Year: 2020

Crimes against birds of prey in Scotland double, new Government report confirms

Two days before Christmas the Scottish Government published its annual wildlife crime report, the seventh since it became a statutory obligation under the Wildlife and Natural Environment (Scotland) Act 2011 for Ministers to lay a report on wildlife crime at the end of every calendar year.

The current report is entitled the ‘2018’ report, but it actually refers to wildlife crimes recorded from April 2017 to March 2018.

The report can be downloaded here: wildlife-crime-scotland-2018-annual-report

The headline news is that reported raptor persecution crimes have doubled since the previous year’s report. So much for the game shooting industry’s repeated false claims then that raptor persecution is declining.

And all the more shocking that this doubling in increase took place at exactly the same time that the Werritty Review was underway – you’d think that the criminals within the grouse shooting industry would have had the sense to ease off whilst under such close scrutiny, at least until the review was completed. But no, they’re either too stupid or, more likely, too arrogant to care, knowing full well the chance of being caught and prosecuted is virtually nil.

We’ll be looking at the game shooting industry’s response to this report in later blogs.

Ian Thomson of RSPB Scotland was quoted in the press as saying the increase in reported raptor persecution crimes is of “significant concern“. He also said,

“This shows very clearly that the targeting of our raptors continues unabated, particularly on intensively managed grouse moors.

The repeated and ongoing suspicious disappearance of satellite-tagged birds of prey, almost exclusively on or adjacent to areas managed for driven grouse shooting demonstrates very clearly that the Scottish Government needs to expedite the robust regulation of this industry“.

The report’s foreword has been written by Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham and it’s well worth a read as she acknowledges the crime stats are a likely underestimate of the true scale, particularly as wildlife crime on remote grouse moors is difficult to detect without witnesses. It’s an obvious point but one that does need to be repeated.

She also makes the important and significant point of discussing the ‘missing’ satellite tagged raptors (two golden eagles + six hen harriers) that vanished during this period. These missing birds are not included in the ‘official’ crime stats because without a body the police are unable to record the disappearance as a crime (which is why so many simply disappear without trace – the criminals know how to play this game) but she says of the sudden suspicious losses, “These circumstances strongly suggest that many of these incidents may be the result of illegal killing of these birds“.

The rest of the foreword makes no commitment to taking forward any specific action, which is hugely disappointing. Roseanna simply acknowledges that there’s still an ongoing issue and repeats the now familiar mantra that the Scottish Government is still committed to tackling it, but doesn’t map out how, apart from talking about increased penalties for wildlife crime, which we’ve already had to wait six years for and they’re still not here yet. Perhaps this vagueness is unsurprising given that we’re now waiting to hear the Government’s formal response to the Werritty Review and the specific actions it intends to take. Apparently we’ll learn details of that response ‘in due course‘, widely expected to be April.

The timing of the publication of this wildlife crime report was pretty poor – two days before Christmas isn’t ideal, although it did get some coverage in the Scotsman the following day on Christmas Eve. In response, Mark Ruskell MSP, the Scottish Green’s Environment spokesperson, suggested the Government was ‘trying to bury bad news’. It’s a fair point.

UPDATE 8 January 2020: Scottish Gamekeepers Association silent as Government report confirms increase in raptor crime (here)

First Hen Harrier Day event for Wales – 18 July 2020

Save the date folks – 18 July 2020 – as Hen Harrier Day arrives in Wales!

Beginning in 2014, this annual event has since spread across the UK including England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, typically taking place on the weekend before the opening of the grouse-shooting season on 12th August.

It’s brilliant to see people in Wales now stepping forward to host an event and also to see it spreading beyond August. Hen harriers are illegally killed on grouse moors year-round, not just in August, so the more opportunities there are to highlight these crimes, the better.

If you’re on social media follow the organisers of Hen Harrier Day Wales @wcrcuk for more details.

UPDATE 14 March 2020: Booking opens for Hen Harrier Day Wales (here)

New Chairman for Scottish Land & Estates

Scottish Land and Estates (SLE), the grouse moor owners’ lobby group (amongst other things) has announced its new Chairman will be sporting estate owner Mark Tennant.

Mark will begin his new role in April 2020 when the current Chair, Lord David Johnstone, steps down.

We don’t know much about Mark other than what SLE has written in its announcement (here) but let’s be honest, he’s not exactly got big shoes to fill. His predecessor, ‘Dumfriesshire Dave’ has spent the last five years pretending everything’s fine and suggesting there’s really no need to do anything about the illegal killing of raptors on grouse moors because it’s no longer an issue, it’s mostly just the RSPB trying to smear the good name of the industry and/or ‘activists’ trying to ‘set up’ law-abiding estates. (E.g. see here, here, here, here, here). Talk about dial ‘D’ for denial.

It’s hard to think of a single example where Dumfriesshire Dave has inspired any confidence in the industry’s willingness, let alone ability, to clean up its act, so Mark Tennant has a bit of an open goal to get off to a good start, should he choose to take it.

According to the SLE announcement, Mark will be working ‘to help fight climate change’. Excellent. Can we expect all SLE-member grouse moor owners to commit to stopping their routine heather burning regimes, including on deep peat, in the interests of addressing the climate emergency?

What we do know about Mark, from the SLE announcement, is that his ‘family business Innes Estate in Elgin has been a member of SLE for over 40 years‘. That’s really interesting. So SLE didn’t expel the estate when the then head gamekeeper was convicted in 2007 for poisons and firearms offences, then? NOTE: there is no suggestion that those historical offences were part of a wider pattern of continued wildlife crime on the estate – as far as we are aware there are no further reports of alleged offences at this estate – we’re just interested at SLE’s apparent lack of action in response to wildlife crime.

Speaking of which, here’s something Mark could sort out for us. We’re still waiting to hear from SLE whether the Longformacus Estate (the location of a catalogue of horrific and violent wildlife crimes for which a gamekeeper was recently convicted) was, and if so still is, a member of Scottish Land & Estates? We asked SLE this specific question in August, after the Crown Office chose not to pursue a prosecution for alleged vicarious liability and SLE had until then avoided commenting on the estate’s membership status. We had a quick response from the Membership Department who told us, ‘I have forwarded on your email to our Senior Management Team who will respond in due course‘. Needless to say, silence since then.

Over to you, Mark. Was/is Longformacus Estate a member of Scottish Land & Estates?

No, Magnus, the Werritty Review does not threaten gamekeepers’ jobs, wildlife crime does

On 20th December 2019, the day after the Werritty Review was published, The Times ran this comment piece from Magnus Linklater:

The long delay in issuing the Werritty report suggests not only that the management of grouse moors in Scotland has proved far more complex an issue than was realised, but also that the balance between sporting interests and conservation is hard to achieve.

Campaigners against the sport argued that the persecution of birds of prey, the culling of mountain hares and the burning of heather, to say nothing of shooting game birds, were unacceptable practices. Proponents said that it brought employment and tourist income to rural areas, as well as funding staff to manage Scotland’s upper moorland.

Professor Werritty concludes that there is no case for banning grouse shooting and that gamekeepers perform a useful service for conservation by controlling vermin and managing the land. But he also recommends regulating estates, issuing licences that will require extensive paperwork and extra cost.

Legislation already provides powers to crack down on the persecution of birds of prey.

As a trustee of an estate that once boasted large numbers of grouse, but is now virtually empty, I know gamekeepers are all too aware of the penalties for breaking the law. Introducing more rules is unlikely to improve the situation and will add to the cost of running these vast areas so beloved by hill-walkers.

Without the income to manage the hills, they would become overrun by predators, such as foxes and crows, which kill not only grouse but wading birds, such as curlew and lapwing.

It is one of the great ironies of the countryside that gamekeepers, so vilified by campaigners, are in fact guardians of the wildlife diversity that is so important to rural Scotland. They too are an endangered species and they too deserve protection.

ENDS

The piece contains all the usual tired, and frankly, now embarrassing rhetoric that we’ve learned to expect from someone with a long-held vested interest in grouse shooting and we had been planning to take his claims apart, sentence by sentence, as we, and others, have done many times before (e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here, here). Fortunately, someone else has done it for us and far more succinctly to boot.

This straight-to-the-point riposte was published in The Times three days after Linklater’s offering:

Guardians of the Land

Magnus Linklater (Dec 20) laments the fate of “endangered” gamekeepers due to proposed licensing for grouse shoots.  Their peril is as a result of their own actions in illegally wiping out birds of prey, inextricably linked to management of driven grouse shooting. Many behave themselves but it is the bad apples among them who blight their industry. This could not happen without the shooting estates condoning such criminal behaviour. Licensing is their reward. David Landsman, Aberdeen.

David Landsman is absolutely spot on (apart from his estimation of crime scale – it’s massive). It’s not the Werritty recommendation of estate licensing that threatens gamekeepers’ jobs – that’s just a ridiculous suggestion from Linklater designed to portray gamekeepers as innocent victims.

No, it’s the continued illegal killing of birds of prey by many of those gamekeepers (note, many but not all of them), and the subsequent denials and cover-ups by estate owners and their representative bodies that is bringing such pressure to bear on the industry.

They’ve had 65 years to understand that it’s a crime to shoot, trap and poison birds of prey and it’s about bloody time they were held to account.