While heatwaves swept across much of Europe last month, our trappers set out into warm but milder sunshine, targeting invasive non-native stoats across Orkney. Summer is an important time of year for our project, because it’s when we usually see a spike in stoat activity – with stoats leaving their dens, and hunting or just running around more often out in the open.
Across June, we removed 71 stoats, responded to 140 stoat sightings from members of the public, deployed 192 new traps, and carried out 13,091 trap checks.
We caught more stoats (42) in East Mainland and the Linked Isles than in the rest of Mainland Orkney combined. This is because we have been heavily targeting this part of the county, as we are confident only a small number of breeding female stoats remain there.
In all areas of Orkney, we caught more stoats than in June 2025. This is also likely due to increasing efforts to trap remaining stoats, with extra staff and more traps deployed throughout the island.
Art attack
We were sad to see Unnatural Arrivals, our multimedia exhibit at the Orkney Museum, conclude on 22 June. But we were really heartened by its fantastic reception!
Across six weeks, over 14,460 people visited the exhibition – journeying from many different corners of the world, to learn more about the effort to remove stoats from Orkney and the ways this has inspired local artists. Some were Orkney locals or travellers from mainland Britain, whereas others came from further afield; visitors joined us from Brazil, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and many more places.
We’re pleased to have helped bring news of Orkney’s native wildlife, and the local people protecting it, to an ever-wider audience.
And we have plenty of other outreach events planned for later in the summer – stay tuned to find out more…
Stoats on Rousay
Our team has also continued to respond to the stoat incursion in Rousay, alongside the fantastic community response volunteers on the island.
In total, we currently have 63 additional traps deployed, 22 cameras and 5 AI thermal cameras in Rousay. We’ve been prioritising the areas of the island where members of the public have reported stoat sightings to us.
The full timeline of updates on our work there can be found here.
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.
