Reintroducing wild animals

[jayne lee wilson]

I took this as a TIC comment - grey squirrels are basically rats with bushy tails and are not welcome up here. I can remember when we had red squirrels in our garden, but no longer.

OG

Any animals you live close to for years become as friends.... it isn't the Grey Squirrels' fault about disease-carrying, and the Reds are never as smart or as confident as Greys, often very nervous in gardens, which hasn't helped them. But they are well-looked after on reserves now...

[Bryn]

Any animals you live close to for years become as friends.... it isn't the Grey Squirrels' fault about disease-carrying, and the Reds are never as smart or as confident as Greys, which hasn't helped them. But they are well-looked after on reserves now...

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/march-2019-update-invasive-non-native-species-and-grey-squirrels

[jayne lee wilson]

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/m...grey-squirrels

Sounds like a Hostile Environment to me...

One or two apple trees and woody shrubs have suffered from bark chewing here, but there's a good abundance of natural (as well as my bird) food for them so they don't eat a lot of trees. Their very favourite food is beech nuts, the shells litter the ground in the autumn, they eat, bury and store them in numbers. (Parakeets - another alien invader, like the topmost nuts as well)

Of course I accept the need for control in some places, I just hate the anthropomorphic demonisation of any wild creature.
Dress like a superhero, fierce expression, high velocity rifle over the shoulder, life's mission the eradication of...? This happened with Magpies too - I think some humans can't stand clever animals.
There are better things to devote yourself to.

For me it is about local conditions and contexts, I dislike the general condemnation of any animal from too selfishly an anthropocentric POV, or as if it has moral agency.
(See wicked, dangerous Lynxes attacking sheep...)

[doversoul1]

I took this as a TIC comment - grey squirrels are basically rats with bushy tails and are not welcome up here. I can remember when we had red squirrels in our garden, but no longer.

OG

Yes, they are apparently called Tree Rats in the Us. In my back garden rats are left alone as long as they don’t become a pest to us.

Red squirrels, for whose troubles the greys are blamed, became virtually extinct in the UK before greys were even introduced

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/28/grey-squirrels-are-unfairly-maligned

They could be of some use to us

https://www.theguardian.com/food/shortcuts/2019/feb/04/view-to-a-cull-is-grey-squirrel-the-ultimate-sustainable-meat

[jayne lee wilson]

Rats in the garden are sort-of-ok (depends what they're up to)...

It's when the cat brings one inside that your troubles begin...

(Excellent G-link DS, thanks... never saw that before...)

[ardcarp]

In the Scottish Highlands, red deer numbers have to be controlled by gillies (or whatever they're called) culling them with firearms. Wolf packs would have done it in the past. Surely nature is better 'red in tooth and claw' than being managed by employees of wealthy lairds?

[Richard Tarleton]

This thread seems to have moved from reintroduction to control.....which was kind of the problem in the first place

I was out on one of my usual beats this morning, by the tidal river, and fell into conversation with two ladies who asked me what I'd seen (being draped with optical equipment tends to invite the question ) and one said she'd seen a red kite over her village the other day. I said there'd been one near where we were standing a couple of days ago, following a tractor that was doing a traditional hay cut (waiting for mice and shrews to run out). The other said a sparrowhawk had landed on her hedge while a blackbird was on her lawn tugging at a worm, and she'd chased the sparrowhawk with a broom (obviously didn't get close) - I felt like pointing out that she might as well have rescued the worm from the blackbird, that it was called the food chain, etc. etc., but gave up in internal despair and wished them a good day . There are people who blame the decline in songbirds on raptors.....

ardcarp - yes indeed. Employees also of NGOs - Scottish National Trust.....(see my post above)....

[doversoul1]

Richard
This is part of the Lynx project page I posted earlier. This looks to me somewhat having a cake and trying to eat it. Could not reintroduction be done without these additional profit? Or can reintroduction be reintroduction if it has to come with these additional benefit/profit which is not part of the wild creatures' nature?

Reintroductions into other European countries have been a remarkable success, with the best managed programs constructing whole new eco-friendly industries such as wildlife tourism around their presence, breathing new economic life into remote rural communities

[Richard Tarleton]

Richard
This is part of the Lynx project page I posted earlier. This looks to me somewhat having a cake and trying to eat it. Could not reintroduction be done without these additional profit? Or can reintroduction be reintroduction if it has to come with these additional benefit/profit which is not part of the wild creatures' nature?

Reintroductions into other European countries have been a remarkable success, with the best managed programs constructing whole new eco-friendly industries such as wildlife tourism around their presence, breathing new economic life into remote rural communities

Given the anthropocentric nature of the countryside - even the wildest mountainous areas are still part of agricultural systems - summer grazing in high Alpine or Pyrenean pastures, that sort of thing - somehow, a way has to be found to to enable reintroductions to take place around existing land use, and to sell the idea to existing land users. We've left so little space for wildlife (in the UK, less than anywhere else). I have no problem with ideas that result in "remote rural communities" buying into things like reintroduction schemes, otherwise they're going to defeat them.

Going on (and on) about the UK, both the negative attitudes to wildlife on the part of our farmers, and the extent to which we fail to challenge them when they tell us that they are the guardians of the countryside, never cease to amaze me. They tell us they leave uncultivated margins for game birds and songbirds. And don't get me started on managed grouse moors, and hen harriers.

In some European countries where I've hiked and birded extensively (Croatia, Slovenia) wolves and bears never went away, yet people seem to live alongside them, and take pride in them. Central and eastern Croatia has a healthy population of white-tailed eagles, which have been successfully reintroduced in Scotland but whose reintroduction to other parts of the UK is bitterly opposed by farming interests. Part of the problem is that this country is simply too crowded, we haven't left enough space for wildlife.

[doversoul1]

Given the anthropocentric nature of the countryside - even the wildest mountainous areas are still part of agricultural systems - summer grazing in high Alpine or Pyrenean pastures, that sort of thing - somehow, a way has to be found to to enable reintroductions to take place around existing land use, and to sell the idea to existing land users. We've left so little space for wildlife (in the UK, less than anywhere else). I have no problem with ideas that result in "remote rural communities" buying into things like reintroduction schemes, otherwise they're going to defeat them.

Going on (and on) about the UK, both the negative attitudes to wildlife on the part of our farmers, and the extent to which we fail to challenge them when they tell us that they are the guardians of the countryside, never cease to amaze me. They tell us they leave uncultivated margins for game birds and songbirds. And don't get me started on managed grouse moors, and hen harriers.

In some European countries where I've hiked and birded extensively (Croatia, Slovenia) wolves and bears never went away, yet people seem to live alongside them, and take pride in them. Central and eastern Croatia has a healthy population of white-tailed eagles, which have been successfully reintroduced in Scotland but whose reintroduction to other parts of the UK is bitterly opposed by farming interests. Part of the problem is that this country is simply too crowded, we haven't left enough space for wildlife.

Thank you, Richard. This seems to be an impossible obstacle to overcome.

this country is simply too crowded,

[Dave2002]

The Scottish Wildlife Trust has a list of species it feels need support - https://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk...ority-species/

I’m not sure whether other national bodies (England, Wales, Ireland have similar lists.

[DracoM]

Numbers of areas in UK are either contemplating and or have activated the re-introduction of beavers.
Believe me, this is a serious, serious mistake.
I have travelled in the Tierra del Fuego NP in Patagonia / Chile / Argentina areas, seen the astonishing impact.

Many of these areas are increasingly desperate to get rid of beavers because they have devastated woodland, pasture land on the edge of beaver habitats, allowing flooding, collapsed natural and man-made drainage, costing millions to repair - repairs that cannot be undertaken until the beavers have been removed.

I have photos, listened to accounts of de-population of hitherto useful land because of them.

Beavers are brilliant and very strictly self-serving engineers, and once entrenched are pure and expensive hell to get rid of.

[Sir Velo]

Whereas of course human deforestation of the Amazon, Pantanal etc is of course good for the environment and the future of the planet...

[Dave2002]

I always thought that golden eagles were the UK’s largest bird, but apparently sea eagles which have been reintroduced in Scotland, are bigger in wingspan. Size is relative anyway - could be height, weight or wingspan.

[DracoM]

Whereas of course human deforestation of the Amazon, Pantanal etc is of course good for the environment and the future of the planet...

NO, of course it isn't. Fairly silly comment, IMO.

We are talking about DELIBERATELY introducing beavers into a UK environment when there seems to be more than a little evidence of the damage they can do as part of their natural activity. It's not wilful - it's what beavers do!

And, yes, I have walked a LOT in the Pantanal and Amazonian areas and I am just as furious about logging, soya, cattle rearing for famous burger chains. BUT this is about UK importing an animal with a record into our own environments. Seems a bizarrely counter-intuitive step.