A young Buzzard was found in a field in Leominster, Herefordshire last week, unable to fly.
An x-ray revealed at least two shotgun pellets lodged in its body. It’s not known when the bird was shot, or where.
The Buzzard is currently receiving expert veterinary care from Dr Sasha Norris of Hereford Wildlife Rescue with assistance from Holmer Veterinary Surgery in Hereford and Battle Flatts Veterinary Clinic in Yorkshire.
Sasha reports that the Buzzard was ‘alert, bright and eating well’ this morning.
Raptor Persecution UK 
“Sasha reports that the Buzzard was ‘alert, bright and eating well’ this morning.”
Fingers crossed.
why doesn’t this surprise me….
Cheat the shooting bar steward you beautiful creature. Live! thrive! and fully recover.
Thankfully it’s still alive
Following on from my previous post on here regarding not having received a reply from Naturescot re the death of Merrick, I finally received one today, it’s rather long:
Firstly, apologies for the delay in getting you a response to your emails of 30 September and 13 October.
I can confirm we followed up the police investigation, requesting an information package from the police upon the conclusion of their investigation. This information package is required to enable us to judge whether the evidence supports a general licence restriction. The package was received in April 2024.
Although we initially acted timeously to initiate the decision-making process around possible general licence restriction, following our published framework, further review led us to conclude that a decision would benefit from some further clarity on the information provided by the police. This has been requested and we expect to receive it shortly. However, this accounts for only a small part of the delay, and it is evident that there was a very lengthy delay in reviewing our initial findings and requesting the extra information, which accounts for the undue lapse of time since the original receipt of police information.
There is no reason for this delay other than the very considerable pressure on the staff involved in wildlife management and licensing; in part due to the increased workload relating to new regulatory and licensing functions arising from e.g. the Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Act 2023 and the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024. To address this we have substantially increased our licensing staff resource to deal with the increased workload, but there has remained something of a bottleneck in coming to a decision on a few cases. We have just recruited a new senior manager to assist in delivery of our licensing function, which will ease this pressure.
Meanwhile, I can assure you that we are still working towards a decision in relation to the Merrick case, pending receipt of the further information, and expect to reach this decision in the next few weeks. Nonetheless, I do uphold your complaint about the time taken to action this, and acknowledge the point you make about the delay giving succour to those who would illegally persecute the birds. Prompt action in such cases is a wholly reasonable expectation that I regret we did not fulfil on this occasion.
I am happy to pick this up directly with you should you wish to discuss further
Regards
Liz
Well done Susan:-)
Keeping them on their toes!
Thankfully it was spotted in time to save its life. Well done to whoever found it!