Last week I spent two half days, and some time in a bar in between, with a bunch of RSPB site managers (or wardens as we used to call them!) talking about fox control.
We have over 200 nature reserves and we cull foxes on about 20 of them, so, as written before, we use fox control as a management option but not as a standard management prescription. Our main reason for fox control is where we have vulnerable populations of breeding waders such as lapwing, redshank and snipe and where we believe that foxes are making a big difference to their numbers or breeding success.
But getting out the rifle is not the only option - non-lethal methods may be more effective, cheaper and more acceptable to the public or to our staff. One option is fencing, and the results of some trials are described in the RSPB Reserves review for 2010 (see pages 34-35 of the document or pages 36-37 of the pdf). A couple of different fence types have been tested but both have electric strands. One advantage of fences is that, as well as foxes which we know can be important predators of waders nests, they also exclude badgers which are more occasional nest predators. Another advantage is that you aren't up late at night with a reifle trying to get a clean shot at a wary animal.
The results are encouraging but we are a cautious bunch so we aren't claiming anything yet. I can't see fences being very useful in the uplands but in lowland areas they may have a part to play. We'll see.
I live in the countryside and hardly ever see a fox. Most of my recent sightings have been in London on early mornings where just as the foxes seem very nonchalant about people, most Londoners seem very relaxed about urban foxes. I get quite excited when I see a fox - they are lovely animals. But I don't, personally, have any problem about a bit of fox control to protect birds of conservation importance.
But we, the RSPB, do take a particularly strict line on predator control on our own land. We don't use snares. We don't use dogs to flush foxes underground or above ground. And we try very hard not to shoot at times when we might kill lactating vixens with young cubs underground. Those constraints don't make fox control very easy compared with the job a gamekeeper can do.
Overall, over the last few years, (2005-2009, see the Reserves Review) lapwings and redshanks have increased in numbers on our nature reserves (and that isn't because we've added more land - it's true of the land we started with in 2005) so unless lots of waders flock into our reserves every year (which is just possible) we can't be doing too much wrong. But lapwing and redshank numbers fell a bit this year (2010) so there's nothing to be complacent about.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Tim Roper's concluding remarks in the chapter on Badgers and Bovine TB;
' And what about badger culling, which is, of all the possible management options, the one of most interest to readers of this book? It is easy to understand why farmers are frustrated by the lack of progress towards controlling what is, by any account, a serious disease situation. It is also easy to understand this frustration results in calls for the resumption of badger culling. Culling has a strong intuitive appeal:it seems only common sense, when faced with a disease reservoir, to try to eliminate it; and the most obvious way of doing this is by eliminating the host species. However, the RBCT has shown that things are not that simple. At best culling may not have much of an effect and, at worst, it may have unintended and counterproductive side-effects. And despite the multiplicity of trials, the long term effects of culling on the prevalence of TB, in either cattle or badgers, are still not known. From a political point of view, culling is hard to defend because of its unpopularity with the general public and because the economic costs of doing it are substantially greater than the immediate economic benefits that the expected reduction in cattle TB would bring. It is still possible that culling would contribute usefully to TB control in certain well-defined circumstances or in combination with other measures such as vaccination or enhanced biosecurity. However, the scientific case against isolated, one-off, spatially restricted culls of limited duration, such as were carried out in RBCT,is very strong.'