Meeting of the Parliament 08 November 2016
As you know, Presiding Officer, I always listen very carefully to Roseanna Cunningham’s winding-up speeches. Tonight will be no exception, especially as she is going to have to deal with the sex life of the slow worm, as described by Bruce Crawford. I saw the civil servants passing down notes to her on the subject: they took 45 minutes to arrive on the front bench. We will listen carefully to her detailed interpretation of that activity.
I congratulate Graeme Dey on securing the debate. He mentioned the fluffy orca. If anyone ever meets a real killer whale, they would want it to be fluffy. In August, some of our wild swimmers in Shetland were swimming around Lerwick harbour when they had a very close encounter with a pod of killer whales—or orcas—that had been swimming around the Shetland coastline during most of the summer. From the description of that encounter, one would not wish to get too close, particularly given that swimmers look just like seals to a pod of orcas.
There is method in my madness in relation to my reference to the fluffy orca. I am running a competition with all our primary schools in the Shetland Islands to name the orca, because of the importance of sightings. That promotional work is the point of much of the work that we do as species champions. The future of the orca lies in understanding their patterns of behaviour. Schools can play a hugely important role in achieving that understanding by providing documentary evidence on where they are, their direction of travel and how they are moving.
My colleagues had a name for the orca, too. John Thurso, who is now the chairman of VisitScotland, had a problem with wild salmon being eaten by seals at the head of a river. He did what any person would have done in the circumstances: he bought a 20-foot inflatable orca and moored it at the head of the river to scare off the seals, which it did. He thought that he had better give it a name, and I am told that he called it “my orca”—which makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
I thank Sarah Dolman of Whale and Dolphin Conservation for all her help. I also thank Hugh Harrop at Shetland Wildlife and the 5,727—and rising—members of the Shetland orca sightings group for all the work that they have done, particularly on Facebook and on social media. Their posts on those sites have been astronomical this summer, although they have been slightly held back by the fact that, around the coast of Shetland, there is no wi-fi or 3G—there is no 1G, let alone 3G—and the postings take a while.
Nevertheless, there is huge interest in the orca, which is a fantastic species and a wonderful mammal. I whole-heartedly agree with colleagues that people should get involved in the programme because of the work that can be done to highlight the serious issues around nature conservation and the marine environment, which Mark Ruskell highlighted, but also for the fun that we can pass on to the next generation. More than in any species, that can be seen in the humble orca.