Natural England reports drop in hen harrier breeding attempts

Last week Natural England published its results of the 2024 hen harrier breeding season and has reported a drop in breeding attempts (here).

This drop has been mainly attributed to poor weather, which is a reasonable assumption, although I’m pretty sure that it’s also been rainy in Northumberland (especially Kielder) and Bowland, where hen harriers continue to do well on land that isn’t managed for grouse shooting. Hmm, funny that.

And in the North Pennines, two pairs bred successfully on the RSPB’s Geltsdale reserve producing eight fledglings, the most successful breeding season there since the 1990s (here) and thanks in no small part to the round-the-clock nest protection provided by the RSPB. It also helps that none of the breeding males were found dead with shotgun injuries on the neighbouring grouse moor.

Disappointingly, Natural England’s end-of-season blog does not even mention any of the ongoing police investigations into dead/’missing’ hen harriers this year (currently 8 that we know about), let alone provide any level of detail about the causes of death. This lack of transparency has become Natural England’s hallmark.

Nor does the blog say anything about the collapse of its hen harrier brood meddling sham trial, other than ‘No nests were brood managed in 2024‘. We already knew that (see here) but I suppose it was a bit much to expect NE to admit to being mugged off by the grouse shooting industry in which it had ludicrously placed so much trust.

The blog does say that NE is “currently reviewing and analysing the data” [from the brood meddling sham trial] and that this is “a process which will be concluded later this year“. NE intends to use its findings to assess whether brood meddling will be rolled out as an annual so-called ‘conservation licence’. This seems an utterly untenable proposition given that (a) at least 128 hen harriers have been illegally killed or gone ‘missing’ in suspicious circumstances, mostly on or close to grouse moors, since brood meddling began (here) and (b) Andrew Gilruth, the CEO of NE’s main brood meddling partner, the Moorland Association, has recently been booted off the national police-led effort to tackle raptor persecution for “wasting time and distracting from the real work” of the Hen Harrier taskforce (here).

I look forward to NE’s brood meddling analysis with great interest. I wonder whether it’ll be as shabby as NE’s behaviour revealed in two examples this morning (see here and here)?