AFTER YEARS of burying its collective head in the sand, Scottish Natural Heritage must be given some credit for finally acknowledging that Scotland’s runaway population of ravens has become a problem that needs direct intervention, rather than optimistic words about some halcyon ‘natural balance’ that will restore itself if only we wait long enough.

The granting of a local licence to take out a set number of the notorious marauders in the Strathbraan area of Perth and Kinross has, according to local gamekeepers, already had a positive impact on the reproductive success of ground-nesting waders like curlew, offering the hope that the alarming declines of the last quarter century might be reversed.

Now, the gamekeepers and their employers obviously have a large grouse-shaped axe to grind in all matters pertaining to predators over moorland, but just because there's a commercial interest there, it is overly cynical to suggest that folk who live and work on that ground day in and day out aren't still the most reliable source of information about its wildlife. Certainly no less so than charity employees driven by the imperative of keeping their urban funding base in a permanent state of mild outrage.

Equally obviously, farmers have a commercial interest in their land, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one that doesn't also delight in the wildlife around them, and feel somewhat aggrieved at the untouchable squadrons of predators proliferating on their fenceposts, whether they be ravens, buzzards, magpies or your common old hoodie crows, making a morning meal out of some poor ground-nester's unhatched family.

Of course no-one is seeking a return to the days of unregulated guns in the countryside blasting away at anything unwanted, just as most sane souls have been happy to see the back of all the poisons that were once part and parcel of country life.

But having allowed the pendulum to swing so fully in the direction of zero predator control and seeing the subsequent dramatic declines in species with at least as much right to life as a hoodie – several of which have considerably sweeter voices – can we not now look to a more flexible national licence system that will operate on the presumption that land managers are neither blood-thirsty psychopaths nor acquisitive monoculturalists, but simply the best placed individuals to make a judgement call on predator numbers?

By all means, make it a legal requirement to record each crow that falls, and monitor the effects carefully. And when there are once again as many peewits calling as there are buzzards circling, we can start talking about wildlife being in balance.