Barra's Nature Problem

Is that a Hurchin on Barra Clara?

 

The picture is of Gilly the Guillemot who my friend Jon and I found on our beach and tried to rescue. I didn’t have any pictures of ground nesting birds, so thought you’d like one of Gilly. She was being harassed by gulls and crows when we found her, so we whisked her off to the vet to see if she could be saved, but although she survived the night she’d lost too much weight. Poor Gilly!

But if you are of a certain vintage you’ll  recall Stanley Baxter’s Parliamo Glasgow with the deathless line, “Is that a marra on the barra Clara?”The funster was mocking the dreadful BBC language series which taught unsuspecting denizens of these isles dodgy and mostly useless Italian. But now it’s hurchins on Barra that are a problem. A hurchin or hurcheon is as most know is an ‘urchin’ or a hedgehog and it’s the possible it will become the scourge of Barra. These sweet, mostly inoffensive beasties if you don’t mind the fleas, are normally a good indicator of the health and diversity of the wildlife in an area. But they have been decimated and more by urbanisation and pesticides over recent decades, but the problem is that they aren’t native to Barra. And that’s a real headache  for local ground nesting birds  and their unprotected nests so they’ve called in the sniffer dogs.

The wading birds on the neighbouring islands of Benbecula and South Uist have a problem and it’s likely caused by these creatures as numbers of the birds have declined dramatically. And after the discovery of a flattened hedgehog on a Barra road NatureScot, the wildlife and environment body, has rung the alarm bells. They have called in the dogs and these highly trained canines will used to find out if there are any more on the island, and it there are a hunt will then  launched against them. It won’t be a cull they say, but they will capture the creatures and relocate them, because after all the hedgehog is a protected species in Scotland.

The trained canines will search Barra and set up humane traps, just as they have done on South Uist and Benbecula since the turn of our current century. And twenty one years later they are still hard at it, the little fellows must be the Scarlet Pimpernels of the animal world! Hedgehogs were first introduced to the islands in 1974 when seven were released without permission in South Uist to eat slugs in a garden. Twenty years later hedgehogs were everywhere throughout South Uist and Benbecula Well they’ve done more than eat slugs, though I could do with a couple of the beasties in my garden as I have a terrible problem with slugs and of course I won’t use pesticides. I am reduced to going out at night with a torch and finding them one by one! Conservationists are concerned about the impact of hedgehogs on ground-nesting birds and as they can eat their eggs. Hedgehogs luckily can’t climb trees. A project was set up to tackle the problem, but unhappily it culled hedgehogs in the beginning and a hue and cry followed. The project was forced to trap and relocate them, rather than butchering the tiny beasties. Since the beginnings of our century many hundreds of them have been relocated to the mainland.

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