Is this £5 million well spent?

ODD to be considering caper-caillie twice in the space of a few weeks... never find one when you want one and then two come along together. Right and a left. Boom boom.

Still, you cannot help what preys on the minds of Scottish ministers. And in the case of Rhona Brankin, the deputy minister for environment and rural development, it has been capercaillie. Now Ms Brankin, as has been noted here in the past, is considered rather a good egg in game circles because she appears to listen. So at the beginning of November she pitched up at Braemar to announce that capercaillie, the subject of continuous doom and gloom from the bird people for what now seems like several decades, had been saved thanks to the "Urgent Conservation Management for Scottish Capercaillie" campaign, aka Save the Caper.

Well, not exactly saved, but there were signs, she disclosed, that maybe, just maybe, the old bird wasn't doing so badly after all. Just to keep you right about this one, the capercaillie used to live in and around the Cairngorms, which is on the very far southern edge of its breeding range, only to disappear in the mid 18th century at about the time they started chopping all the trees down on Speyside to build ships for the Royal Navy. It was then reintroduced from Scandinavia for sporting purposes and did pretty well, presumably because it was encouraged to breed so that it could be shot. Thereafter it bobbed along, some of us shot it, in the days when we were allowed to, but the continual loss of habitat seems to have more or less finished it off. Now the poor bird, teetering on the edge of extinction in Scotland, is being forced to breed whether it likes it or not, probed and spied upon by men and women in bobble hats in the name of biodiversity.

Various ploys have been tried to keep the numbers up such as taking down deer fences so that it doesn't kill itself in full flight. But that has turned out to be an eco disaster because once the fences were gone the deer walked in and ate the trees and so the deer had to be shot. That aside, Ms Brankin gave everyone at Braemar a pat on the back, including private landowners, which must be something of a first for a Scottish minister.

"Forty chicks reared in one Strathspey forest alone - tremendous!" enthused la Brankin. Whether there were any more chicks in other forests or whether 40 was our lot she didn't let on. But it sounded jolly encouraging.

So you'd need to be an awful old Mr Grumpy to wonder if this sudden conservation triumph in the wake of a constant diet of ochone had anything to do with the fact European funding to save the caper is coming to an end, and yes, we are applying for more.

The Scottish Gamekeepers' Association (SGA), which is represented on the board of "Save the Caper" is deeply sceptical. "The government should be cautious after so many bad breeding years before claiming this project has been a success in either conservation terms or being good value for the taxpayers' e7.3 million (5 million). As the breeding success has been so poor in the past (less than one chick per hen) not enough young birds are being bred year on year to sustain the population we started this project with."

One chick per hen is not very good. A hen will lay between seven and 11 eggs. So what then is the problem?

Rather coyly the SGA refers only to "Non-endangered, protected predators chewing their way through what is left of Scotland's capercaillie population," by which it means protected pine martens, the same family as ferrets, which are now enjoying phenomenal breeding success, thanks to a diet of capercaillie chicks.

Of course a "derogation" from Europe allowing us to live trap, relocate or cull protected species where they threaten others can be applied for. But as the caper is now doing so well that won't be necessary. Will it?