Conservationists on Scotland's Orkney Islands are deploying cameras powered by artificial intelligence to help eradicate an invasive predator and save native birds.
The technology targets members of the weasel family called stoats. According to the Woodland Trust, a stoat is a "potent predator," despite its adorable look. These furry little terminators are super-energetic hunters that can climb trees to reach birds' eggs and run at speeds of 20 miles per hour.
They also have a keen sense of smell, allowing them to detect and track prey for hours, even in underground burrows. On top of all that, they are known to perform a dizzying little jig called the "weasel war dance" — it's used to mesmerize their prey.
According to The Guardian, stoats first arrived on the Scottish islands around 2011. With no natural predators to control them on the archipelago, their population exploded, and they quickly became an existential threat to Orkney's famous ground-nesting birds, which include 25 percent of the United Kingdom's hen harrier population.
"Why did we start all of this?" Sarah Sankey, an operations manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Scotland, posed to The Guardian. "Orkney is less than 1 percent of the UK's land area, but we've around a quarter of all Arctic terns and hen harriers, about a third of Arctic skuas, and we're the only place with Orkney voles. So there was a lot to lose, basically."
The Orkney Native Wildlife Project — which previously described how stoats had also threatened New Zealand's kiwi — has an impressive £16 million (about $21 million USD) budget, making it one of the largest mammal eradication efforts in the world. Before adding AI to their tools, the team had already installed 9,000 traps and was using eight specially trained dogs to hunt the stoats.
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Today, heat-detecting cameras, guided by AI trained to recognize the animal's unique shape and movements, scan the moors day and night. When the AI detects a stoat, it sends the team a real-time alert, allowing them to deploy traps more effectively.
This isn't the only instance of using AI to help manage wildlife. One project in the UK leveraged the tech to identify gray squirrels at feeders, giving them contraceptives to protect native red squirrels. In other parts of the world, large-scale trapping programs are underway.
New Zealand has an ambitious "Predator Free 2050" goal to remove stoats and other invasive mammals to save iconic birds, like the kiwi. But it's not easy. Another study on invasive raccoons in the Czech Republic found the animals are smart enough to learn how to escape traps.
So far, the high-tech effort in Orkney appears to be working. The Guardian reported that since 2019, the project has seen a "1,267 percent increase in the chance of curlew hatchings" and a "64 percent rise in hen harrier numbers."
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"None of us are here because we want to kill an animal," Sankey told the outlet. "We're here because we want to protect the nature of Orkney."
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