THE tree mallow was once described by a naturalist as “the glory of Craigleith” - but this pretty Mediterranean plant has turned from rare and exotic beauty into a rampaging weed that has almost driven puffins on the Firth of Forth island to extinction.

From 28,000 pairs of birds in 1999, the population has plummeted to just a few thousand today as the mallow has covered virtually the entire island, blocking up the birds’ burrows and allowing few other plants to grow.

However, it was announced yesterday that 235,000 - from the proceeds of a tax on rubbish dumped in landfill sites - has been given to the Scottish Seabird Centre to help fund an extensive “SOS Puffin” campaign to hack back the tree-mallow jungle on Craigleith.

After conservation efforts were kickstarted last autumn by the Channel 4 programme Wild Thing, I Think I Love You, featuring comedian Bill Bailey, a major programme of work will now be carried out over a five-year period to enable plant and animal to live together in relative harmony.

The cash will pay for regular boat trips to the island to take squads of volunteers to cut back the mallow, which has spread rapidly, partly because of fewer winter frosts as the climate warms.

Ironically, the plant has also benefited from the puffins’ previous success. As puffin numbers on the island rose, their guano fertilised the soil and their burrows made it easier for the mallow to take root.

Dr Rene Van Der Wal, an ecologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at Banchory, who studies the puffins on Craigleith, said: “They dug their own graves effectively, which is a bit sad.

“It was very dramatic, it changed the whole landscape - last year 75 per cent of the area was covered with tree mallow and as soon as the plant is in there, the puffins have to move out.

“We lost over half of the pairs in a five-year period and the situation has got worse ever since.”

The extra funding of the SOS Puffin campaign, he said, would enable the removal of large numbers of plants so “puffins and tree mallow can live happily together”.

The money will also be used to set up four solar-powered cameras on the island to monitor the birds and similar work will be carried out on the island of Fidra in the firth.

Puffins, highly sociable birds which mate for a life that can last 20 years, tend to return to the same burrow.

Large numbers arriving at Craigleith have been seen in the water off the island, unable to find a place to congregate and burrow.

This makes them more vulnerable to predators like peregrines and great black-backed gulls as well as herring gulls, which do not eat them but will kill puffins to steal their sand-eel catch.

Maggie Sheddan, a seabird centre volunteer who runs boat trips to Craigleith, said the fast-growing mallows had “exploded” since the 1980s and had created an almost impenetrable jungle. The “wonderful” award of money would enable regular boat trips to the island.

She added: “I’ve seen gulls caught up in the mallow which have just died because they have got in a tangle. I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of it completely, but we can pull it back dramatically.”

LIKE many seabirds, the fate of the puffin is closely linked with its favourite food - the sandeel. Populations of sandeels, which are fished on an industrial scale to make fertiliser, feed farmed fish and even to be burned in power stations on the Continent, are going through a turbulent period. Experts say the tiny fish will have a bad year, causing extinction for many seabirds, and then a good year, with no clear pattern.

Sandeel fisheries have been closed and reopened periodically amid concern about their numbers, but it is difficult to develop a clear picture of what is actually going on.

What does appear certain from studies of sandeels eaten by seabirds is that the average size of the adult fish is getting smaller. This means puffins and other seabirds must work harder and expend more energy to provide their chicks with the required amount of calories.

BY REUTERS

Posted 3/2/2007

The global flight from risk knocked gold and silver hard for a third straight day on Friday, with bullion falling below $640 an ounce for the first time in 1 1/2 months as funds and currency investors cashed out on precious metals to pay for losses in other markets.

Investors often buy gold as a safe bet when financial markets look unstable, but investors are keen to unload the metal after plunges in global equity markets last week, analysts said.

Many investment funds were seen to have bought commodities, including gold, over the past month with the proceeds from stocks as Wall Street reached new highs last month.

Most-active gold for April delivery on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange settled down $21, or 3.2%, at $644.10 an ounce, after bottoming at $641.30, a 1 1/2-month low. It hit a session high of $668.20.

Carry trades in which investors use low-yielding currencies like the yen as a cheap source of funds to buy higher-yielding currencies and assets were largely to blame for Friday’s sell-off in gold futures, analysts said.

This is because the yen rose to an 11-week high vs. the dollar, and currency traders needed to close out their positions in gold futures to unwind bets on riskier assets that were financed by borrowing the Japanese currency.

Gold is often used by investors as a safe haven in times of financial uncertainty, but analysts said that this time funds opted for cash and to pay off losses because of the equities rout.

Silver followed gold to trade sharply lower.

The yen wrapped up its best week in 14 months, as investors unwound bets on riskier assets that were financed by borrowing the Japanese currency.

The yen gained about 3.6% against the dollar for the week according to Reuters data, its biggest weekly advance since December 2005.

The yen got a boost early in the session after St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole said he saw nothing disruptive in carry trades.

Gains in the Japanese currency accelerated in the afternoon as U.S. stocks extended their declines.

Traders said they were keeping a close eye on stock prices for clues on whether the big unwinding of carry trades may have run its course. Heavy falls in global stock markets last week have left investors smarting and led them to cut back on other risky trades in their portfolios.

Owning a ski property for most Britons means looking at the Alps or possibly Bulgaria, but there is one classic location that is fast becoming a new favourite with buyers: Canada.

The country has a string of high quality, award-winning resorts such as Whistler and Mont Tremblant, with properties ranging from ski apartments at about 70,000 to luxury chalets hitting seven figures. Other resorts such as Banff and Jasper are in large national parks, so skiers share the area with the wildlife of the Rockies. And because of Canada’s top-class road system, most resorts are usually no more than two hours’ drive away from a town.

The Canadian ski season lasts from November until June (longer still in Whistler, where it is usual to ski through the summer months) so it is much longer than the European equivalent, and several resorts have snow-making equipment to ensure year-round activities.

Chartered airlines such as Canadian Affair, Zoom and Air Transat are now offering low-cost flights to major hubs such as Vancouver and Calgary - sometimes for just 70 one-way - so the Canadian ski resorts are fast opening up to the British market.

With lower property prices than in the French Alps in particular, longer seasons and larger ski homes than almost anywhere in Europe - therefore accommodating more people - Canadian properties are a sharp investment, too, for those who want to combine a holiday home with earning an income.

“House price growth in Canada hit 11.2 per cent at the end of 2006, creating strong prospective capital gains as well as a burgeoning rental market as Canadian ski resorts become more accessible to European tourists,” says Martin Sadler of Assetz Canada, a ski property estate agency and finance consultancy.

Canada has an interest base rate of 6 per cent and with mortgages available at 0.85 per cent or more below this rate, investors can expect rates as low as 5.15 per cent. Even as a non-resident of Canada, mortgages are available for at least 65 per cent of the purchase price of a property.

“The number of people going to Canada to ski has consistently increased over the past decade. Canada is a stable country with a great standard of living. Buyers are investing because in just a few more hours than a European flight, they can be at their own large log home purchased for the same price as an apartment in the Alps,” says Sean Collins, managing director of Pure International, a UK estate agent selling ski homes around the world.

“Snow is guaranteed, the standard of skiing is high and the number of other snow and year-round sports available is just vast,” he says.

To prove the point, one of Canada’s most popular ski destinations, Mont Tremblant - voted the number one ski resort in the eastern region of North America for eight years by the US’s Ski Magazine - has 100km of cross-country ski trails, a frozen cliff face for ice climbing, an 18-acre snow park with ramps, modules, jumps and a 130-metre long and six metre high half-pipe for extreme sports fans.

For ski purists the resort, which is about 90 minutes by car north of Montreal, boasts 94 marked downhill trails, 13 ski lifts and 13 chairlifts and gondolas shifting over 27,000 skiers per hour at peak times.

Mt Tremblant has expanded vastly over the years - tourist numbers have grown from 700,000 in 1996 to 2.5 million in 2006 - and there are now several new property schemes being built and marketed simultaneously.

Lesa River de Sanctuire has three-bedroom semi-detached properties with 1,200sq ft of interior space starting at 160,000 and going up to 185,000, while larger units with 2,160-sq ft go for up to 500,000, all with local golf club membership thrown in. Close by is Blueberry Lake, where 204,000 will get you a 1,250-square foot three-bedroom house and 365,000 buys a 2,950 sq ft five-bedroom property. Both have 7 per cent net rental guarantees for a year, too, through Pure International.

If you feel more adventurous you can buy a plot of land at Lac Desmarais on the Mt Tremblant resort - close to a property owned by Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas - and then build your own home. Some 1.5-acre plots have lakeside views, too, although these will be well above the base price of just 167,000 (again through Pure International).

If you are looking for a lower priced Canadian ski investment property, there is a more European-style complex of dense apartments at Fernie Grande in British Columbia, with prices starting from just 67,000 for a 400 sq ft studio including a furniture package, through Assetz Canada. Your property is automatically part of a scheme-wide rental pool. You may use it personally as little or as much as you wish. On the remaining days, your rental return is based on a proportion of the rent income for the rest of the scheme.

But although most Canadian ski resorts are well-regarded, there are some complaints about others mainly because of their size. Ski resorts in Canada are measured in their thousands of homes, because of the sheer size of the landscape and the potential for building. But occasionally developers find resistance from buyers.

The huge Three Sisters Mountain Village, 90 minutes from Calgary, for example, is beginning to sell the first phases of 4,000 new flats and houses in what will be Canada’s second-largest scheme after Whistler. But some visitors say the properties built so far are too dense and are simply too close together.

In some cases the ski infrastructure is too small to support the massive number of skiers - at Mt Tremblant, for example, 40-minute waits by ski lifts are not unusual at peak season, which north American skiers in particular regard as too long.

But these are minor quibbles in what is broadly regarded as a keenly priced market with good returns for investors as well as consistently excellent skiing for enthusiasts.

With European resorts increasingly expensive to buy into, and this year’s snow disappointing, things may well be looking up for Canada’s ski developers.

Savills: 020-7016 3740

Pure Internationa: 020-7331 4500

Assetz Canada: 0845 430 0020