The past month has been a busy one for everybody here at the ONWP. With a stoat confirmed to be present on Rousay, we’ve been hard at work trying to catch and remove it from the island. The full timeline of updates on our work there can be found here.
But this has also only made it clearer how important our trapping work is on Mainland Orkney. We’ve continued to remove stoats from all areas of the Mainland and Linked Isles, despite the fact that denning females continue to hide below ground. The majority of stoats were caught in East Mainland, South Burray and Ronaldsay, just as in April, the previous month.
In total, we removed 14 stoats, responded to 72 stoat sightings from members of the public, deployed 239 new traps, and carried out 10,097 trap checks.
Unnatural Arrivals
Our ongoing exhibition at the Orkney Museum, Unnatural Arrivals, has seen a fantastic reception.
Bringing together artwork and science to tell the story of the stoat crisis in Orkney, this multimedia experience has attracted all manner of visitors – from Orcadian locals to travellers from far-flung places.
The exhibit will run until 22 June – so if you haven’t had the chance to visit yet, there’s still plenty of time!
The Rousay situation
4 June Update
Since our last update the team have been continuing to work with local volunteers to monitor the camera and trap network as well as begin to expand the response based on evidence found in the field. Although we have not had any more public sightings since the start of April, two dog searches at the start of this week did discover fresh scat (poo) in a location approximately 2km from the original sighting at the western end of Muckle Water. Alongside this, one of our cameras detected a stoat near the original public sighting location over the last weekend (30th-31st May). A new network of cameras and traps was established, by the team of local volunteers, the day after the fresh scat was discovered. The discovery of the fresh scat is very useful as this allows us to continue to build a picture of the extent of the problem, although more evidence is needed before we can draw any solid conclusions.
We currently have 53 additional traps and 23 cameras (including 5 AI cameras) on Rousay as part of the response.
National Volunteer Week
The first week of June was National Volunteer Week, and we’d like to give a warm thanks to everyone who’s volunteered their time to help with our project. Over the years, volunteers have given us over 29,800 hours of their time – and supported us in a variety of ways.
Local volunteers are key to some of the ONWP’s most crucial work, including the yearly vole and wading bird surveys that collect important data on the population status of many native species.
We've also had great support from volunteers based on Orkney’s other islands, who’ve taken part in putting together biosecurity response plans in case stoats were found off the Mainland. The volunteers on Rousay have been working extraordinarily hard responding to the current stoat sightings, and we’re beyond grateful to them all.
