“At first, the stoat looks like a faint smudge in the distance. But, as it jumps closer, its sleek body is identified by a heat-detecting camera and, with it, an alert goes out to Orkney’s stoat hunters.

Aided by an artificial intelligence programme trained to detect a stoat’s sinuous shape and movement, trapping teams are dispatched with the explicit aim of finding and killing it. It is the most sophisticated technology deployed in one of the world’s largest mammal eradication projects, which has the aim of detecting the few stoats left on Orkney.

Conservationists on the islands, which sit in the far north of Scotland, have already used an array of 9,000 lethal traps and eight specially trained tracking and detection dogs to dispatch nearly 8,000 stoats over the past six years. At least 30 of those digital cameras will soon be staked out across the moors and coasts of Orkney’s mainland, building a network that connects hits from the cameras to computers and mobile apps used by the trapping teams…

The latest survey data suggests the project has succeeded. Since it began in 2019, there has been a 1,267% increase in the chance of curlew hatchings, a 218% rise in vole activity and a 64% increase in hen harriers numbers. Hen Harriers are heavily persecuted by gamekeepers on the UK mainland, but now Orkney is home to 160.”

From The Guardian.