19 July 2015 News/Editorial
Three apparently unrelated incidents start us off this time.
Ken ran out to greet me as I set about some strimming and weed killing earlier this week.
Pointing at a little hole at the base of a huge Wellingtonia, he smiled and said triumphantly “We saw a hedgehog go in there!” We agreed we used to see them all the time, until the badger sets increased hugely both in size and number over recent years. The unspoken truth, of course, being that badgers kill hedgehogs, and they have killed almost all of ours.
A month ago my brother Simon kindly asked me on a trip to the Farne Islands to see the nesting guillemots, puffins, kittiwakes and terns (arctic, common and sandwich), amongst many others. It was fantastic. What I had not expected was that the boat taking us out there would first go to the Outer Farne to look at some grey seals, of which there are many 1,000s around the shores of the UK, each one partial to a bite or three of passing salmon as they nose their way up the Northumbrian coast towards their native rivers in Scotland. The driver of the boat (Captain?) informed us that whereas seals eat mountains of all sorts of fish, nothing predates on seals other than killer whales, and there have been no killer whales off the Farnes for many years. There were a number of us salmon fishermen on the boat who, silently, and some not so silently, wished that Orca might make a comeback, to redress the balance somewhat in favour of our returning adult salmon and grilse.
Many years ago, before licensing of such things was required, a goosander met an untimely death and, just before breathing its last, it disgorged the contents of its crop/stomach, which comprised 6 young salmon, a couple of young trout and a young eel…...that is one meal for one goosander on one day, just imagine what depradations the cohorts of goosanders and cormorants wreak on Tweed’s juvenile stocks over 365 days of the year. We have a photograph as evidence.
The common theme here is that the odds are stacked in favour of the hunter, to the huge detriment of the hunted, and there is nothing we humans are allowed to do to redress the balance.
Unless the badgers are reduced in number, I cannot see we will ever have hedgehogs in any numbers again.
And when it comes to our salmon, there is a certain irony in the Government seeking to control humans killing them, especially the rod wielding variety of humans, when they kill so few, yet the goosanders, cormorants and seals kill, unseen, countless 1,000s of both juvenile salmon and returning adults, yet there is nothing, or almost nothing, we humans are allowed to do about it.
I am not expecting any of this to change, but do you wonder at the incredulity of the rod fishing fraternity at the needless impositions on them of kill licensing, quotas and tagging...when it is the rods (both anglers and fishery owners/proprietors) who have done more than anyone else over the last 3 decades both to reduce the numbers they kill themselves and to fund the purchase and decommissioning of nets?
Now does anyone know the address of a good, slightly peckish, killer whale that we can tempt to holiday off the Farnes for a month or two, lovely beaches, all expenses paid and views of Bamburgh Castle? Or a hawk that likes nothing better than chasing goosanders and cormorants up the Tweed?
It would seem that when it comes to the hunter and the hunted, we humans cannot reduce the impact of the hunter on the increasingly scarce hunted, except by proxy from another animal.
Next time my brother asks me to the Farne Islands, it wouldn’t half cheer me up to see some resident killer whales as part of the trip….. to keep some of those grey seals “honest”.