A kestrel has been euthanised after being found shot in North Yorkshire.
It’s a kestrel, FFS. You’d have to be a gun-toting psychopath to shoot one of these. Unsurprisingly, it’s not the first kestrel to have been shot in North Yorkshire, England’s raptor-killing capital (see here here and here).
News of this latest shooting appeared on Twitter yesterday. We’ve been unable to find any more details:
Raptor Persecution UK 
“You’d have to be a gun-toting psychopath to shoot one of these.”
Unfortunately there are any number of gun-toting psychopaths available in North Yorkshire. Or, as some have described them – A few bad apples.
Shot with what, shotgun or air rifle? Unfortunately these birds are a sitting target to a yob with an airgun when hovering near a road.
Unfortunately that detail has not (yet) been released by the Police.
You’re right though, a yob with an airgun is a distinct possibility, as is a criminal psychopath with a shotgun (see previous three cases of shotgun-blasted kestrels in North Yorkshire).
I’ve known several keepers who travel around quiet country roads in their SUVs looking for Kestrels (or Buzzards) to shoot, which are perched on fence posts, trees, telegraph poles or road lights.
In reality I care not which, one is a yob with an air rifle the other usually an equally mindless person with a shotgun both have a considerable tendency ( Especially in North Yorkshire?) to break the law when it comes to raptors, both are common criminals, too bloody common. What the hell damage are Kestrels supposedly doing FFS!
Firstly, I wouldn’t have thought that Kestrels present that easy a target to shoot with an air rifle. I have enough difficulty getting close enough to photograph them, which is well out of range for an airgun. Secondly, keepers use air rifles. So even if it had been shot with an air rifle, it doesn’t mean the perpetrator is not connected with a shoot.
As I’ve said here often, it’s a mistake to think that certain raptors are persecuted because they simplistically eat game birds, therefore reducing their numbers in that way. Shoot managers for driven shooting aim to produce the maximum density of game birds possible. These unnaturally high densities of game birds are not simply lost from a shoot by straight forward predation, but by the game birds naturally dispersing in response to perceived predators. This is the mindset of the game managers. Therefore any raptor, any predator, and even humans are seen as a potential threat to these artificially high densities of game birds. Any possible disturbance is seen as a threat to what the shoot managers aim for. This is why raptors which are unlikely to prey much or at all on game birds, such as Kestrels, Short-eared Owls etc, are killed. It is absolutely not an accident, as the case last year where a gamekeeper was filmed killing and burying Short-eared Owls proved. He was found to have a calling device, which I assume, although don’t know for sure was for SEOs.
It is very difficult for me to provide simple proof of what I’m saying because the shooting industry is notoriously secretive about it’s real thinking behind it’s methodology, knowing full well it is socially unacceptable. However, if you look closely you can see the strong circumstantial evidence for this. The driven shooting industry has always been hostile to public access to driven shooting areas. Think the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, and the army of gamekeepers that met the walkers. Before protection gamekeepers used to openly kill or predators. Even where CRoW Access has been granted, the landowners have sought bans on dogs. In the eye of shoot managers, any type of disturbance was regarded as bad as it will cause the unnaturally high game bird population densities to they are trying to create, to disperse and be effectively lost by the shoot. This can be seen with Fox hunting. Often the owners of big managed shoots, were also big in Fox hunting. But they never hunted Foxes in the areas they managed for shooting, for fear of dispersing the game birds.
This is why the driven grouse shooting is not interested in diversionary feeding such as tried out at Langholm Moor. They want to eliminate anything which might disturb the unnaturally high density of here, Red Grouse, that they’re trying to create. The shooting industry does not want people to know how they see things, because once you know this, it becomes clear that they will always want to persecute raptors and protected predators, and there is no compromise. Driven shooting is the problem in general. This is not so say walked up shooting is fine, and there will never be any persecution with regard to it. Just that driven shooting will be bound to create the temptation to kill all raptors if they think they can get away with it.
You have hit the nail squarely on the head here and explained the thinking behind the practice, something which is not apparent until you follow it logically, step by step. Thank you.
You are almost certainly right, I spent most of my life in North Yorkshire and even recently talking to folk who shoot, (with one real exception Simon and another partly so) they are pig ignorant about wildlife and have an inbuilt automatic prejudice against all predators and quite simply cannot understand those of us who feel differently. They think we are the weird ones because most folk in their social circles think as they do.
As a teenager it was explained to me by a then retired keeper in a village pub I was wont to frequent ( no village bobby so several of us were moderate but frequent underage drinkers) That Kestrels were seen as a bloody nuisance because when the keeper fed his birds along open rides or the edge of fields this inevitably attracted small birds and mammals and thus the Kestrel came too. Pheasants and Partridges being stupid birds or was that caring of any potential young, were allegedly put of their food by the hovering Kestrel. For this heinous crime the Kestrel was shot ( not sure what the gun noise did to the sensitive souls that are pheasants et al!)
It seems despite the fact this was fifty years ago it may still apply, a tragedy and a pointless ignorant bloody crime. There can be no suitable punishment for such pointless and ignorant criminality.
Is there something in the water in North Yorkshire? What the fxxx is wrong with these people? And why isn’t this ongoing and long-standing issue being resolved?
Why is the British taxpayer still subsiding shotgun licences?
Why aren’t all gamekeepers registered?
Why hasn’t the raptor killing stopped!?
It is banjo country, if you get what I mean. Generations of it, it takes a toll. That is what is wrong with Yorkshire.
This is not a safe area for any Raptor. See this article for the worst incident of persecution to be reported from the exact same Leyburn Shawl area. Worth posting I hope as it predates this blog.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/2961976.stm
Anything with a hooked beak is persecuted by gamekeepers, this has always been the case.
Seems to me that many people who shoot are borderline serial killers.
Loki, you seem to be assuming gamekeepers have brains! Of course they haven’t. And Eric is right, North Yorkshire is quite definitely Raptor Massacre Central’ in England and a blood brother to the Scottish Highlands – with emphasis on ‘blood’!. I speak from bitter experience. I am a proud Mancunian and to keep sane I used to take a bus to Hayfield and walk to Kinder Scout as many times as I could. This was in the early 1950’s pre doing my National Service, and even then I was soon made aware of the great love of the Derbyshire gamekeepers for their bête-noir – the perceived ignoramus ‘hikers’ who had the effrontery to disturb their precious grouse. Then, when I came up to Cumbria in 1963 and started working with owls I began lecturing all over the UK trying to get people to put up nest boxes for Barn Owls and create and manage land for the Field Voles which are the key to Barn Owl survival in the UK. That was in the heady days when we could release captive-bred Barn Owls into the wild once their habitat had been restored, and I used to try and instruct landowners how to carry this out correctly. On one never to be forgotten occasion I was in full flow at a venue in the Yorkshire Dales when a loud ‘Yorkshire bellow’ emanated from the back of the audience shouting “I lad, you put ’em out and we’ll knock ’em out of the sky”!!! Of course silly me, I had forgotten that Barn Owls (and evidently Kestrels) are notorious predators of Red Grouse!!! I won’t even go into our work with Short-eared Owls and Eagle Owls! For first-hand proof of the battle we face, just try doing a lecture to an audience from an Agricultural College which has a Gamekeeping Course in its prospectus and see what they are taught. In my experience their first training is on ‘vermin control’! And before any reader writes in to say that this is Lancastrian bias to Yorkshire men, let me add that one of the World Owl Trust’s best Conservation Officers was a Yorkshire girl!
Strange We’re not allowed to release captive need native barn owls without a licence, which as far as I know would not be forthcoming of we applied
However, we could release thousand of pheasants, sorry millions, workout any controls
Captive BRED in case you were confused.
It’s half term. Not an excuse, I know.
The sad fact is, many of these guys that wander around our countryside shooting things, are Pig Ignorant when it comes to wildlife & many can’t actually identify different Birds of Prey.
I was speaking to a shooter the other day who called a Kestrel a Sparrowhawk & called a Sparrowhawk a Hedge Hawk! 😮 😮 😮
The sooner they introduce a stringent wildlife exam as part of the application for a Gun Licence, the better!
I work in this area and is so depressing , thankfully we have the army ranges close by , where an owl or two can live in peace , but the whole of Leyburn is surrounded by shooting estates and patrolled by these inbred, trigger happy , cave men with no respect or thoughts about anything but pheasant & grouse , evil bastards.
Well said, David. They are evil bastards. I was criticised by fellow tree conservationists last year for being explicit about how much I despised gamekeepers and their ilk and was told that we had to try and work with them. I asked the critics what collaboration had achieved so far and they went quiet. It galls me that these excuses for human beings are paid to live in remote areas and wipe out our magnificent wildiife. Wildlife which doesn’t stand a chance now due to thermal imaging, night sights and all the other horrors these psychopaths bring to bear.
When I was a lad and walking out in the Bleasdale and Bowland Hills. I admit that I had respect or understanding of trespass for the land which was ripe for walking. I was frequently chased by gamekeepers that would tell me, “You are trespassing, get off this land”.
Sadly, I saw their work hanging on lines outside the cottages. My first sighting of kestrels, sparrowhawks, badgers, foxes, stoats and weasels, closeup, was hanging dead from such a line. This was in the mid 60’s after the protection laws were in force. But clearly ignored.
It has been made very clear that things have not improved but the corpses are now carefully hidden.
At a Mark Avery talk last week, a comment from, I assume a gamekeeper, just simply said we have to control vermin. There was clearly a number of shooters and gamekeepers there to hear Mark but none of them had their happy faces on.
Once again in the mid 60’s a friend and I were watching a barn owl, when suddenly, Bang and it fell to the ground. A youth came walking across the field with the dead bird, we feigned interest but took his shot gun and rammed it into the ground, we may also have bent it. He didn’t fight back but left with his damaged shotgun and we didn’t see him again.
Vigilante, maybe but at least we temporarily curtailed his killing spree.
Doug
I had similar experiences in both the moors of Nidderdale/ Washburn and the lowlands between Harrogate and Wetherby with both keepers and gibbets. The first otter (and for nearly 30 years the only) was dead on a keepers gibbet near Knaresborough, same with Barn Owl, Tawny Owl, and Sparrowhawk. At a relatively tender age I learnt if you explained to a farmer that you were on his land to look at wildlife they were usually pretty good about it, with keepers I quickly learnt this was pointless and soon learnt that the only response to give them was FO and run ( these days I don’t run!). I have had the acquaintance of many of them since many I despised, a few I liked as humans ( yes really!) very very few I would trust—–Only one estate in the whole of the Dales these days. There was a time in the late eighties and early nineties that things seemed to be improving but the ” Langholm Report” killed that, it has been downhill ever since. There is but one answer – ban driven shooting and like the Dutch the release of none indigenous gamebirds.
Is this Feb 2018 or 2019? It’s surely not possible to have discovered it to be shot and ask for information on just 3 days
Sadly, Natural England (prefer to call them Unnatural myself!) have issued over 100,000 licenses for birds to be shot, including goldfinches and robins and kites. Oh, ravens too. Whoever is coming up with this nonsense can hang their heads in shame – and then put their heads into a noose!
Bastards!!!