Hen harrier brood meddling: Natural England’s hilariously bad ‘interim social science’ review about whether grouse moor owners’ attitudes towards hen harriers have changed

This is a blog I’ve been meaning to write for some time but for various reasons it kept dropping down the list. However, given hen harrier brood meddling is back on the agenda (we’re awaiting the imminent publication by Natural England of its review of the hen harrier brood meddling trial and a decision about whether brood meddling will be allowed to continue now the 7-year trial has ended) it’s probably timely to write it now.

For new blog readers, the hen harrier brood meddling trial was a conservation sham sanctioned by DEFRA as part of its ludicrous ‘Hen Harrier Action Plan‘ and carried out by Natural England between 2018 – 2024, in cahoots with the very industry responsible for the species’ catastrophic decline in England. In general terms, the plan involved the removal of hen harrier chicks from grouse moors, they were reared in captivity, then released back into the uplands just in time for the start of the grouse-shooting season where many were illegally killed. It was plainly bonkers. For more background see here and here.

One of the objectives of running the brood meddling ‘trial’ was to test whether the availability of brood meddling would change the attitudes of grouse moor owners/managers towards hen harriers (i.e. would they have more tolerance of harriers), which could be judged by, for example, reduced levels of illegal persecution.

The brood meddling trial began in 2018 and three years in, Natural England conducted an ‘interim’ social science study in 2021, ‘to evaluate any changes in social attitudes by those involved in upland management‘.

This interim social science evaluation was completed in 2022 but I couldn’t find a copy in the public domain so I eventually received a (heavily redacted) copy via FoI in 2023. It’s this report that is the focus of this blog and the report is available to read/download at the bottom of this page.

I’ve read a lot of nonsense from Natural England over the years about hen harrier brood meddling but I’ve got to say, this report is right up there as being hilariously bad.

The evaluation was flawed right from the start. Given the tiny number of grouse moors directly involved in the brood meddling trial, it meant that there weren’t that many grouse moor owners and/or gamekeepers available to participate in Natural England’s evaluation interviews to measure if/how attitudes had changed.

There were so few relevant interviewees, in fact, that to make up the numbers for a semi-decent sample size it was decided to extend the list of participants to include seven Natural England staff (who were directly involved in the trial) as well as 12 non-Natural England participants who were directly involved in the brood meddling trial including a few grouse moor owners, gamekeepers and a bunch of people who weren’t from the grouse shooting industry at all but who had participated directly in the brood meddling trial, either by helping to apply for licences or those physically undertaking the brood meddling. The actual breakdown of who these people were and what their roles/affiliations were have been redacted from the report.

So, the opinions of 19 interviewees, seven of whom were Natural England staff and 12 others, some of whom were not directly associated with grouse moor management but were being paid what is believed to have been a large sum of money by the Moorland Association to undertake brood meddling, were used to assess whether attitudes had changed towards hen harriers within the grouse shooting industry as a result of brood meddling being available.

You couldn’t make it up!

Of course they’re going to say that brood meddling is a brilliant wheeze and is a positive course of action and how it’s promoted changed attitudes towards hen harriers; for some of them, their jobs/income relied upon brood meddling continuing!

To be fair to the authors of the interim evaluation report, some of the limitations were acknowledged:

“It is important to recognise a number of potential limitations of this study. First, although the [report’s social science] researchers are not part of the project delivery team, their affiliation with Natural England may have limited respondents’ willingness to be open and honest about their experiences of the trial. Second, in order to provide evidence for the process evaluation, the sample is limited only to those who are delivering or participating in the trial. There have only been a limited number of grouse moors where the density threshold for using brood management has been met as well as receptor sites assessed as suitable for harrier release within the same SPA. This has resulted in the comparatively small sample size of this research compared to the total number of grouse moors and people involved in grouse shooting. As such, participants are likely to be among those members of the moorland management community who are most receptive to the idea of brood management and who recognise the need to change attitudes and behaviours. Caution must therefore be taken in extrapolating the potential effects of rolling the trial out more widely“.

To be honest, as soon as it was known that there were too few relevant participants available this social science ‘study’ should have been scrapped. How much public money was wasted on it?

I won’t go in to detail about the study’s findings – you can read them for yourselves in the report below – but there are some hilarious assertions made by the interviewees.

These include a suggestion that ‘within the last five years [up to 2021] there has been a wider change in attitude toward harriers among the grouse shooting community due to recognition that the future of grouse shooting is intrinsically linked with the future of hen harriers. Brood management was perceived to have tapped in to this change and helped harness it in a practical way‘

and

‘Brood management enabled moors to hold each other to account for any persecution through greater self-policing‘.

Of course, we all have the benefit of hindsight several years later and we know that attitudes by the majority of grouse moor owners/managers towards hen harriers has not changed one bit, as evidenced by the continued illegal killing throughout the duration of the brood meddling trial:

I haven’t seen any evidence of ‘greater self-policing’ by grouse moor owners/managers, have you? How many cases have there been where someone from within the grouse shooting industry has reported another for illegal persecution?

What we’ve seen instead is at least 134 hen harriers confirmed illegally killed or ‘missing’ in suspicious circumstances on or close to grouse moors (here), complete denial by the then Chair of the Moorland Association, Mark Cunliffe-Lister, that persecution was even happening (here), the current CEO of the Moorland Association, Andrew Gilruth, being booted off the national priority delivery group (RPPDG) set up to tackle illegal raptor persecution and being accused by the police of “wasting time and distracting from the real work” of the police’s new Hen Harrier Taskforce (here), and a police investigation into alleged raptor persecution on a grouse moor that was directly involved in brood meddling (here). Oh, and what should have been a police investigation into the illegal poisoning of a red kite found dead on another grouse moor that was also directly involved in brood meddling (here).

Changed attitudes? Not by any stretch of imagination.

Although, thinking about it, it probably IS fair to say that attitudes have changed, but not in the way Natural England intended. They’ve changed in as much as more recently, gamekeepers are deliberately NOT targeting hen harriers that are carrying satellite tags because they know that will attract unwanted attention and instead they’re aiming their guns at untagged harriers, simply because those untagged victims are less likely to be detected by researchers or the authorities.

We saw and heard a vivid example of this change of tactics in the Channel 4 News programme that aired last October, which showed RSPB covertly-captured audio and video footage of three gamekeepers on a Yorkshire grouse moor discussing this very issue, deciding not to shoot a tagged hen harrier but then apparently shooting and killing an untagged one. If you haven’t seen this programme I strongly encourage you to watch it – it’s astounding:

I’ve no idea whether Natural England’s interim social science evaluation of the hen harrier brood meddling trial served any useful purpose in NE’s overall review of the trial, but hopefully we won’t need to wait for much longer before the final review is published and we learn whether the Moorland Association’s current licence application for brood meddling has been granted.

In the meantime, if you want a good laugh, here’s the interim report: