Talk:Soay, Inner Hebrides

	Scottish islands portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Scottish Islands, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of islands in Scotland on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Scottish IslandsWikipedia:WikiProject Scottish IslandsTemplate:WikiProject Scottish IslandsScottish Islands articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Scotland Mid‑importance

	Scotland portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Scotland, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Scotland and Scotland-related topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ScotlandWikipedia:WikiProject ScotlandTemplate:WikiProject ScotlandScotland articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Soay Sheep

Am surprised to read nothing about the famous primative Soay sheep which erradicate bracken and now populate St Kilda. Is anyone able to write knowledgeably about these sheep - I'm not qualified? Mail4stu (talk) 13:12, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

This is the wrong Soay for the sheep ;) They have their own page at Soay sheep and are mentioned on the other Soay page Soay, St Kilda and St Kilda, Scotland of course. Akerbeltz (talk) 13:32, 7 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

UTC)

Basking Shark Numbers

The claim that Maxwell's activities caused a serious drop in basking shark numbers, though supported with a citation, is ridiculous. Even a cursory read of Harpoon At A Venture confirms that his basking shark operations were neither the only ones in the area, nor the most successful in terms of numbers caught. What set his endeavour apart was not the hunting of the sharks, but the attempt to process the entire shark. As the company was relatively unsuccessful and short-lived, and was active in an area already being fished for basking shark by others, I would be extremely surprised if evidence can be found to show that Maxwell's activities in particular have caused lasting damage to the basking shark population around the Isle of Skye. Poglad (talk) 10:20, 3 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yep I decided to look this up, since it did seem a bit much to blame Maxwell for "a serious drop in the numbers of these animals in the surrounding seas". I found a book (The Basking Shark in Scotland, 1998, page 102) which says that the "Soay company" caught 166 sharks in 1947 and 42 sharks in 1948. Another book (Advances In Marine Biology 56, 2009, page 295) says that in total 105,000 basking sharks were captured by fishermen in the north-east Atlantic between 1946 and 1996. Pasicles (talk) 00:41, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know a great deal about them, but what kind of range do these creatures have? Do they stay in a small area, or travel great distances like large whales?

(As a matter of interest, I used to know someone from Soay, who had worked with Gavin Maxwell on this. He was seen as a crank by locals, rightly or wrongly.)-MacRùsgail (talk) 20:48, 17 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't claim to be an expert either, but I've had a further read-up on this. Basking shark movements aren't fully understood, but they are migratory, and they range about the temperate latitudes of the North Atlantic, following the plankton, which makes their movements unpredictable. Adult sharks do often to return same coastal region in consecutive years - so Maxwell's activities could, I suppose, have caused some localised harm, but I still can't find any evidence for it. Basking shark numbers have seriously dropped, and they are now a protected species, but there is no clear answer as to the cause of the decline, although the last half-a-century of fishing in the Atlantic can't have helped. (In the 1950s the Canadian government even had a "basking shark eradication program" albeit on the Pacific coast).

The book I mentioned (The Basking Shark in Scotland, 1998) has quite a lot to say on the Soay operation. It describes Maxwell as "extraordinarily gifted, versatile, and visionary", but "decidedly not a businessman". It describes the Soay venture as pretty much doomed from the start, because Soay was totally unsuited for even a small industrial enterprise, and his workforce "were often disaffected". Pasicles (talk)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Soay, Skye. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080905071803/http://www.seahorsepublishers.com/phillipscatalogues.htm to http://www.seahorsepublishers.com/phillipscatalogues.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 18:55, 26 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]