Further to this morning’s blog about a satellite-tagged Hen Harrier (Pete) who has ‘disappeared’ in Cumbria (see here), here’s news of another one, quietly updated in Natural England’s spreadsheet without anybody saying a word.
And there’s quite a bit that could / should be said about this particular case but for some reason the authorities (Natural England, Northumbria Police, National Hen Harrier Task Force) have chosen to keep everyone in the dark.
This one’s called ‘Edna’. She was tagged (Tag ID 161143a) in Cumbria as a nestling on 27 June 2023.
Edna featured in three Natural England spreadsheet updates after she’d fledged, listed in September 2023 as ‘Alive – Cumbria’, in December 2023 as ‘Alive – Cumbria’ and in April 2024 as ‘Alive – Yorkshire Dales’.
The next spreadsheet update was published in August 2024 and Edna’s listing was as follows:
Date of last contact: 7 June 2024
Location of last contact: Northumberland
Status: Dead
OS reference: Recovered awaiting PM [post mortem]
That was all we knew about Edna’s fate for the next 14 months. Natural England published two more spreadsheet updates (December 2024 and April 2025) but in both of those updates Edna was still listed as ‘Recovered awaiting PM‘.
In January 2025 I’d blogged about the long delay in releasing Edna’s post mortem results, along with a number of others (here). They weren’t included in my running tally of ‘missing’ or illegally killed Hen Harriers because they could have died from natural causes or have been the victims of illegal persecution.
It took Natural England until October 2025, in its most recent spreadsheet update, to finally inform the public about Edna’s fate but even then, significant information has been withheld.
Edna’s entry on the October 2025 spreadsheet update looks like this:
Date of last contact: 7 June 2024
Location of last contact: Northumberland
Status: Dead
OS reference: NY910827
Notes on loss: Suspected illegally killed. Carcase had been scavenged, plus severe state of autolysis and decomposition.
If you look up that grid reference that Natural England has now provided, it shows a field at the Green Rigg Wind Farm nr Ridsdale, next to the A68, just south of Otterburn in Northumberland.
Hmm.
Now, because Edna’s corpse was too badly decomposed for a pathologist to determine the cause of death, it can be reasonably assumed that her satellite tag data provided sufficient evidence for the police and Natural England to determine that she was “suspected illegally killed“.
This ties in with information I was given by a number of sources in 2024 that a satellite-tagged Hen Harrier was believed to have been found dead at a wind farm in the north of England ‘and the circumstances suggest it didn’t get there of its own accord‘.
That’s a plausible scenario. We’ve seen many examples of the lengths the raptor killers will go to hide their crimes, including moving a tagged Golden Eagle (still alive), with two broken legs (injuries consistent with being caught in an illegally-set trap), some 15km north of the crime scene in the dead of night & leaving it to die in a layby (here), moving a Golden Eagle’s satellite tag (& perhaps the corpse) and dumping it in the North Sea (here), dumping a Golden Eagle’s satellite tag in a loch (here), wrapping a Golden Eagle’s tag in lead sheeting to block the transmission signal & dumping it in a river (here), removing a Hen Harrier’s tag from the victim and attaching it to a live Crow to make it look as though the tagged Harrier is still flying around (here), cutting off a White-tailed Eagle’s tag and placing it somewhere else, perhaps on neighbouring land (here), cutting off a White-tailed Eagle’s tag and dumping it in a river (here), and using a heat pack to mislead those monitoring the tag data that a dead Hen Harrier’s body temperature was stable whilst the tag data showed that the tag (and probably the corpse) was inside a vehicle travelling away from the kill site for disposal elsewhere (evidence that this has likely happened was provided during a police presentation at a recent Wildlife Crime conference).
Back to the info I received in 2024. I didn’t know where or when this had happened, only that it was in 2024 and my subsequent efforts to find out this information from the authorities have all failed, being repeatedly told it was being withheld for ‘operational purposes’.
I assumed ‘operational purposes’ meant that there was an ongoing investigation and that eventually this information would be made public, either on the NE spreadsheet, or in a public appeal for information from the police.
But no. Natural England’s spreadsheet provides the bare minimum of information and Northumbria Police have said absolutely nothing whatsoever ever since Edna’s corpse was found 16 months ago.
Why do you think that is? Who benefits from this information being withheld?
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know the name of the estate where Edna is suspected to have been killed, and whether other Hen Harriers have also ‘disappeared’ from the same estate?
Watch this space…
Raptor Persecution UK 