questions about predator control because we absolutely lack even the most basic information about delivering this conservation technique in a 21st century landscape. What will it cost? Who will actually do it? How much of it needs to be done?
The ecological argument is sound – but just as an architect can develop plans to construct the most wonderful buildings, nothing happens unless the builders have everything they need.
