‘There were stoats in kitchen cupboards’: AI deployed to help save Orkney’s birds | Conservation

A.First of all, the poppy looks like a light speck from a distance. But as it approaches, its sleek body is identified by a heat-detecting camera and with it a warning is sent to Orkney’s mongoose hunters.

Aided by an artificial intelligence program trained to detect a ferret’s sinuous shape and movement, capture teams are dispatched with the express purpose of finding and killing it. This is the most advanced technology used in one of the world’s largest mammal eradication projects, aimed at identifying the few remaining weasels in Orkney.

Conservationists on Scotland’s northernmost islands have already used 9,000 lethal traps and eight specially trained tracking and detection dogs to remove nearly 8,000 ferrets over the past six years. At least 30 of these digital cameras will soon be deployed on the moors and coasts of mainland Orkney, creating a network that links hits from the cameras to computers and mobile apps used by trapping teams.

The stoat is an existential threat to the native land-nesting birds for which Orkney is famous – it is home to 11% of all breeding seabirds and around 25% of henbirds in the UK, as well as its most valuable native rodent, the Orkney vole.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds of Scotland, which runs the Orkney Native Wildlife Project, believes the cacti arrived from the Scottish mainland in about 2011. Since then the population has exploded, with colonies forming on mainland Orkney and the nearby islands of Burray and South Ronaldsay, as well as the Deerness peninsula (caddies can swim for several kilometres), with devastating effects.

RSPB Scotland’s regional operations manager, Sarah Sankey, says the ferrets’ biggest advantage is that Orkney has no predators. “They have nothing to control them: we have no foxes and very few vultures. We’ve seen this all over the world. This weasel population would persist until we wiped out everything,” he says, holding up a laminated map of Orkney with thousands of red dots marking the trapping network.

“We saw this before we started destroying them. There was poop running between people’s legs, there was poop in people’s kitchen cabinets, there was poop in people’s attics.”

They have expanded to 58,000 hectares (143,260 acres) in less than a decade. A feasibility study said it would be financially and logistically impossible to control them if they were spread across all the Orkney islands. In other words, a budget of 16 million pounds and 46 personnel were given to the project, which will last at least 10 years.

Erectors penetrate vole nests, search for eggs and chicks in thousands of sandpiper, lapwing and hen nests, and also hunt for seafood along Orkney’s extensive coastline, feeding on starfish and urchins.

“We have a perfect disaster here where there are tons of food available year-round,” Sankey says. “There is nothing to control the streams and there is a lot of native wildlife to lose and the tourism economy depends on it.

“Why did we start all this? Orkney covers less than 1% of the UK’s land area, but we have about a quarter of the Arctic terns and grousebirds, about a third of the Arctic skuas, and we’re the only place with Orkney voles. So basically there was a lot to lose.”

The latest survey data shows the project is a success. Since starting in 2019, there has been a 1,267% increase in curlew hatching chances, a 218% increase in vole activity and a 64% increase in hen hurdle numbers. Orkney, which is heavily persecuted by UK mainland hunters, is currently home to 160 hen hunters.

“Despite a major population decline, particularly of curlews and lapwings, we are managing to stabilize the population on Orkney,” says Sankey.

Hailing from New Zealand, where conservationists face an uphill battle to eradicate millions of non-native predatory mammals, the AI ​​system is backed by thermal scopes and drones, says James Geluk, the project’s chief technologist and a New Zealander who is working on an eradication project near Wellington.

Thermal detectors are much more sensitive to motion than the trail cameras normally used by conservationists, he says. They work perfectly in the dark and send live alerts in real time once the video footage is uploaded to a cloud server. Artificial intelligence has learned to distinguish stoats from otters and voles.

“This is a much more accurate tracking tool than a regular trail camera could ever be,” says Geluk.

After six years of concerted trapping efforts, including cutting lockdowns during the Covid crisis when poop numbers rose again, the RSPB hopes to begin the “clean up” phase in December, which will be reached after 95% of the poops have been eliminated.

They estimate there are only about 100 pregnant ferrets left in Orkney. “We are all conservationists working here,” Sankey says. “None of us are here because we want to kill an animal. We are here because we want to protect the nature of Orkney.”