Plan to remove all hedgehogs from Hebridean isles

A conservation project has secured nearly £100,000 towards removing every hedgehog from a group of islands in the Western Isles.

The animals are not native to the Hebrides and are blamed for eating the eggs of ground-nesting birds, causing severe declines of several species.

A new project - Saving Uist Nature (SUN) - would trap hedgehogs in South Uist and Benbecula and release them on mainland Scotland.

A previous initiative - the Uist Wader Project (UWP) - has managed to keep North Uist hedgehog-free, but a lack of funding meant removals on South Uist and Benbecula could not continue.

RSPB Scotland, NatureScot and the Scottish SPCA are involved in SUN.

They have secured £97,840 from the Scottish government's Nature Restoration Fund to develop the project over the next 12 months.

RSPB Scotland said SUN would be a world first because of its scale.

Kenna Chisholm, its north Highland and Hebrides area manager, added: "Taking action is critical to protect remarkable wildlife here in Uist and ensure the best possible outcomes for the hedgehogs which will be relocated and the mainland population."

Iain Macleod, NatureScot operations manager for west Scotland, described the project as "ground-breaking".

Scottish SPCA wildlife operations lead Sean Meechan added "As a non-native invasive species to Uist, hedgehogs have a detrimental impact on the important breeding populations of ground-nesting birds on the island.

"This project provides a unique opportunity to reduce that impact while also working to preserve populations of hedgehogs as a threatened species."

Fifty years ago hedgehogs were reportedly let go into a garden in South Uist in the hope they would eat slugs and snails.

But numbers multiplied - and they were soon preying on more than garden pests.

By 2001 their predation on birds' eggs was becoming such a problem an effort was launched to remove them.

An initial plan to cull them was quickly abandoned due to a public outcry.

UWP was set up to trap hedgehogs and relocate them to the mainland, after first being given a health check and then tagged.

North Uist has been hedgehog-free since 2016.

The Western Isles are home to thousands of ground-nesting birds, waders such as lapwing, curlew, dunlin and redshank.

Many of the birds are of high conservation concern and decline in the islands was detected in the mid-1980s.

By 1995 hedgehogs were common throughout South Uist and Benbecula, their numbers growing in part thanks to the lack of predators and the isles' quiet roads.

In 2015 there were estimated to be about 5,000 of them in the Western Isles.

Research done by NatureScot between 2012 to 2014 suggested 55% of monitored nests in South Uist, where hedgehog numbers were high, had failed.