This is a photo of a dead buzzard inside a hole. How did it get there? Did the person who illegally killed the buzzard stuff it inside the hole to hide the evidence from casual passers-by? Or did the buzzard crawl inside the hole to die of natural causes? Yep, that must be it. Didn’t 13 of them do the same thing on a Scottish sporting estate a few years ago? Interesting that they all chose rabbit holes within close proximity to a crow cage trap. Oh and then there were the gunshot wounds…
Red kites have also been known to do it, funnily enough on another Scottish sporting estate. First they removed their wing tags, placed them in a hole and then covered the hole with moss. Then they severed their own legs, placed those in holes and also covered the holes in moss. Remarkable.
Raptor Persecution UK 
Aye, they’re a devious lot and the lengths they will go to just to try and lay the blame on the poor, innocent game estates. It’s disgraceful that a respectable and law-abiding profession can be unfairly tarnished by the indiscriminate actions of some underhand raptors. However, it must be said that the majority of birds don’t operate in these ways and it is only a rogue element carrying out such deplorable acts.
Well it is not exactly well hidden is it! If someone was trying to hide this they have done a pretty poor job! Is this a recent find in Scotland and has it been reported to the police ? If so we will see it is the SASA data soon I presume.
Yes this is a recent find in Scotland. It may or may not have been reported to the police but in a way that’s irrelevant because either way, a prosecution would be unlikely without direct evidence linking the crime to a specific individual. That’s why so many of these offences go unrecorded – the police don’t have to compile statistics on these findings and SASA will generally only record data from incidents where poisoning is suspected, so if the buzzard had been shot, or been caught in an illegal trap and had its head smashed in with a piece of wood SASA wouldn’t have a record of it. As far as we’re aware, the RSPB is the only group to compile data on these types of incidents but RSPB annual statistics are dismissed as unreliable by….you guessed it, the game-shooting industry. Fortunately, not everyone is blind to the goings-on, including the Environment Minister who commented recently that even though the first quarterly SASA poisoning stats showed a drop in (reported) incidents this spring, he was aware that poisoning was not the only method of illegal killing in use.
Thanks that is intersting. However I think you do SASA a disservice. I have just had a look at the Scottish Govt SASA stats that they publish on their website and they do record all kinds of “Abuse”, not just poisoning. They even record the results of the species of wildlife that they test that have died without any suspicious circumstances. I have also seen the Partnership Against Wildlife Crime Scotland website guidance for such incidents and they clearly state that all incidents of suspected criminal activity should be reported to the Police. So I would hope that even cases like the above are reported.
The intention wasn’t to do SASA a disservice. They do a fantastic job and we’d be a lot worse off without them. The point being made is that the SASA results do not provide the whole picture of the number of persecution incidents (both attempted and completed). For example, compare the list of confirmed and probable incidents in the RSPB’s 2010 annual report with the number of incidents listed in SASA’s 2010 report. The two lists are incomparable because, for example, SASA can’t test a baited spring trap for poison abuse, but the presence of a baited spring trap set out (illegally) in the open is a clear persecution attempt.
Agreed, all suspected criminal activity relating to wildlife crime should be reported to the police, but more importantly, figures on these reported incidents should be made publicly available at the end of each year with an indication of what happened, ie. was it investigated and what was the outcome? New measures brought in under the WANE Act include a requirement for wildlife crime stats to be reported annually to the Scottish Government. It remains to be seen how much detail will be included and whether these data will be available to the public. Those of us who have reported suspected wildlife crime only to be met with police apathy will be particularly interested in the data. That’s not a sleight on all police wildlife crime officers – some of them are highly committed individuals who do their utmost to investigate in often difficult circumstances. Others though are not quite so diligent.
I agree, the Govt report will be interesting. The spring trap type of incident you mention would be recorded if reported to the police and the National Wildlife Crime Unit though. They produce an annual report, I know because I look at it as I’m interested in deer poaching crime too.
Have you actually read an NWCU annual report?! If not, try reading the 2010 report. It’ll tell you how many analytical reports they’ve prepared and the type of each report produced, it’ll also tell you how many ministerial visits they’ve had and how many staff they employ. All very interesting, but not half as interesting as the wildlife crime data would be, had they decided to analyse them and present them for public scrutiny.
Perhaps there are reasons that they didn’t present these data. Two reasons could be (a) The NWCU data are unrepresentative of the big picture because not all police forces submit their data, and (b) Even when data have been submitted, the level of coding is so poor that it is apparently not possible to discern many types of wildlife crime from another.
See here: https://raptorpersecutionscotland.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/head-sand-buried/
And see here, especially Q194 and Q195: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenvaud/uc1740-iii/uc174001.htm
I’ll have a look at these, thanks.