March 2025 – Page 2 – Raptor Persecution UK

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:

*n/a – no hen harriers were brood meddled in 2018. **Post mortem reports on a further six hen harriers found dead in 2024 are awaited.

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:

FoI Tingay_HHBMT interim social science evaluation full report_Redacted Download

Lincolnshire gamekeeper guilty of multiple offences in relation to deaths of red kite and buzzards

Another trial and yet another gamekeeper convicted of offences relating to the illegal killing of birds of prey.

The trial of gamekeeper John Bryant, in relation to the illegal killing of a red kite and two buzzards, concluded at Lincolnshire Magistrates Court last week where he was convicted of four of ten alleged offences.

Gamekeeper Bryant, 40, of West Ashby, Horncastle, Lincolnshire had been summonsed to court last September following a police investigation into reports of three birds of prey, a red kite and two buzzards, being poisoned and killed over a five year period between 2017 and 2022.

Bryant had pleaded not guilty to ten charges (two charges of using a trap to kill or take a wild bird, six charges of possessing an article capable of being used to commit a summary offence, and two charges of contravening health & safety regulations) so he faced trial starting 6th March 2025.

He will be sentenced for the four offences next week when full details of the case and convictions will be published.

UPDATE 20 March 2025: Lincolnshire gamekeeper John Bryant sentenced for crimes relating to raptor persecution – police statement (here).

Aim to Sustain’s Game Assurance Scheme collapses in industry’s latest self-regulation failure

The UK gamebird shooting industry’s flagship ‘Game Assurance Scheme’, which was set up to demonstrate to politicians and the public the supposed high standards of gamebird shoots and game meat through audit and certification (a bit like farming’s Red Tractor Scheme), has collapsed.

Shot red grouse ready for cooking. Photo by Ruth Tingay

The Game Assurance Scheme was first launched in 2018 under the branding ‘British Game Alliance’ although it was immediately apparent that not all was as it should be. I pointed out that its list of supposedly ‘assured members’ included estates that had recently been at the centre of police investigations into alleged, and confirmed, wildlife crime (see here and here). The published list of ‘assured members’ was soon removed from the BGA website, never to return. Not much assurance there, then.

In October 2021 the British Game Alliance changed its named to ‘British Game Assurance’. It kept this name until December 2023 when it changed to ‘Eat Wild Ltd‘ and stopped being an ‘assurance scheme’ and instead focused on promoting game meat to the public.

In October 2023 the role of the ‘assurance scheme’ was instead transferred from the British Game Alliance to a recently formed ‘partnership’ calling itself Aim To Sustain, and the Aim to Sustain Game Assurance Scheme was born.

The Aim to Sustain partnership was formed in July 2021 and was apparently designed ‘to highlight the crucial role that sustainable game shooting plays in delivering biodiversity net gain through preserving and protecting cherished rural landscapes and a tremendous array of wildlife‘. I described it at the time as a ‘propaganda supergroup’.

The partnership included most of the usual suspects: Countryside Alliance, British Game Alliance, British Association for Shooting and Conservation, Country Land & Business Association, Game Farmers’ Association, Moorland Association, National Gamekeepers’ Organisation and Scottish Land and Estates. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust were acting as ‘scientific advisors’. The Scottish Gamekeepers Association was noticeably absent.

Amidst great fanfare (e.g. here) in October 2023, it was announced that the Game Assurance Scheme was being transferred to Aim to Sustain and by December 2023 it was up and running.

Aim to Sustain launched a website and set out the details of its Game Assurance Scheme. Here are some screenshots and associated files – posted here for posterity because they’ve recently all been removed from Aim to Sustain’s website.

Aim-to-Sustain-Upland-Standards Download

Aim-to-Sustain-Lowland-Shoot-Standards Download

Aim-to-Sustain-Game-Farming-standards Download

I think it’s worth clicking on that link from the launch of the new Game Assurance Scheme in October 2023 and reading some of the quotes given at the time by the Aim to Sustain directors, because they all emphasised the political and public significance of having a Game Assurance Scheme in place to demonstrate effective self-regulation and high standards.

The Countryside Alliance later re-emphasised the ‘urgency of self-regulation‘ ahead of the general election in June 2024:

“In this political climate, the shooting sector needs to show those in power that through responsible and independently audited self-regulation, any new government-imposed regulation is unnecessary“.

The game shooting industry was under scrutiny like never before and it thought that Aim To Sustain’s Game Assurance Scheme would act as an effective firewall against the growing number of magnifying glasses being wielded by pesky campaigners who were daring to question the status quo and were rattling a few Government-building doors and windows to seek urgent and radical policy change on gamebird shooting.

Unfortunately for the industry, Aim to Sustain’s firewall might as well have been made from kerosene because the whole lost has just combusted.

Aim to Sustain’s Game Assurance Scheme lasted for just over one year. This last weekend, a blog reader sent me the following letter that the Aim to Sustain partnership had just sent out:

So it would seem the Game Assurance Scheme has collapsed because Aim to Sustain couldn’t attract sufficient numbers of estates, shoots and game farms to join and keep it financially viable.

Is that because there aren’t sufficient numbers of estates, shoots and game farms that can meet the standards needed for certification?

Are the sustainable shoots so few in number that they’re dwarfed by the number of unsustainable, irresponsible cowboys/criminals that wouldn’t stand a hope in hell’s chance of gaining accreditation?

I don’t know how many estates, shoots and game farms were audited and accredited within the 14 months the assurance scheme was being run by Aim To Sustain (total lack of transparency) but it can’t have been that many if the scheme has already collapsed. I heard there might have been around 150 but I have no way of verifying that figure. Either way, it’s obviously a teeny tiny proportion of the thousands of established shoots across the UK.

Whatever the reason for failure, it is yet another example of the game shooting industry’s inability to self-regulate, coming hot on the heels of last week’s news that the industry’s purported five-year voluntary transition away from using toxic lead ammunition has also failed spectacularly.

And it’s not just the Game Assurance Scheme that’s collapsed. If you look at the Aim to Sustain Ltd entry on Companies House there appears to have been a sudden and fascinating exit of seven Directors since January:

Rats and sinking ships comes to mind.

DEFRA endorses Natural England’s recommendations for a presumption AGAINST the issuing of licences for taking wild birds of prey for falconry

Some good news for birds of prey! DEFRA has endorsed Natural England’s recommendations for a presumption AGAINST the issuing of licences for taking birds of prey from the wild for falconry and aviculture.

A licensing policy review was undertaken by Natural England following the furore in 2020 when NE issued licenses for the removal of young peregrines from the wild for a purported captive-breeding programme.

That news had generated heated arguments both for and against the licences, as reported on Mark Avery’s blog (e.g. see here, here and here). In 2022 NE said that although licences had been issued in 2020, ‘the licenses expired earlier this year with no chicks having been taken‘. It’s not clear why the licences weren’t used.

Young peregrines on a nest ledge. Photo by Ruth Tingay (taken under licence)

In 2022, licences to take birds of prey from the wild were temporarily suspended whilst NE began a fairly comprehensive licensing policy review which included a public consultation with wide stakeholder engagement from the falconry and non-falconry communities. Natural England has published links to various reports resulting from the consultation process, here.

The species most frequently mentioned by those wanting to take birds from the wild for falconry purposes were peregrine (58%), sparrowhawk (58%), merlin (22%) and goshawk (10%). One individual falconer respondent mentioned buzzard and golden eagle. However, many falconer and non-falconer respondents considered the latter two species to be unsuitable for inclusion in a future wild take licensing regime. In the case of golden eagles, it was stated that this was due to their rarity in England. Many falconers also considered merlin to be unsuitable for inclusion due to their rarity.

The consultation process included detailed evidence from the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) about the increase in the legal and illegal trade in peregrines, both for the domestic and international market, and how licensed ‘wild take’ may add to the problem.

Many of you will be familiar with Operation Tantallon, the recent successful multi-agency investigation leading to the subsequent prosecution and conviction of two peregrine launderers in south Scotland who were selling wild Scottish peregrines to wealthy falconers in the Middle East (see here).

The scale of their offending was considerable and I heard at a wildlife crime conference earlier this week that many more cases are currently under investigation as a result of Operation Tantallon.

In October 2023 Natural England’s ‘wild-take’ licensing review came to an end and drew the following conclusions:

Wild take is not integral to the present-day practice of falconry or aviculture in England. Few modern falconry texts define falconry as involving the use of ‘wild’ birds of prey and there are limited historical references to the cultural importance of wild take or of wild-taken birds to British falconers. No clear consensus exists within the falconry community or in the available falconry literature regarding the cultural importance of wild take as a core aspect of falconry practice.

Despite rapid growth in the popularity of falconry in recent decades, the available evidence suggests that there are sufficient birds of the relevant species readily available – via captive populations – to meet current demand. There is no evidence of significant inbreeding risks in these captive populations and captive-bred birds are generally considered to perform to a similar standard as wild birds when used for falconry purposes.

Most non-falconers are opposed to licenced wild take on ethical grounds and have concerns regarding the potential impacts of falconry and wild take on the conservation and welfare of the species affected. Both falconers and non-falconers are supportive of additional measures to ensure that individuals keeping birds of prey have suitable experience in caring for such birds.

Few respondents to the public call for evidence expressed a desire to gain commercially from wild take. However, risks identified relating to the illegal trade in birds of prey nevertheless suggest a need for strict controls on commercial use of such birds alongside improved traceability and other measures to be taken forwards by the responsible agencies. Difficulties in tracing individual birds under current arrangements mean there is a credible risk that the offspring of a wild bird taken under licence could be illegally laundered via commercial breeding operations into the domestic and international trade.

On the basis of the above conclusions, Natural England put forward the following recommendations to DEFRA in late 2023 and advised that a clear policy statement should be published for England setting out the following:

That licences permitting the wild take of native birds of prey for falconry or avicultural purposes should not be issued other than in exceptional circumstances;

That the commercial use of native birds of prey taken from the wild under a licence issued for falconry or avicultural purposes – and any offspring of such birds –should not be permitted other than in exceptional circumstances; and,

That the power to grant licences remains on statute, with the adopted policy (as above) subject to future evidence-based review as required.

These are the recommendations that DEFRA has now endorsed and has implemented the policy of a presumption AGAINST issuing licences to take wild birds of prey for falconry and aviculture.

Natural England has stated that, ‘Whilst the power to grant licences will remain on statute, Defra ministers support the view that licences should not be issued, other than in exceptional circumstances. No evidence was provided during the review process that would support the issuing of licences for any specific exceptional circumstances at the present time‘.

There’s a useful Natural England blog on the subject, here.

For those interested in Natural England’s policy review, it can be read/downloaded here:

Natural England Licensing Review Wild Take of Birds of Prey Policy Options for Falconry and Aviculture Download

From my personal point of view, this is an excellent decision and is good news for birds of prey in England.

I’ve previously outlined my reasons, here.

Shooting industry hilariously claims ‘significant progress’ made on the failed voluntary transition away from toxic lead ammunition

Further to this morning’s news that a new study by leading UK academics has shown the shooting industry’s complete failure to achieve its much-heralded five-year voluntary transition away from using toxic lead ammunition (here), some within the gamebird shooting sector are continuing to shoot themselves in the foot.

Yesterday the Shooting Times published a news article that included the following statement:

“While there are claims from anti-shooting groups that the voluntary move away from lead use has yielded few results, the evidence for this suggests otherwise“.

I’m not sure whether the Shooting Times author and/or editor was aware of the impending publication of the Shot-Switch paper showing the failure of the five-year voluntary transition away from toxic lead ammunition and that this news item was his/their attempt to spin the results, or whether it is simply an unhappy coincidence (for Shooting Times) that this embarrassing nonsense was published the day before the scientific findings were published.

Either way, it makes them look ridiculous. Describing five years worth of peer-reviewed scientific evidence from leading experts at the University of Cambridge as “claims from anti-shooting groups” just exposes the lengths they’ll go to to push their propaganda.

News article published in Shooting Times, 6 March 2025

It’s apparent that the Shooting Times article was probably based on a recent blog published on the BASC website on 24 February 2025 (although the BASC blog does not slur the scientific credentials of the Cambridge University research team, at least not this time – BASC does have form for doing this – see here).

The BASC blog, marking the fifth year of the shooting industry’s pledge to undertake a five-year voluntary transition away from using toxic lead ammunition, claims:

“As we reach this milestone, significant progress has been made. Market-led solutions have emerged, education and awareness have increased, and the sector has demonstrated its ability to adapt and innovate“.

That so-called “significant progress” ignores entirely the five years of research evidence produced by the Shot-Switch project and instead focuses on the “major strides” made by the shooting industry in terms of the availability of alternative, non-toxic ammunition and a claim that, “thousands of people have attended BASC’s sustainable ammunition events since 2020, before then switching to lead-free ammunition themselves“.

I’ve never understood the shooting industry’s arguments about there being a lack of availability of non-toxic ammunition. If you go to any large hunting retailers in the US you’ll see entire aisles stocked to the brim with non-toxic alternatives such as steel shot and bismuth:

Steel shot cartridge boxes widely available in the US (photo by Ruth Tingay)

Bismuth cartridge boxes widely available in the US (photo by Ruth Tingay)

Perhaps these products, or similar, aren’t easily available in the UK? I don’t know, I’ve never tried to buy any but if non-toxic ammunition isn’t easily available in the UK then what are all the waterfowl hunters using? They’ve been banned from using toxic lead shot for killing certain species and over wetland environments in the UK for decades (although compliance is low in England and in Scotland) so where are the compliant hunters sourcing their non-toxic ammunition?

BASC’s blog also makes the following claim:

“The impact of the transition is already being seen in the field. Many shoots have embraced lead-free ammunition, game dealers are increasingly sourcing lead-free game, and retailers are responding to consumer demand for more sustainable products. Through a combination of industry innovation and engagement with the shooting community, BASC and its members have demonstrated that sustainability and shooting can go hand in hand“.

This claim seems to be at odds with the particularly candid opinion of Louisa Clutterbuck, CEO of Eat Wild (the development board for ‘wild meat’ in the UK, although claiming that non-native reared & released gamebirds are ‘wild’ seems to be stretching it a bit!).

In an article published online in May 2024, Louisa said this:

“I have heard from several game dealers recently that some shoots are returning to lead on shoot days which is most alarming and retroactive. They don’t feel there is any benefit to them as a shoot but surely having all your game collected and knowing it is entering the food chain is the largest benefit of them all?

“When we are speaking to retail outlets we never bring up lead shot, we presume they are happy with it unless stated otherwise. Unfortunately, there has been a steep rise in these conversations and so we are discussing the options of lead-free shot more and more. I say unfortunately because there still is not enough supply of lead-free game to fulfill our current supermarkets as well as any new markets“

AND

“Waitrose cannot get enough supply of lead-free birds that they need, and their sales have dramatically fallen because of this, it will be no skin off their nose if they have to switch to selling farmed guinea fowl, we are fooling ourselves if we think otherwise“.

BASC is correct in saying that supermarkets are indeed responding to consumer demand for more sustainable products but that’s nothing to do with ‘the impact of the transition‘, as BASC claims, because so far, despite disturbingly inaccurate claims, evidence has shown that not one of the supermarkets has been able to ensure that all its gamebird products are lead-free.

Hopefully, by this time next week Defra’s Secretary of State Steve Reed MP and his colleagues in the devolved governments will have made an announcement about whether they intend to accept the recommendations of the Health & Safety Executive to ban the use of lead ammunition.

UK gamebird shooting industry fails to meet voluntary pledge to stop using toxic lead ammunition – new study

Press release from the University of Cambridge (6th March 2025)

Pledge to phase out toxic lead ammunition in UK hunting by 2025 has failed

A voluntary pledge made by UK shooting organisations in 2020 to replace lead shot with non-toxic alternatives by 2025 has failed, analysis by Cambridge researchers finds.

The pledge, made in February 2020 by the UK’s nine leading game shooting and rural organisations, aimed to benefit wildlife and the environment and ensure a market for the healthiest game meat food products.

But a Cambridge team, working with the University of the Highlands and Islands, has consistently shown that lead shot was not being phased out quickly enough to achieve a complete voluntary transition to non-toxic ammunition by 2025. In a final study, published today in the journal Conservation Evidence, the team concludes that the intended transition has failed.

The team has closely monitored the impact of the pledge every year since its introduction, recruiting expert volunteers to buy whole pheasants from butchers, game dealers and supermarkets across Britain and recover embedded shotgun pellets for analysis.

A pheasant carcass bought in Waitrose containing toxic lead shot. Photo by Mike Price

In 2025, the study – called SHOT-SWITCH – found that of 171 pheasants found to contain shot, 99% had been killed with lead ammunition.

This year, for the first time, the team also analysed shotgun pellets found in red grouse carcasses shot in the 2024/25 shooting season and on sale through butchers’ shops and online retailers. In all 78 grouse carcasses from which any shot was recovered, the shot was lead.

“Many members of the shooting community had hoped that the voluntary pledge away from lead ammunition would avert the need for regulation. But the voluntary route has now been tested – with efforts made by many people – and it has not been successful,” said Professor Rhys Green in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and lead author of the report.

Eating game meat killed using lead shot will expose people unnecessarily to additional dietary lead. Lead is toxic to humans even in very small concentrations; the development of the nervous system in young and unborn children is especially sensitive to its effects. As a result, many food safety agencies now advise that young children and pregnant women should avoid, or minimise, eating game meat from animals killed using lead ammunition.

Discarded shot from hunting also poisons and kills many tens of thousands of the UK’s wild birds each year.

Despite proposing the voluntary change, many shooting organisations and some individual shooters do not support proposed regulatory restrictions on lead ammunition.

Green said: “Private individuals pay a lot of money to shoot pheasants on some private estates – and people don’t like to change their habits. It’s a bit like wearing car seatbelts, or not smoking in pubs. Despite the good reasons for doing these things, some people were strongly against using regulation to achieve those changes, which are now widely accepted as beneficial. The parallel with shooting game with lead shotgun ammunition is striking.”

Danish shooters now say that the legal ban on lead introduced in Denmark around 30 years ago was justified. They say it has not reduced the practicality or popularity of their sport, and has increased its acceptability to wider society.

“Although a few large UK estates have managed to enforce non-lead ammunition on pheasant shoots, some have had to be quite draconian in order to do it, with the estate gamekeepers insisting on loading the guns for the shooters,” added Green.

In the 2020/21 and 2021/22 shooting seasons, over 99% of the pheasants studied were shot using lead ammunition. This figure dropped slightly to 94% in 2022/23 and 93% in 2023/24, with the remaining pheasants killed by ammunition made of steel or a metal called bismuth, before rising to 99% again in 2024/25.

Retail pressure

The researchers also checked up on a pledge made by Waitrose in 2019 to stop selling game killed with lead ammunition.

They found that the retailer had been largely let down by suppliers, and that some of their shooters continued to shoot using lead despite making assurances to the contrary. As a result, Waitrose did not sell oven-ready pheasants at all between 2021 and 2023. It sold pheasants again in January 2024 and the 2024/25 season, but the researchers showed that the majority had been killed using lead shot.

In 2022 the National Game Dealers Association (NGDA), which buys game and sells it to the public and food retailers, also announced it would no longer sell game of any kind that had been shot using lead ammunition. But this pledge has since been withdrawn. The researchers bought 2024/25 season pheasants from three NGDA member businesses and found that all had been shot with lead ammunition.

Inside influence

The researchers also analysed all articles relating to the voluntary transition published in the magazine of the UK’s largest shooting organisation, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. They found that articles near the beginning of the five-year pledge communicated clear, frequent and positive messages about the effectiveness and practicality of non-lead shotgun ammunition.

But by 2023, mentions of the transition and encouragement to follow it had dropped dramatically.

The upshot

At the request of the Defra Secretary of State, the UK Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has assessed the risks to the environment and human health posed by lead in shot and bullets. Its report, published in December 2024, proposes that the UK Government bans the use of lead shot and large calibre bullets for game shooting because of the risks they pose to the environment and health. This recommendation is currently under review by Defra ministers, with a response due in March 2025.

Steel shotgun pellets are a practical alternative to lead and can be used in the vast majority of shotguns, as can other safe lead-free alternatives. But the results of this study indicate UK hunters remain unwilling to make the switch voluntarily.

Since 2010, UK governments have preferred voluntary controls over regulation in many areas of environment and food policy and have suggested that regulation be used only as a last resort.

“Shooting organisations did a lot of questionnaire surveys when the pledge was introduced in 2020, and the results suggested many shooters thought the time had come to switch away from lead ammunition. Those responses stand in contrast to what we’ve actually measured for both pheasant and grouse,” said study co-author Dr Mark Taggart at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Toxic lead

A previous study led by Green and colleagues found that pheasants killed by lead shot contained many fragments of lead too small to detect by eye or touch, and too distant from the shot to be removed without throwing away a large proportion of otherwise useable meat. This means that eating pheasant killed using lead shot is likely to expose consumers to raised levels of lead in their diet, even if the meat is carefully prepared to remove whole shotgun pellets and the most damaged tissue.

Lead has been banned from use in paint and petrol for decades. It is toxic to humans when absorbed by the body and there is no known safe level of exposure. Lead accumulates in the body over time and can cause long-term harm, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease and kidney disease in adults. Lead is known to lower IQ in young children and affect the neurological development of unborn babies.

The studies were part-funded by the RSPB, Waitrose & Partners, and an anonymous donor. They were supported by a group of unpaid volunteers, who are co-authors of the reports.

ENDS

The new paper, published today in the journal Conservation Evidence, can be read/downloaded here:

Green et al_CEJ_22_18_25 Download

UPDATE 6th March 2025: Shooting industry hilariously claims ‘significant progress’ made on the failed voluntary transition away from toxic lead ammunition (here)

Natural England quietly releases intriguing grouse moor location where two shot brood meddled hen harriers found dead

Just before Christmas 2024, Natural England published a blog that included information on the fates of two satellite-tagged brood-meddled hen harriers that had previously been listed as ‘Missing, Fate Unknown’.

These two young brood-meddled harriers (R3-F1-22 and R2-F2-20) had both ‘disappeared’ two years earlier, in December 2022, within days of each other, from the same winter roost site in the North Pennines.

Natural England’s December 2024 blog was the first time that NE had announced that the corpses of the two hen harriers had been found (one in April 2023 and the other in June 2023) and that both corpses contained shotgun pellets (three and two pellets, respectively).

In January 2025 Natural England updated its hen harrier satellite tracking database. Thanks to a sharp-eyed blog reader (you know who you are!), it was noticed that NE had finally, and quietly, published the grid references of where the dead hen harriers had been found (previously this detail had been withheld, apparently at the request of the police).

Natural England’s database now provides the following information about these two harriers:

Female, [Brood meddled]: R3-F1-22, Tag ID: 213921a, Date of last contact (i.e. date the satellite tag stopped functioning): 14th December 2022. Dead. Location: North Pennines NY708423. ‘Suspected illegally killed’. [Body found 10 April 2023].

Female, [Brood meddled]: R2-F2-20, Tag ID: 55144, Date of last contact: 7 December 2022. Dead. Location: North Pennines NY730372. ‘Suspected illegally killed’. [Body found 29 June 2023].

When I mapped these two grid references they were just under 5.5km of each other:

The dead hen harriers were both found on moorland managed for grouse shooting near Garrigill, in Cumbria:

Nobody has been charged with shooting these two harriers, presumably due to a lack of evidence – there’s no doubt they’d been shot at but where, and when, and by whom, remains unproven in a court of law.

The fact that the harriers disappeared from the same roost site within a week of each other, and their shotgun pellet-riddled corpses were found within 5.5km of one another on an area of grouse moor, is obviously just another one of those pesky coincidences that seem to happen so ~~frequently~~ unfairly in the world of driven grouse shooting (e.g. see here, here and here).

So keen is Natural England not to attribute the shooting of these birds to their deaths, the NE database states: ‘suspected illegally killed‘ [emphasis by me].

I was curious about this area of grouse moor and who owned it, so I looked up Guy Shrubsole’s earlier mapping work on his fantastic Who Owns England? website:

Guy’s map shows an area he calls ‘Townshends’ although he clarifies in his 2016 grouse moor database that this was the name of the owners, not the name of the estate. His database shows the owner as The Honourable Mrs Charlotte Anne Townshend and he reports that a CAP payment of £12, 178.33 was paid in 2014 registered under ‘The Honourable Mrs Townshend’.

The grid reference where the dead brood meddled hen harrier R2-F2-20 was found seems to be right in the middle of the estate area mapped by Guy, but the grid reference for the other dead hen harrier, R3-F1-22 appears to be outside of Guy’s mapped area, just to the north.

But it looks like Guy has only partially mapped this estate. The notes that accompany Guy’s map indicate that he mapped 4,200 acres but I think it extends further than this, and that the estate actually covers 9,500 acres of moorland and a further 2,000 acres of grassland.

Why do I think that? Well, it was actually revealed in written evidence submitted by another of the estate’s owners, a Mr James Townshend, to a Westminster parliamentary committee taking evidence on grouse shooting in 2016 prior to the debate of Mark Avery’s petition to ban driven grouse shooting.

Not only does Mr Townshend identify himself as one of the owners of Garrigill Estate, he writes quite specific details about the extent of the landholdings, hence why I think Guy’s map provides only partial coverage of this estate.

Ironically, Mr Townshend also writes about how he thinks “good grouse moor management…has a significant beneficial impact on…hen harriers“.

Here’s his full written submission:

James Townshend written evidence grouse shooting 2016_Garrigill Estate 9500 acres moorland Download

I think that the Garrigill Estate extends further north than Guy’s map (and if so would likely include the area where hen harrier R3-F1-22’s shot corpse was found).

Why do I think it extends to the north rather than in any other direction?

Well, because in March 2021 a sporting agency published this job advert for a trainee grouse moor gamekeeper on the ‘Garrigill & Rotherhope Estate“. Rotherhope lies to the north of Guy’s mapped area.

It’d be interesting to know whether the Garrigill [and Rotherhope] Estate is a member of the Moorland Association. It’d also be interesting to know whether this area has been classified as a hen harrier persecution hotspot by the Hen Harrier Taskforce. The criteria for classification include ‘repeat locations for suspected crimes involving hen harriers’. I’d say that finding two dead hen harriers within 5.5km of one another, both with shotgun injuries, would qualify as a hotspot.

Unfortunately the identities of these hotspots are being kept ‘secret’ by the police in order to “build trust” (see here). There’s clearly an armed criminal at large in the area – why wouldn’t you want to warn the public about that?

I can see why prominent landowners might not want a ‘persecution hot spot’ status made public but I’m pretty sure the Honourable Mrs Townshend would want the criminal caught if his actions were threatening the wildlife on Garrigill Estate. She was a former patron of Dorset Wildlife Trust until her resignation in 2013 and her spokesman was quoted in the Dorset Echo at the time, saying: “Mrs Townshend… will continue to ensure that her estates are managed to the highest standard for the benefit of wildlife and conservation“.

No doubt she was furious last month then when her Ilchester Estate in Dorset was fined nearly £28,000 by the Environment Agency for “deliberately flouting” the conditions of a licence to abstract water from an ecologically sensitive chalk stream, using ‘the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water during a drought’ (see here).

Hang on a minute. The Ilchester Estate? That rings a bell. Ah yes, that’s the estate that made several donations to support West Dorset’s Conservative MP Chris Loder, he of “Dorset is not the place for eagles” fame.

It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?

Hen Harriers – are we heading for yet another pointless ‘dialogue’ process to address the ongoing illegal killing?

I’ve read two blogs recently that suggest we might be heading for yet another pointless and futile ‘dialogue’ process, purportedly to find a ‘solution’ to the ongoing illegal killing of hen harriers on grouse moors.

Representatives of the criminals within the driven grouse shooting industry would be on one side of the table and conservationists and the police on the other.

*This hen harrier was euthanised after suffering catastrophic leg injuries in an illegal trap set next to its nest on a grouse moor in Scotland in 2019. Photo by Ruth Tingay*

The first public indication that this dialogue process was being mooted appeared in a blog published by the charity Hen Harrier Action at the end of January 2025 (here). The charity had interviewed Detective Inspector Mark Harrison of the National Wildlife Crime Unit, who leads on the Hen Harrier Task Force.

In that interview, DI Harrison is quoted as follows:

“We are applying for funding from DEFRA to use the IUCN Human-Wildlife Conflict and Coexistence Guidelines as a tool for building for the future. This funding will bring in independent facilitators to collaborate with key stakeholders to find and implement long term solutions. We hope that this funding will be for three years“.

The second blog which refers to the same dialogue process is this one, posted three days ago on the Northern England Raptor Forum’s website (NERF represents raptor fieldworkers across northern England).

The NERF blog starts off with a response to the suspicious disappearance of satellite-tagged hen harrier ‘Red’, who hatched on the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve last year but then vanished on a grouse moor in the North Pennines in January 2025 (here).

It then moves on to the so-called ‘conflict resolution’ dialogue process, as follows:

“In the meantime, the MA [Moorland Association] are demanding that NE and Defra undertake another round of conflict resolution claiming that the killing of Hen Harriers is the result of human animal conflict as defined by the ICUN Guidelines. This assertion is dismissed by conservation groups, including by NERF, as irrelevant. The so-called conflict is entirely the result of criminals who consistently break the law at will killing Hen Harriers throughout the North of England. It is evident that there are many in the grouse shooting industry who will not be satisfied until Hen Harriers are extinct in the North of England.

“If the rumours are correct and a new round of conflict resolution is being entered into it will be yet another victory for the grouse shooting industry who will have kicked the problem into the long grass, again. Apparently, the plan is for the process to last for 3 years and cost £400, 000. If past experience is anything to go by the process will last longer and cost significantly more than the original estimate. How much of the estimated cost will come from the public purse is not known at the moment, however any intent to squander tax payer’s money on this flawed idea should be resisted. Hardly a day goes by without a Cabinet Minister reminding us that they inherited a £22 billion ‘black hole’. Government Departments are having their budgets slashed and staff numbers are being reduced. Natural England’s Hen Harrier field team is being reduced from 3 to 2. £400k could pay for that field worker to be retained for up to 10 years“.

The earlier conflict resolution process that NERF refers to was known as the ‘Hen Harrier Dialogue’ which began nineteen years ago in 2006 and was hosted by The Environment Council. It dragged on until 2013, by which time the breeding population of hen harriers in England had fallen to just a single, successful pair, the RSPB had walked away from the dialogue (here), later followed by NERF (here) and then the Hawk & Owl Trust (here).

The dialogue process was a complete and utter failure. It achieved absolutely nothing in terms of hen harrier conservation but was used by the grouse shooting industry as a politically-pleasing gesture and a useful delaying ploy.

The sham hen harrier brood meddling trial followed, between 2018 – 2024, which proved that attitudes in the grouse shooting industry towards hen harriers remained firmly in the Victorian era with at least 134 hen harriers ‘disappearing’ or confirmed illegally killed since the trial began, most of them on or close to grouse moors.

We are currently awaiting a formal review of the brood meddling sham by Natural England and a decision on whether NE will issue a licence to the grouse shooting industry for further brood meddling this year and in the years ahead (see here).

It’s an oft-repeated phenomenon that whenever someone ‘new’ gets involved in the issue of hen harrier persecution, indeed the issues relating to all raptor persecution, that they call for all ‘sides’ to sit down together, build partnerships and reach a resolution that will end the illegal killing.

It’s an understandable and seemingly sensible idea. That is, until you look back at the history of this issue and realise that one ‘side’, i.e. the criminals within the shooting industry, simply aren’t prepared to tolerate hen harriers / raptors on ‘their’ grouse moors because of the perceived threat to ‘their’ red grouse.

Pseudo ‘partnerships’ with the game-shooting industry have been set-up so many times, only to fail miserably in the face of ongoing illegal persecution and abject denial from the shooting industry’s representatives (e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here, here).

As far as I can see, nothing has changed to suggest that setting up yet another sham partnership to address the illegal killing of hen harriers on driven grouse moors will do anything other than provide the criminals with yet another opportunity to masquerade in public as law-abiding, responsible custodians whilst in private continuing to shoot, trap, stamp on, and pull the heads and wings off any hen harrier that dares to go anywhere near a driven grouse moor.

The time for talking ended years ago.

Sign the Wild Justice petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting HERE. It is currently supported by 69,000 people. It requires 100,000 people to sign it, before 22 May 2025, to trigger a debate in the Westminster parliament.

UPDATE 9 July 2025: Defra refuses funding for another futile ‘dialogue’ process to address ongoing killing of Hen Harriers on grouse moors (here).

RPUK blog reaches 15th birthday & passes 12 million views

Today marks 15 years since this blog was started and it happily coincides with the blog passing 12 million views – two milestones in one day!

Thanks as ever to everyone who follows and supports this work, and particular thanks to the generous sponsors who help fund my time – without them it would be impossible to sustain the blog.

50,000 people support the Northern Ireland Raptor Study Group’s petition to ban possession of dangerous, raptor-killing pesticides

Many, many thanks to all of you who signed the Northern Ireland Raptor Study Group’s (NIRSG) petition calling for a ban on the possession of dangerous, raptor-killing pesticides.

The petition has just passed its target of 50,000 signatures and the NIRSG has issued the following press release:

The NIRSG held a recent Raptor Conference which provided incredible insights into a range of topics locally and globally. Many of the talks raised a consistent theme of targeted persecution of birds of prey. Not least amongst these was the on-going issue in Northern Ireland of the Possession of Dangerous pesticides.

Some of the NIRSG 2025 conference attendees supporting the call for a ban on dangerous, raptor-killing pesticides. Photo by Marc Ruddock

The NIRSG highlighted that 63 raptors have been killed between 2009 and 2023 with a range of poisons, dominated by Carbofuran which has been banned for nearly 25 years. There have been at least 30 buzzards, 16 peregrine falcons, 13 red kites, 3 white tailed eagles and 1 golden eagle all poisoned in this time frame.

This evidence is collated by the Partnership for Action Against Wildlife Crime in Northern Ireland (PAW NI) and published in raptor persecution reports, which include ‘hotspots’ of illegal killing of our native birds of prey. These reports are publicly available on the PAWNI webpage available here and also aggregated in the RSPB Bird Crime reports available here.

In 2011, the wildlife legislation in Northern Ireland was strengthened, resulting in increased sentences of £5,000 fines (per offence) and up to 6 months imprisonment. The updated laws included a provision to ban the possession of prescribed ingredients under “Section 15B Possession of pesticides harmful to wildlife” of the Wildlife (Northern Ireland) Order 1985 as amended.

As part of that legislation there should have been an attached Order listing the banned chemicals. That list has never been created. Wildlife has continued to be poisoned by these dangerous and banned substances.

The legislation states in Section 15B Part 2: “A prescribed ingredient is one which is prescribed for the purposes of this Article by an order made by the Department; but the Department may not make an order under this Article unless it is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient to do so in the interests of protecting wild birds or wild animals from harm”. [Emphasis added by NIRSG]

There is significant evidence of continued harm from banned pesticides to birds of prey, based on robust post-mortem and laboratory results, which has been published in many reports. We believe it is indeed expedient for Minister Andrew to implement this Order to protect our birds of prey from harm. 50,000 people agree with us. Thank you to everyone who has supported the petition and helped give a voice to our wildlife.

The NIRSG will be seeking a meeting with Minister Andrew Muir to present the petition now that it has surpassed 50,000 signatures.

ENDS

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