REVIVE, the coalition for grouse moor reform is hosting it’s annual national conference at Perth Concert Hall on Sunday 10th November 2024.
This year’s theme is land reform and the event will be hosted by leading land reform campaigner Dr Lesley Riddoch.
REVIVE National Conference for Land Reform: A turning point for our people, wildlife, and the environment
Sunday 10th November 2024, Perth Concert Hall.
Doors open 11:05. Conference programme (to be released shortly) begins at 12 noon.
REVIVE are thrilled to invite you to the launch of Scotland’s next major push for land reform – a turning point that aims to empower people to change the face of Scotland.
Just 433 people own half of Scotland’s private land. A large amount of this land is used by a few people to kill our wildlife for ‘sport’ while our environment suffers and Scotland’s people are denied access, opportunities, and a say in how our land is run and owned. Scotland remains one of the most nature depleted places in the world.
How can we transform our land to create thousands more good jobs, fund our communities and offer a vision that can unlock our land’s potential for people like you, our wildlife and the environment?
That’s what The Big Land Question will seek to answer – a major national project that is being launched at this conference to pinpoint how the ownership and management of Scotland’s land could be transformed for all of us, not just a few big landowners.
Join us on what we believe will be a key turning point for people, wildlife and the environment that will change the face of Scotland for the better.
In May 2024, Police Scotland issued an appeal for information after the discovery of a dead osprey called ‘Laddie’, the famous breeding male from the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Loch of the Lowes Reserve in Perthshire (see here).
Criminality had been suspected initially but a few weeks later the police announced that criminality still hadn’t been established but they were awaiting the results of a post mortem to confirm (see here).
Osprey ‘Laddie’ with his mate. Photo from Scottish Wildlife Trust webcam.
Yesterday Police Scotland (Tayside) issued the following statement on Facebook:
“Following extensive enquiries on the remains of an osprey found near Dunkeld, Perth and Kinross, on Friday, 3 May, 2024, no criminality has been established.
It is believed the protected species, which is thought to have been nesting at Loch of the Lowes, close to where it was found, died from natural causes“.
Further detail has been published by the Scottish Wildlife Trust:
“The post mortem has revealed that the male osprey died of bleeding from stomach ulcers. There was no indication of lead or any other poisoning; evidently, old age played its part. We think he was at least 15 years old” (see here for more info).
Thanks to the blog reader who alerted me to the following notice in Border Telegraph, dated 31 July 2024:
FRAUD CHARGE
A police officer will face trial at Jedburgh Sheriff Court accused of a fraud involving almost £10,000.
Forty-six year-old Suzanne Hall is charged with pretending she had just moved into her home at Lamberton Holdings in Berwickshire with her family in December 2020 after previously staying in a house in Chirnside.
But the charge alleges the Lamberton house had been her sole or main residence since August 2015 and she was due Scottish Borders Council £9,613 in back-dated council tax.
Hall pleaded not guilty to the charge and a trial date was fixed for November 19th 2024.
This looks to be the same WPC Suzanne Hall from Lamberton Holdings who was previously charged, along with her husband Timothy and son Lewis, with offences linked to the alleged laundering of wild peregrines that were later sold for profit to falconers in the Middle East. Her husband and son pleaded guilty but Suzanne Hall’s not guilty plea to five charges was accepted by the Crown in December 2023, although it was reported at the time that, “a fraud charge was deserted with the Crown reserving the right to re-raise the case at a future date” (see here).
Juvenile peregrines. Photo by Ruth Tingay
It’s not clear whether the latest fraud charge alleged against Suzanne Hall relates to the previously deserted charge or whether this is a different one.
NB: As this case is live, comments are turned off until proceedings have concluded.
Convicted peregrine launderer Lewis Hall, 23, is due to appear at Jedburgh Sheriff Court on 4th September 2024 in relation to action being taken by the Crown to recover £164,028.80 under the Proceeds of Crime Act (see here).
UPDATE 12 October 2024: I’ve received an unconfirmed report that the case against WPC Suzanne Hall has been dropped. I’m seeking confirmation of this and will report in due course.
UPDATE 17 November 2024: Fraud charge dropped? The weird case of WPC Suzanne Hall, wife & mother of convicted peregrine launderers (here)
Following the disruption of a grouse shoot on Wemmergill Estate in County Durham on the Inglorious 12th (see here), the Hunt Saboteurs were out again yesterday and this time managed to disrupt a grouse shoot on Stean Moor in Nidderdale, North Yorkshire.
The grouse shooting party leaving Stean Moor yesterday. Photo by Sheffield Hunt Saboteurs
Stean Moor was previously owned by one of the Queen’s good mates, the now late Lord Vestey (see here for obituary, and also see pages 116-117 in Guy Shrubsole’s fascinating book, Who Owns England?).
The Hunt Sabs managed to disrupt two shooting days there last year (see here).
For details of yesterday’s disruption, please see here.
Over the last few months I’ve heard from various well-placed sources that hen harrier brood meddling has not taken place this year.
For new blog readers, hen harrier brood meddling is a conservation sham sanctioned by DEFRA as part of its ludicrous ‘Hen Harrier Action Plan‘ and carried out by Natural England, in cahoots with the very industry responsible for the species’ catastrophic decline in England. In general terms, the plan involves the removal of hen harrier chicks and eggs from grouse moors, rear them in captivity, then release them back into the uplands just in time for the start of the grouse-shooting season where they’ll be illegally killed. It’s plainly bonkers. For more background see here and here.
Photo: Laurie Campbell
I’ve asked Natural England (the licensing authority for hen harrier brood meddling) about the status of brood meddling this year but they haven’t responded yet.
If the rumours are true, and brood meddling hasn’t taken place this year despite there being broods available to meddle with, it raises a lot of questions, not just about what happened this year but also about any future prospects for brood meddling, whether that be as part of the continuing so-called scientific trial or the full roll-out of brood meddling as a recurrent annual practice, which is what the grouse shooting industry wants (laughingly calling it a ‘conservation licence’)!
Long-term blog readers will know that the initial brood meddling trial ran for five years from 2018-2022 inclusive. At the end of that trial, the brood meddling project board (which unbelievably includes vested-interest representatives from the grouse shooting industry such as the Moorland Association and GWCT, as well as the licence applicant, Jemima Parry Jones, who’s paid by the MA to do the brood meddling) decided it wanted to extend the trial and Natural England agreed to a further five year trial period (here).
An initial two-year extension licence was granted for 2023 and 2024 (NE isn’t permitted to grant a licence for longer than a two-year period in one go) with a few changes to the licence conditions as requested by the ‘project board’, including:
An increase in the number of times a pair of breeding hen harriers can have their nest brood meddled (previously, intervention was restricted to prevent the same pair being brood meddled in successive years – this time intervention was permitted in successive years);
No further requirement to satellite tag ALL the brood meddled chicks, only a sub-sample;
In the case of the North Pennines Special Protection Area (SPA) Southern Zone, no further requirement for brood meddled birds from this Zone to be released back into this Zone specifically, but still must be released into the wider North Pennines SPA (the project board had sought to remove entirely the requirement for brood meddled birds to be returned to the same SPA from where they were originally removed – this is important, I’ll come back to this point below).
For more detail about the changes to the licence conditions for 2023/2024 extension, see this Case Submission to Natural England’s High Risk Casework Panel in April 2023 and released to me under FoI:
So if the brood meddling ‘project board’ was so keen for an extension to the brood meddling trial/sham, why would they only take advantage of the extension for one year (2023) instead of the two years for which it was licensed? Just adding a one year extension to the trial doesn’t seem sufficient time (to me) to provide the data required to address the questions the so-called scientific trial was seeking to address, which is why NE approved a two-year licence extension within an extended five-year trial extension.
Well, there are a few hypotheses circulating about that. Of course these are all speculative at the moment because we don’t know for sure that brood meddling didn’t take place this year, but let’s assume for now that it didn’t.
The first hypothesis is that the grouse shooting industry simply hasn’t been able to find sufficient ‘receptor sites’ where the brood meddled chicks would be released post-captivity. We know, from an official internal NE report released via FoI, dated April 2022 (heading into the last year of the initial five year trial), that only four estates had been involved as ‘intervention sites’ (i.e. their hen harriers were brood meddled: one nest in 2019, two nests in 2020 and two nests in 2021) and only three estates had functioned as ‘receptor sites’. That’s not very many estates willing to engage in hen harrier brood meddling, is it?
Incidentally, data from the 2022 breeding season show there were four broods meddled with that year and six broods meddled with in 2024. I haven’t seen any information about how many estates were involved (as intervention or receptor sites) but the figure must still be staggeringly low.
Out of a purported 190 grouse moor member estates, the Moorland Association seems only to have found a handful willing to participate in the brood meddling trial, whether as an ‘intervention’ site or a ‘receptor’ site. I wonder why that is?
It could be that a lot of grouse shooting estates don’t see the point of getting involved in brood meddling because they’ve already got a tried and tested way of removing hen harriers from their moors (i.e. illegally killing them) and the chance of getting caught and prosecuted for it is virtually nil (see here).
It could be that a lot of grouse shooting estates won’t get involved in brood meddling unless it’s guaranteed that after the ‘trial’ period, brood meddling will be rolled out as a standard, legal technique that grouse moor owners can use every year to get rid of hen harriers. There’s some evidence that this hypothesis is more than speculative, as follows:
Cast you minds back to Valentine’s Day 2023 when the Natural England Board and some of its senior staff had a day out at Swinton Estate in Nidderdale (an estate at the epicentre of hen harrier brood meddling and also an estate with a long track record of confirmed and suspected raptor persecution offences, including some relating to hen harriers). I wrote about that day out (here and here).
After their soiree on the Swinton grouse moors, Natural England’s Board and senior staff went out to dinner and invited some fascinating guests. The NE Board had been issued with an internal briefing document to help them navigate what were described as “elephant traps and tricky issues”, which included hen harrier brood meddling. Here’s the briefing document, released to me under FoI – pay attention on page 3 under the heading Future of Brood Management, where it says this:
“NE Board has taken the in-principle decision to continue participation I [sic] brood management on a scientific trial basis. The MA is the principal partner in the trail [sic], promoting participation by estates, organising and funding release facilities and enabling access for our fieldworkers to tag and monitor chicks. Along with all our brood management partners, they are rightly proud of the success so far and are clear that an estate’s appetite for tolerating or welcoming breeding hen harriers is directly related to the availability of brood management as a ‘pressure valve’ to avoid a build-up of breeding hen harriers. The MA has supported the proposal of extending the trial but is clear that this should lead to the eventual wide availability of the technique as a practical and affordable tool“. (Emphasis added by me).
Also of interest in this internal briefing document is the news that the Moorland Association had asked for a ‘fixed release site’ (for brood meddled hen harriers) instead of having to release the birds back the same SPA from where they were removed. The MA had suggested Moorhouse NNR in Upper Teesdale or Ingleborough NNR in the Yorkshire Dales National Park as potential fixed sites. NE didn’t support this and the briefing document states:
“[REDACTED] judgement is that this represents too great a risk to the ‘NNR-brand’ as a whole and individual sites as long as illegal persecution remains a real threat to any hen harrier nest: additionally the MA should have sufficient contacts with access to vast tracts of suitable land if a long term commitment to hen harrier recovery is their goal“. [Emphasis is mine].
So there’s that issue I flagged earlier about the difficulty the MA appears to be having in providing ‘receptor’ sites. Funnily enough, this issue has also been raised again this year in a Moorland Association blog posted on 12 April 2024 (here), where there is quite a lot of moaning about having to release brood meddled hen harriers back in to the same SPA from where they were removed, and of course the now obligatory veiled threat about this potentially being in breach of IUCN guidelines, an argument the MA has also used recently in relation to the Police-led Hen Harrier Taskforce and one that the National Wildlife Crime Unit has summarily dismissed (see here).
A further hypothesis that’s been put forward about why the hen harrier brood meddling sham appears to have collapsed this year is that the Moorland Association probably doesn’t want to have to keep spending a fortune on paying for satellite tags when those tags are the primary source of evidence that demonstrate that brood meddling has not put an end to hen harrier persecution – indeed, last year (2023) was the worst on record since the brood meddling sham began in 2018, with 33 individual hen harriers reported as being illegally killed or to have disappeared in suspicious circumstances, including 13 brood meddled birds, and most of them on or close to driven grouse moors:
Over the next few weeks there should be more information available about this year’s hen harrier breeding season, including the number of breeding attempts, breeding failures and successes, the number of hen harriers satellite-tagged by Natural England and by the RSPB in various regions, the number of dead/missing hen harriers reported so far this year, and whether brood meddling did take place this year or whether the whole sham has just come tumbling down.
Whatever has happened this year, Natural England’s two-year extended brood meddling licence (2023-2024) has now expired and we can expect a substantial review of the seven-year ‘scientific trial’ which will be used to determine whether the trial is now closed or extended again, whether the grouse shooting industry will get a permanent ‘conservation licence’ (ha!) to continually remove hen harriers from the grouse moors, or whether the new Government will be pressed into dropping the whole sorry pantomime and instead focus its attention (and our money) into taking more effective action against the hen harrier killers.
There’s another opportunity for peacefully demonstrating against grouse shooting this weekend, with a moorland walk in the Peak District National Park, a few miles west of Sheffield.
This now annual event is hosted by a consortium of local organisations, who’ll meet at the car park at Redmires Reservoir (S10 4QZ) at 11am before heading off for a stroll on the moor.
Whilst the Hunt Sabs were out disrupting grouse shoots in northern England yesterday (here), Extinction Rebellion were at Dundee Airport in Scotland to protest against grouse shooting.
This is the third year they’ve demonstrated with banners at Dundee Airport on the Inglorious 12th, aiming to coincide with the arrival on private jets of grouse shooters, heading from the airport to go shooting in the Angus Glens.
There are more photographs of the event on the Extinction Rebellion Dundee facebook page, including someone who looks remarkably similar to Maggie Chapman MSP from the Scottish Greens.
As they’ve done in previous years (e.g. see here), members of the Hunt Saboteurs Association were out in force today in northern England to disrupt grouse shooting on the Inglorious 12th.
Today they were on the Wemmergill Estate in County Durham. If Wemmergill sounds familiar it’s because it’s previously featured on this blog (here, here and here) and on Mark Avery’s blog (here).
Today marks the opening of the red grouse shooting season (the Inglorious 12th) and the media is full of ‘woe is us’ stories from the grouse shooting industry claiming that the lack of grouse available to shoot this year (largely down to climate breakdown) will result in the annihilation of the rural economy. (It won’t).
Strangely, the grouse shooting industry is keeping very quiet about the jolly good wheeze it’s got up its sleeve to ensure that the bloodsports enthusiasts will still have something to get their kicks from killing – they’re using the red-legged partridge (RLP) as an alternative quarry to red grouse – although they won’t be able to kill them until the RLP shooting season opens on 1st September.
Millions of this non-native species, hatched and reared by gamebird breeders and sold to shooting estates across the UK, are typically released onto lowland shoots but in recent years there has been an upsurge in the release of this species on to upland grouse moors.
This may be a response to continuing low red grouse stocks, but in Scotland I suspect it’s also a response to the new legislation requiring licences for grouse shooting, which can be suspended / revoked if wildlife crime such as raptor persecution, badger persecution, fox hunting etc continues on those estates.
I’ve written about this previously (here), as the new licences only cover the shooting of red grouse, not the shooting of pheasants or RLPs. I’ve argued that shooting estates can simply by-pass the new grouse shooting licencing rules (and thus sanctions) by shooting RLPs instead of grouse.
Additionally, if a grouse moor owner’s licence is suspended/revoked because wildlife crimes have been uncovered on the estate, that owner/tenant could simply switch to shooting RLPs instead of red grouse because the licence revocation doesn’t apply to shooting RLPs.
Although, to be fair, the Scottish Parliament has recognised that estates may use this ploy to escape sanction for the continued killing of birds of prey on the moors and has thus included a provision in the new Wildlife Management & Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024 to add other species, including RLPs, to the new licensing regime if it’s found that this is indeed what Scottish grouse moor owners are up to.
I’ve previously published photographs on here of new RLP release pens being built on grouse moors (here) and now another blog reader (thank you!) has sent me photographs of more new RLP release pens that he found on Friday on a well-known Scottish grouse moor in the Highlands:
The blog reader told me there were three identical RLP release pens at this site, approximately 50m apart, although only one is shown in the above photographs.
You can clearly see the size of the operation, including what looks like brand new hill tracks built across the moor to access the pens. I suspect the hill track campaign run by Scottish Ramblers might be interested in these.
I showed these photographs to Mark Avery at the weekend, who wryly pointed out, “There’ll have trouble arguing that this is traditional“.
Apparently there won’t be much grouse shooting taking place this year when the season opens on Monday (12th August). According to various reports from the grouse shooting industry, this is due to a combination of factors including a cold wet spring and an extraordinarily high worm burden on many moors.
Red grouse photo by Ruth Tingay
They may not be shooting many red grouse but they’re more than making up for it by shooting themselves in the foot instead, particularly in Scotland.
I’ve read quite a few newspaper articles in the last few days about the so-called Glorious 12th but a couple of them stood out – whoever is advising the shooting organisations on their PR strategy is hanging them out to dry! Not that I’m complaining, if they want to make complete fools of themselves it saves me a job.
The first article that made me laugh out loud was an opinion piece in TheScotsman by Peter Clark, BASC’s Scotland Director:
I’m not going to reproduce the whole article because it’s too dull – you can read it here if you want to – but I do want to highlight a couple of points.
His opening paragraph goes like this:
“Grouse shooting is crucial to rural upland communities, with the start of the season representing the culmination of a year’s hard work, grit, and determination. Unfortunately, this season doesn’t look as promising as previous ones, with counts looking less positive“.
I wondered if the grit he refers to is the tonnes and tonnes of toxic, medicated grit that grouse moor managers chuck out on the moors, with minimal regulation, to medicate the so-called ‘wild’ red grouse to stop the natural, cyclical population crashes caused by parasites? I somehow doubt it – the industry’s leaders prefer to keep this dodgy practice under the radar.
Peter’s article goes on (and on) about how much shooting is worth to the economy, but predictably he lumps ALL types of shooting together rather than just focusing on grouse shooting, presumably to make grouse shooting look more economically viable than it actually is. It’s a common tactic. He also fails to include in his calculations the economic costs of grouse shooting to society. Again, a common ploy by the defenders of this so-called ‘sport’.
But the real PR disaster comes further down the article where he’s discussing the new grouse moor licences that have been introduced for the first time this year as the Scottish Government’s latest attempt to stop the illegal persecution of birds of prey on grouse moors. Peter writes:
“We clearly communicated to Jim Fairlie, the Scottish Government’s minister for agriculture and connectivity, before the Wildlife Management Bill became an Act that he should pursue amendments to make it more practical.
These proposed adjustments included removing provisions for adding additional game bird species to the shooting licenses, eliminating expanded investigative powers for the Scottish Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and refining the scope of what are considered to be “relevant offences” under the licencing scheme. These offences include those under wildlife legislation, ranging from the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, right through to the new Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Act 2023. The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) was clear that the scope of the relevant offences was too broad, given that the sole focus of this licensing regime from its inception was to tackle raptor persecution.
Despite presenting strong evidence of the risks these aspects pose to the sector, our specific proposed changes were not included. While the BASC and other shooting organisations successfully won amendments to the Bill and challenged many aspects of what was originally proposed, ultimately, the shooting community now faces new layers of regulation.
Consequently, BASC is defending its members and seeking legal advice regarding the final version of the licensing scheme, which has now been implemented ahead of the start of the season“.
So let me get this right. Peter seems to be arguing that it’s just not fair that grouse shooting licences could be suspended and/or revoked if offences, other than those relating to raptor persecution, such as badger persecution or the hunting of foxes with more than two dogs, are uncovered on grouse moors!
“BASC is defending its members…” he says. What, by saying that BASC members shouldn’t be sanctioned if these other types of wildlife crime are uncovered??
Is he for real?!!
BASC is not alone in making the industry look ridiculous. In another article, published yesterday in the Guardian (here), BASC, along with industry lobby groups Scottish Land and Estates (SLE) and the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) are also arguing that the licensable area to which these new regulations apply should be restricted to just the grouse moor area and that’s it’s ‘unnecessary and unfair‘ if the licence applies to other parts of an estate.
Eh? Where’s the logic in that? It’s blindingly obvious that estates would simply restrict their illegal activities to estate land next to the grouse moor, e.g. shooting a sleeping eagle as it roosts in trees on the edge of the moor, thus carefully avoiding culpability and a licence sanction, let alone a criminal prosecution.
The raptor killers have been exploiting this loophole for a long time – the most favoured practice being placing poisoned bait on the tops of fenceposts on an estate’s boundary line, especially at the top of a hill, making it more likely that a poisoned raptor will die further downhill on an adjoining estate and thus putting that neighbouring estate in the frame for the illegal poisoning.
As for the extent of the licence coverage being “unnecessary“, if that were so, why would the shooting organisations be so keen to limit the licence’s geographical extent if they’ve got nothing to hide?
There’s a quote at the end of the Guardian piece from Professor Colin Galbraith, Chair of NatureScot’s Board, discussing the entire coverage of an estate with a licence:
“If they’re not doing anything wrong, why worry about it?“.
Raptor Persecution UK 