Concerns over spending more millions to save capercaillie in Cairngorms National Park

A new emergency plan to help save the under threat capercaillie has taken another step forward - but only after strong concerns were raised over the lack of past success.

The Cairngorm National Park Authority's board members agreed at their latest meeting to move forward with the six-year Capercaillie Emergency Plan - but subject to provisos.

It intends to call on the Scottish Government and NatureScot to accelerate a pine marten population survey as a priority - amid concerns the continuing recovery of the protected mammal species is having a damaging impact on numbers of the birds.

As well as calling for a survey as a priority the board will also write to government ministers to reflect these and other concerns and will seek a meeting with the relevant minister.

The Capercaillie Emergency Plan for 2024 to 2030 includes a range of planned measures - including woodland expansions, forest bog restoration, fence removal and marking near leks, reducing disturbance of known sites, and monitoring of leks and other factors such as pine marten populations and researching possible introductions of additional capercaillies into the population.

More than £3 million has so far been secured from a range of funding sources - both public and private - and the plan would also focus on general improvements to habitats that would benefit multiple species, not just the capercaillie.

Addressing the meeting Andy Ford, director of nature and climate change, told board members: "[The] emergency plan is specifically a request from Scottish Government for NatureScot and the CNPA to work together with stakeholders to maintain the long term investment in habitat, produce a spacially-costed plan and to do a pine marten population study."

However, some members were worried that efforts to save capercaillie were too slow, and argued for predator control measures to be introduced swiftly.

Bill Lobban said: "We've spent huge amounts of money and we've divided communities and yet we've had little if any impact on the species. We're doing something wrong.

"Maybe the solution is bringing in a large quantity of new birds, the same as was done last time, or predation control, and surely predation control must be part of this emergency [plan] rather than say 'well, let's just spend huge amounts more money and we'll do another survey to see how many predators there are', since it seems to be fairly obvious to those in the know that predator control must be part of this."

Fellow board member Russell Jones, citing plans for the pine marten study, said it felt like "we just seem to be kicking the can down the road" and said that "if we're not going to involve lethal predator control in this then I would struggle to support it".

"It we agree this today and more money is spent on capercaillie and it fails again, then the narrative will be that the board authorised officers to spend the money and they went out and then did it - so it'll come back to us again."

Earlier Mr Ford told the meeting that peer-reviewed scientific studies had found that diversionary feeding of pine marten could reduce predation of bird nests by 82.5 per cent, without the need to target a protected species with lethal measures.

Board member Steve Micklewright said he supported the proposals, and said that without knowing the actual pine marten population, or trying the diversionary feeding, there was no way of knowing if lethal control would be the right course of action.

"It's a difficult one. I would say that the habitat measures are exactly where the money should be going and I really support that and I think the whole reasons for the causes of capercaillie are really complicated, and predation might be an issue, fencing, disturbance, habitat, climate change - it's a really complicated one.

"But I would just remind board members, if you're going to take lethal control out on a protected species that once used to be extremely rare, you're going to have to have a really good justification for that."

He continued: "If you go down that road you're going to have to absolutely prove that you've tried all the other measures that you possibly can, and diversionary feeding at the moment seems like a measure.

"If we are going to take action we have to absolutely know as best that we can that it's the right action to take and I would say I don't think we know that."

Grant Moir, CEO of the park authority, also sounded caution over assuming pine marten were the only reason for capercaillie numbers, arguing the difference between correlation and causation.

He explained: "It's not as simple as just pine marten because the population [of capercaillie] in Deeside plunged and disappeared almost, when there were no pine marten in Deeside, so the idea that it's just a link between the two is not right".

He said there was a conversation to be had on potential lethal control, but without doing the survey first to ascertain pine marten numbers they'd "just be going round in circles".

He added: “The only way where if you want to do pine marten control is to know the population levels within the park because you cannot apply for a licence to control a species that you do not know how many you’ve got.

“And you need to do the scientific work to work out how many you would need to take and also what impacts that would have on other predators because the reality is it's not as simple as if we just knock some pine marten on the head, the capercaillie will survive.”

Mr Moir also stressed at the meeting that it was not Cairngorms National Park Authority budget money being spent.

Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.