A programme to remove invasive stoats from Scotland's Orkney archipelago is working, with native wildlife including rare voles beginning to thrive again.
Islands are among the most fragile ecosystems on Earth. When a new predator arrives, the native wildlife has often never encountered it before and has no instinct to avoid it. In Orkney, that predator was the stoat – and its arrival pushed some of Scotland's rarest wildlife toward the edge.
Stoats are not native to Orkney. They arrived, began preying on native voles, and disrupted an ecosystem that had been balanced for thousands of years. In response, conservationists launched a careful, sustained programme to remove them from the archipelago entirely.
The results are now visible. Native wildlife is recovering. One of the UK's rarest mammals – the Orkney vole – is reported to be thriving again across the islands. The delicate balance that the stoats disrupted is reasserting itself as the pressure is lifted.
Projects like this require years of painstaking work across difficult terrain. Orkney is an archipelago of islands, some small and remote, and finding and removing every stoat demands extraordinary persistence from the teams involved.
The success in Orkney adds to a growing body of evidence that invasive species removal, done carefully and completely, can restore ecosystems that appeared permanently damaged. New Zealand has pioneered this approach, and Scotland is now producing its own proof that it works.
An island where rare wildlife is thriving again is not a small thing. It is evidence that careful conservation work, sustained over years, can genuinely turn the tide for species that seemed to be running out of time.
Source: Positive News