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?“.
Last month I raised concerns about NatureScot’s proposed framework that it will use when making decisions about whether to modify, suspend or revoke the new grouse shoot licences that form part of the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024 (that blog can be read here).
For new readers, this Act was introduced as the Scottish Government’s response to the continued widespread illegal killing of birds of prey on grouse moors. It will work on the basis that all red grouse shooting must now be licensed in Scotland under a section 16AA licence and if, on the civil burden of proof (i.e. the balance of probability) sufficient evidence is found that the licence has been breached (including evidence of illegal raptor persecution), the licence can be withdrawn as a sanction, preventing the shooting of red grouse on a particular estate for a period of up to five years.
Red grouse photo by Ruth Tingay
NatureScot published its proposed decision-making framework in July 2024, as follows:
My biggest concern about the framework was that NatureScot was proposing that a licence might not be suspended / revoked if “corrective action could effectively be taken to bring the licence holder in line with relevant licensing conditions, within a timeframe usually not exceeding 12 months“:
NatureScot didn’t define “corrective action” and I argued that the removal and replacement of a gamekeeper could be considered to be “corrective action”, in which case NatureScot would effectively be providing estates with a massive loophole to be be exploited because the estate could simply perpetually replace ‘dodgy’ gamekeepers that fell under suspicion and thus never suffer the consequences of a licence suspension/revocation for wildlife offences.
I’ve since written to NatureScot to ask for clarification on that issue and a few other concerns about the proposed framework. I’m grateful to Robbie Kernahan from NatureScot’s senior leadership team for his responses, as follows:
Please can you explain whether evidence provided by the Scottish SPCA will be accepted in NatureScot’s decision making? And if it won’t be accepted, what the rationale is for that?
NatureScot can consider evidence gathered through SSPCA in line with the arrangements they are developing with Police Scotland.
2. How will NatureSot define ‘minor’ and ‘of a serious nature’ when considering the level of non-compliance?
We recognise there will be a spectrum of potential issues which may arise associated from non-compliance of conditions of licence, through to offences under the relevant legislation. For instance, returns not being made within the defined period – would be a compliance issue, but one which could be rectified without necessarily recourse to suspension or revocation, and may therefore be considered to be ‘minor’. NatureScot being satisfied that a relevant offence has been committed on the land by the licence holder or a person involved in managing the land to which the licence relates, is likely to be considered to be ‘of a serious nature’.
3. How will NatureScot determine whether a relevant offence has been committed by ‘the licence holder or a person managing the land’? It seems to me that this difficulty is precisely why the licensing scheme has been introduced, because it’s often not possible to identify the individual responsible for an offence.
NatureScot will consider such evidence as is made available to us. We anticipate that the primary source of evidence will be provided by Police Scotland, supplemented by any additional intelligence available to us. This will be on a similar basis to the evidence provided to us in considering the restriction on use of General licences. There may be cases in which NS will be satisfied, based on the evidence available, that a relevant offence has been committed on the land by the licence holder or a person involved in managing the land to which the licence relates, and as you note, where that evidence would not necessarily satisfy the standard of proof required for a criminal conviction of the relevant offence.
4. How will NatureScot define ‘corrective action’ when considering a decision to suspend/revoke a licence? Will that include the removal (by the estate) of an individual gamekeeper? If so, what are the implications for a prosecution (of that gamekeeper) or for vicarious liability (of the licence holder)? And why would the removal of one gamekeeper, presumably to be replaced by another one, solve the problem? How many times can an estate remove and replace a gamekeeper, without the estate being sanctioned?
The corrective action we envisage in this is likely to be around administrative issues (supply of returns) or other minor breaches which could be rectified quickly – not for wildlife crime.
These responses provide some reassurance but not all are as convincing as they might have been.
For example, on question 1, the arrangements between the SSPCA and Police Scotland for investigating and reporting suspected offences has not yet been made public (and may not become public) so the question of whether NatureScot will accept evidence provided by the SSPCA is still not clear. Remember, this arrangement between Police Scotland and the SSPCA relates only to the SSPCA’s increased investigatory powers for incidents where a live animal is not involved. The SSPCA is already a statutory reporting agency in its own right for offences under section 19 of the Animal Health and Welfare (Scotland) Act 2006, which is included in the ‘relevant list of offences’ [for which a licence may be suspended/revoked] under Naturescot’s proposed framework so it’s not clear to me why there’s so much opaqueness about whether evidence provided by the SSPCA will be accepted by NatureScot, especially in relation to offences under the Animal Health & Welfare Act.
On question 2, I think NatureScot’s explanation is clear and its rationale for distinguishing between ‘minor‘ non-compliance breaches and those ‘of a serious nature‘ seems sensible and fair.
On question 3, I think this is a reasonable response in as much as NatureScot can’t predict the type of evidence that will be available as each case (and thus available evidence) will be different. NatureScot has done a fairly good job so far of assessing evidence in relation to the General Licence restrictions it has imposed so we’ll have to wait and see whether that standard will be applicable for the suspension/revocation of section 16AA licences, which ultimately can be (and undoubtedly will be) challenged by the licence holder in a Sheriff Court.
On question 4, the definition of “corrective action“, I’m pleased to see the clarification from NatureScot that corrective action “is likely” to be associated with administrative breaches and not for wildlife crime, although I would have preferred to have seen this written as “will be” rather than “is likely” to be.
However, I’m still concerned that this “corrective action” loophole is included in the framework under the section headed ‘suspending or revoking a licence’. If NatureScot’s intention is to apply this measure for minor admin breaches only, why wasn’t it included in the section headed ‘modifying a licence’, which specifically deals with minor breaches, instead of the section headed ‘suspending and revoking a licence’, which deals with more serious breaches (i.e. criminal offences)?
Press release from Hen Harrier Action, 7th August 2024:
FOUR YOUNG HEN HARRIERS SATELLITE TAGGED THANKS TO GENEROSITY OF WILDLIFE CHARITY SUPPORTERS
Uplands conservation charity Hen Harrier Action has just released full details of the four young Hen Harriers satellite tagged with funds raised by the charity’s supporters in a Christmas Appeal. The appeal aimed to raise enough money to fund four tags, and the donations poured in. In just 10 days the Christmas Appeal reached, and then exceeded, its ambitious target.
The satellite tags have been fitted to four young Hen Harriers, two that fledged in England, one in Wales and one in Scotland.
The tags, fitted by experts from the RSPB and Northern England Raptor Forum, will allow dedicated staff at the RSPB to monitor the birds’ movements throughout their lifespan.
Two English Hen Harriers fledged in the Forest of Bowland
The two English Hen Harriers, Sita and Binbeal, fledged in the Forest of Bowland. Sita, a female, is named for the Hindu Goddess of self-sacrifice and dedication – a fitting name for a female Hen Harrier who will hopefully go on to breed and fiercely defend her chicks.
And Binbeal, a male, is named for the Australian Aboriginal spirit of rainbows. In the mythology, he is the son of Bunjil, the creator deity often depicted as a Wedge-tailed Eagle.
Scottish and Welsh Hen Harriers
The Scottish Hen Harrier, a female, named Gilda by the Scottish Raptor Study Group, fledged at the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve, the ambitious community-led rewilding project. One of four chicks, Gilda has two sisters and a brother. In Old English, the name means golden.
And the Welsh bird, a male called Adar, fledged in North Wales, named after the medieval Welsh word for birds.
Battling the British Weather
After the unusually wet and dreary Spring and early Summer, it was challenging for the teams out in the field fitting satellite tags to the young Hen Harriers in the nest.
Steve Downing, Chair of the Northern England Raptor Forum and a veteran of satellite tagging projects, commented on the challenges: “It is always challenging and this year was no different with the occasional hot day; but predominantly the weather was dominated by cold, persistently wet days throughout the breeding season. Now we wish them and the other members of the 2024 cohort fair weather and a following wind to take them away from the threat of persecution and on to a long and successful life.”
For those who want to find out more about hen harriers and their illegal persecution in the UK, this year’s Hen Harrier Day, organised by Hen Harrier Action, takes place this Saturday (10th August) at Carsington Water in Derbyshire. For more details about this free event, please click here.
Raptor Persecution UK 