On Saturday, Natural England published a press release providing details about this year’s hen harrier breeding season, including the latest results of its so-called ‘scientific trial’ of hen harrier brood management, which many of us refer to as brood meddling – a conservation sham sanctioned by DEFRA as part of its ludicrous ‘Hen Harrier Action Plan‘ and carried out by Natural England, in cahoots with grouse moor owners, the very industry responsible for the species’ catastrophic decline in England (more info here and here).
As we’ve come to expect from Natural England, they spun a positive story about an increase in hen harrier breeding success this year (36 successful nests, up from 34 last year) and proclaimed ‘there are now more Hen Harriers nesting in England than at any point since they were lost as a breeding species around 200 years ago‘. That’s true, but given that England has sufficient habitat to host an estimated 330 breeding pairs, the breeding population is currently at an estimated 10.9% of what it could/should be, thanks to the illegal killing of this species on land managed for grouse shooting.
The press release does acknowledge that hen harrier persecution remains an ongoing issue on many driven grouse moors, and includes a link to the important 2019 scientific paper by Murgatroyd et al showing the extent of these crimes, but doesn’t include reference to the more recent paper by Ewing et al (2023) which shows hen harrier annual survival rates are appallingly low, especially among birds under one year old (males: 14%; females: 30%), with illegal killing accounting for the deaths of 27-41% of birds under one year, and 75% of mortality in birds aged between one and two years.
It’s fairly pointless to celebrate improved breeding success without balancing that against poor survival rates. But this is a game Natural England plays routinely, giving very high prominence to breeding success without providing the same amount of publicity about persecution levels (e.g. see this conversation from 2021).
I’ve written before (here) how I think Natural England is utterly compromised on reporting about hen harriers, largely because Natural England has entered into a written contract with one of the shooting organisations whereby NE receives £75,000 over a period of three years (until 2024) in return for not making “any derogatory remarks” about the shooting organisation in relation to hen harriers (see here).
At the end of Natural England’s latest press release/blog, it says this:
‘As this blog goes to press the Police are actively investigating the deliberate killing of two brood-managed hen harriers, though we have been asked to give no further details at this time. These incidents hit our staff on the ground hard and can only detract from the efforts we and the partners we are working with to restore these special birds to our uplands‘.
What is doesn’t say, is that eight more satellite-tagged hen harriers have ‘vanished’ since NE’s last update in May 2023, and in total this year, of the 20 ‘missing’/illegally killed hen harriers, nine of them are brood meddled birds.
There’s quite a discrepancy between two and eight birds! Why have those eight most recent birds not been included in the press release? The data are provided in Natural England’s latest spreadsheet on the fate of tagged birds (here) but NE has deliberately chosen not to highlight them in its publicity drive. Why is that?
Is it because to do so would mean Natural England has to talk about the fact that since its brood meddling trial began in 2018, at least 109 hen harriers have gone ‘missing’/been illegally killed, most of them on or close to driven grouse moors?
The details (from the NE spreadsheet) of the latest eight ‘missing’ birds are provided below. I will add them to the rolling list of (now 109) missing/killed birds later today, but not until I’ve blogged about yet more ‘missing’ birds that the RSPB has just reported, which takes the total above 109 birds.
Here are the eight birds that have gone since the last update from NE in May 2023 – note, there hasn’t been a single press release/appeal for information from either NE or any of the police forces involved in these investigations:
Tag #203004, male, brood meddled in 2020 (name: R1-M2-20). Last known fix 12 June 2023 on a grouse moor in Co. Durham (grid ref: NY976322).
Tag #55144, female, brood meddled in 2020 (name: R2-F2-20). Last known fix 29 July 2023 at a confidential site in the North Pennines. Notes from the NE spreadsheet: “Dead. Recovered – awaiting PM results. Final transmission location temporarily withheld at police request“.
Tag #213922, male, brood meddled in 2021 (name: R2-M1-21). Last known fix 11 June 2023 at a confidential site in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Notes from the NE spreadsheet: “Final transmission location temporarily withheld at police request“.
Tag #213932, male, brood meddled in 2022 (name: R2-M3-22). Last known fix 31 May 2023 in Northumberland (grid ref: NY765687).
Tag #201124a, female, (name: ‘Rubi’), tagged 27 June 2023 in Co. Durham. Last known fix 6 July 2023 on a grouse moor in Co. Durham (grid ref: NY911151).
Tag #55154a, female, brood meddled in 2023 (name: R1-F1-23). Last known fix 23 July 2023 on a grouse moor in Co. Durham (close to where ‘Rubi’ vanished), grid ref: NY910126.
Tag #55155a, female, brood meddled in 2023 (name: R1-F2-23). Last known fix 24 August 2023 at a confidential site in Northumberland. Notes from the NE spreadsheet: “Final transmission location temporarily withheld at police request“.
Tag #201118a, female, brood meddled in 2023 (name: R3-F1-23). Last known fix 11 August 2023 in Co. Durham (grid ref: NZ072136).
Raptor Persecution UK 
Why are the Green Party and Friends of the Earth so completely silent about the role their erstwhile leader, Tony Juniper, (Executive Director of Friends of the Earth, England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and ex-Parliamentary candidate (Cambridge, Green Party candidate, 2010) is playing here?
Juniper was awarded a CBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours for ‘services to conservation’ – but then he had been a ‘special advisor’ to the then Prince of Wales Charities’ International Sustainability Unit and the then Prince’s Rainforests Project.
He is also a Fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, whose Patron is currently… the King!
How many shooting estates do the Royal Family have?
Prior to becoming Chairman of Natural England, Juniper was also President of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts and Executive Director for Advocacy and Campaigns at WWF-UK.
Lots more Royal connections there!
Well said. Nothing will change until the elephant in the room is acknowledged. Don’t hold your breath! Thank you.
As I’ve already said the corruption and lies within these companies including the councils are what they stand for money and power as they truly believe that people r below them
…… and these are just the detectable (or otherwise) ones that we know about. How many untagged birds does 8 tagged ones equate to? Probably four or five times as many. Absolute carnage.
Like Keith, I had been wondering what Tony Juniper makes of this situation. He is strangely silent on the matter, whereas I would have thought that, particularly with his background, he would be up in arms about what is going on on his watch. What is it going to take to see some positive action? Some hard-hitting publicity would make a good start instead of hiding bad news in spread-sheets. This is a national scandal and it is time it was treated as such!
Last week when this seasons results were released by NE, Tony Juniper was giving some very supportive spin to the results of the brood meddling partnership and what it was achieving. Complete stomach churning words from a man who purports to be a conservationist. I have long pondered his responses and commentary on this debacle and other conservation issues and conclude that he is part of the problem and not the solution.
Who gets to decide – and upon what expert advice or training – whether to publicise a case straight away and make a public appeal, or to wait months before mentioning it? How often has staying silent proven to be a successful approach versus how often has it achieved nothing? The North Yorkshire police officer interviewed in the Guardian podcast (about the stamped-on harrier chicks) who could only mumble that things weren’t done that could have been done, brought my confidence in that police force (but certainly not all police) to a bit of a low, regards the wisdom (or more accurately the deliberate inertia) of not-publicising straight away.
There is a horrible inevitability to all this, there are Hen Harriers out there on grouse moors that don’t want them= shot harriers and disabled tags. It happens because the law protecting these birds is weak and even if it weren’t there are those in policing who see wildlife crime as unimportant. What is concerning is that some sites are withheld, this only protects the guilty. I long ago stopped expecting policing and NE to be more upfront and uncompromising about such persecution, unless they are we are and the law changes giving us a strong and robustly policed licensing scheme the only alternative, which is coming ever nearer is a complete ban on DGS.
First question that jumps out is how many nesting attempts as opposed to succesful ones? The useful idiots at NE yet again treating the taxpayer with contempt. Maybe need reminding they are public servants not serfs for the criminal cartel.
Appears Durham and Northumberland are pretty dangerous at the moment if you’re a harrier.
18 nest failures.
Tony Juniper’s statement this weekend says that there were 24 brood meddled hen harrier chicks this year taken from 6 nests. “The fledglings recorded this year includes 24 brood-managed chicks, taken from six nests on grouse moors and reared to fledging in captivity”.
Their updated HH spreadsheet shows that there were 17 hen harrier chicks tagged this year in total (4 of which are already shown as missing – 23%) but only 9 of these came from 4 brood meddled nests Why the discrepancy?
I may be wrong but I thought it was a requirement of the HH Action Plan that all brood meddled birds had to be tagged before release. Is this right? If not that leaves 15 hen harriers outside of Natural England’s ability to protect, monitor and support them as part of their Hen Harrier Action Plan.
[Ed: they’ve changed the rules, Mike. They no longer have to tag each brood meddled bird, just a representative sample from each brood. I have some info from an FoI on this that I’ll try to blog about when I get chance].
Thanks Ruth. Slippery customers aren’t they! Why would they not want to see all hen harriers tagged I wonder. It can’t be financial.
I am sure that NE will at least tell us where in England they released the 15 non tagged, brood meddled, hen harriers. Hope it wasn’t Durham and Northumberland!
Maybe Hen Harriers go missing from grouse moors because that is where they chose to live. Vermin control and heather burning create habitat which suits Hen Harriers. We have no habitat management, no grouse and no hen harriers on the moors here.
As has been pointed out on this blog before, hen harriers do NOT need vermin control and heather burning to survive, they did not appear as a new species to science because of vermin control and heather burning. Criminal activity by humans is their downfall.
Why do you people bother trotting out the same old rubbish? The so-called “management” of our uplands by the DGS mafia is an ecological disaster, as anyone with an ounce of integrity would concede.
Maybe look at orkney Islands, mull, North uist before making this ridiculous comment. No moorland management, no keepers and loads of hen harriers.
Hen Harriers go missing from grouse moors because of the criminal activity which is taking place.
On a grouse moor where the illegal persecution of birds of prey doesn’t take place, then Hen Harriers will successfully live and breed.
I think the truth of the matter is that most grouse moor owners don’t want Hen Harriers on their land because it interferes with the shooting.
So, some engage in criminal activity, whilst the rest of the shooting industry looks in the opposite direction, knowing full well that this criminal eradication of Hen Harriers also benefits their estates, as the population of Hen Harriers doesn’t really increase to extent that it has a detrimental effect on grouse numbers.
It is very telling that NE and the shooting industry are very keen to publicise the number of successful nests, but never talk about the wider population of adult Hen Harriers.
It is also very telling that many game keepers often try and fool the public by talking about conservation in terms of creating a balance in nature. This isn’t a natural balance, but a very skewed balance which favours grouse numbers.
Such unnatural balances would not be be tolerated in any other industry, and the introduction of regulations and licensing to all aspects of game shooting is long overdue.
I also think most people with a genuine interest in this matter have now understood, just how much some of those in senior positions in NE and government have been heavily influenced by the game shooting industry’s carefully orchestrated propaganda machine.
And to respond directly to your point, I would suggest that should the Hen Harrier population increase to a more natural size, then Hen Harriers would start to live on the moors near you, because as they expand their range, then some of the birds will be forced to live on moors less favourable than the managed grouse moors.
This is no different from any of their species which will favour the more easy places to inhabit, before expanding into the more marginal areas.
Green Party pretty useless here(Ireland) too on such biodiversity matters
“5 Natural England shall be entitled to terminate the Agreement with immediate effect by giving written notice if in its reasonable opinion the continuation of the Agreement would have a material and adverse impact upon the reputation of Natural England or the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs“.
This is from the MOU between NE and BASC ie the legal agreement signed in return for £75k “donation”. How much lower does NE’s reputation wrt to HH have to sink before they terminate this MOU?
Durham and Northumberland are dangerous places for any form of wild life or birds of prey north Yorkshire is not much better. Once happened to drop in on a lurcher and terrier show there !! Never seen such awful stuff stalls selling snares animal pelts puppies for sale for a fiver I was traumatized. It’s all futile, grouse moors rule in England and Scotland and these barbaric atrocities will continue until land owners are held criminally responsible.
This is a national scandal. The public are paying NE to implement the Hen Harrier recovery programme. It is time the real truth of what is happening, and the disappearance of so many satellite tagged Hen Harriers was made public through mainstream media.
Politicians also need to be asking questions in parliament about this issue, and the Minister in charge should be required to give an account of just what is happening.
This is a serious issue and I suspect that the answers could be very embarrassing for the government, which currently defends the interests of landowners on which grouse shooting takes place and where Hen Harriers go missing.
The plight of the Hen Harrier is just one example of how the UK government is failing wildlife and the natural environment.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the current Conservation government in Westminster has very little interest in protecting nature and it appears to be far more interested in looking after the financial interests of those who support it.
Time for a change, but I doubt the other political parties will offer the radical changes needed to implement proper reform in the countryside, so that those who engage in criminal activities or harm nature and the environment face proper justice for the wrongs they are committing.
(If there are any MPs reading this blog- you have been elected and given a very privileged position, -with those privileges comes responsibility, and failing to ask questions and do something about the plight of one of the UKs most endangered birds, on which a lot of public money is being spent makes you complicit in what is taking place- the government needs to give a proper account of this matter, as I suspect vested interests are at play- if this was happening in a developing nation, we would call it corruption!!)
It concerns me that the police are refusing to disclose the location and details of these crimes. There can be no lawful, or valid, reason for this situation. It would be worth doing FOIA requests to each of the police forces to ask for their statutory authority for these decisions. It is not just one police force but a number of them. How can this be? Prima facie it appears to be collusion with the criminals.