Monday 13th January 2020

Phase 2 of my Churchill Fellowship project begins. Up and out with Urs and Christine to walk the dog. The walk starts out, as with most dog walks, with a saunter through the local village, heading off in the direction of the park.

Oh my word, on arrival to the park, I take a look to my left and am confronted with a spectacular view of the Bernese Alps. From my view point I can clearly see the North Face of the Eiger, the Monch, Jungfrau and the highest mountain peak in the range, the Finsteraarhorn.

Eventually, we head off to the offices of KORA, where I meet up with a few people I’ve met before from the Lynx Expert Conference in Bonn and a number of new and welcoming people.

I give a short presentation on the aims of my project to the staff at KORA, which is followed by the usual question and answer session. I then set to work organising individual meetings and field visits with staff members. Unfortunately, at this point it becomes clear that a long standing meeting I’ve had planned with the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment is no longer going to happen. My contact has not yet returned from maternity leave and other members of staff are overwhelmed with work. Urs suggests that I get in touch with Agridea, who undertake lynx prevention, management and compensation duties for the Federal Office. Luck is on my side as the Agridea team are due to visit their Bern offices tomorrow and a meeting is arranged. I also arrange a meeting with Professor Marie-Pierre Ryser-Degiorgis, a wildlife vet, who is head of the Centre for Fish and Wildlife Health at the University of Bern and who has spent many years investigating health and disease aspects of Eurasian lynx and who has been heavily involved in reintroduction projects for the species.

My contingency day, next week, now holds another meeting, this time with Jochen Lengger, Senior Curator at Zurich Zoo who runs the EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria) Studbook for lynx.

So, every cloud ……………..

I then have a quick chat with Roland, who shows me how KORA store their data/records and what’s shared with the general public. I’m incredibly envious and wish that we had the same system in place in the UK.

In the afternoon, I have a meeting with Dr Kristina Vogt who ran a project from 2015-2019 studying the influence of lynx predation on Alpine chamois. The project was instigated due to concerns over a perceived decline in chamois from the local community especially hunters.

In 2015 a general workshop was held with the cantons, federal office for the environment, hunting association and KORA, which defined the area for undertaking the research. The field work was carried out between 2015-2018.

The hunters weren’t directly involved in the project. Regular reporting of findings was via the canton, communicated in hunting magazines and through face to face presentations.

The research found that yearlings and old chamois were mainly preyed upon by lynx, which differs from roe deer predation, where all age classes are targetted. There was no evidence that there were fewer kids present where lynx predation was strongest, suggesting that lynx preyed most strongly on growing chamois populations. Where chamois populations were less productive, the lynx preyed on roe deer. Lynx were found to be preying on the species most abundant in the area.

Retrospective analysis of the chamois population was limited as although data collected went back to the 1960’s, recording methods changed in the 1990’s and the newer data couldn’t be interrogated or compared to the earlier data.

However, hunting pressure, harsher winter conditions and the expansion of red deer populations were all found to have a population limiting effect on the chamois. Additionally, domestic sheep drive out chamois from their usual feeding grounds and increase disease transmission. Chamois, within the study area are also increasingly negatively impacted by increasing human activities such as skiing and paragliding.

Deer hunting deliberately increased in the 1990’s with an increase in the deer population, which coincided with an increase in the lynx population. However, a series of harsh winters, disease and high hunting pressure led to both deer and chamois population collapse. This was at a time of an increased domestic sheep population. Inevitably, and suddenly 20% of the domestic sheep population was taken by lynx and large numbers of lynx were killed legally and illegally. At this time hunters dumped lynx carcasses in areas where they could be easily viewed by the public i.e. outside supermarkets, in front of government buildings.

Thankfully, the situation now is very different and the lynx is generally accepted throughout Switzerland. Further to this lynx kills of sheep are relatively few and compensation and prevention schemes exist (see tomorrows blog for further detail). This latest project resulted in management advice being provided to the cantonel hunting authorities for suitable harvests of chamois according to a range of scenarios.

I went on to spend the evening discussing the chapters I’ve written so far for my report with Urs.