Natural England has finally published the post-mortem results of two brood meddled hen harriers found dead in October 2021.
You’ll recall I’ve been chasing Natural England for these results for months (see here and here) and I last heard from them on 23 February 2022 telling me they couldn’t provide the results just yet because of the ‘complex nature’ of my request. It wasn’t ‘complex’ at all, it was a straightforward question.
On Friday 4th March 2022 Natural England posted these summary PM results:
There isn’t any reason to doubt the PM results in these two cases and accept NE’s presumption that both harriers died of natural causes.
In the same blog published on Friday, Natural England also discussed a number of other satellite-tagged hen harriers and I’ll be writing about those in separate blogs.
Standby….
Raptor Persecution UK 
Thank you for posting these results. I read the first as saying very little given the state of the corpse. It is well known that illegal predation by humans does take place at known roosts and thus it cannot be proved either way. The second looks a little more straightforwards.
My remaining doubt in regards to the first is simply by the delay and the fact that it took care to mention the absence of poison on minimal remains, simply bones by the description, while omitting any reference to illegal actitivies in the first.
In normal circumstances I would have no issue with either, but given the track record of obfuscation and the delay in making public something apprantly so simple …………….
I would imagine that since they have published the report summaries, the full PM reports will now drop into your inbox as per your FOI….?
Glad to see your sense of humour is still intact, Circus!
Did the trackers on these birds stop working?. Surely they should have been working when found. If so does the tracker data agree with the estimated time of death.
How long after they stopped giving moving did they find the birds?