Last month I blogged about what looked to be the collapse of the hen harrier brood meddling sham, after hearing persistent rumours that no broods were meddled this year (see here).
I submitted an FoI to Natural England seeking confirmation of this and yesterday they responded and told me, “no requests came in this year” [from any grouse moor owners] and therefore no hen harrier broods were meddled in 2024.
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.
Hen harrier by Laurie Campbell
I also asked Natural England how many hen harrier broods were available for brood meddling this year. NE claimed not to hold any information about that, but it’s common knowledge that there were multiple broods on Swinton Estate this year, and at least one additional brood on a neighbouring estate, so it seems that brood meddling could have taken place this year, had either of those estate owners chosen to use the opportunity.
So why didn’t they?
I’d suggested a few plausible but speculative hypotheses in my earlier blog (here) but one hypothesis I didn’t examine was that the Moorland Association might have thrown its toys out of the pram and withdrawn from the brood meddling trial in retaliation for the pressure its members were coming under from the NWCU’s new Hen Harrier Taskforce, which is using an approach similar to that used to tackle serious and organised crime and applying it to target those who continue to persecute hen harriers on grouse moors.
The Moorland Association had accused the Taskforce police of “bypassingregulation” (here) but instead of meekly deferring and backing away, as has happened for at least two decades, this time the police told the Moorland Association it was “wasting time and distracting from the real work of the Hen Harrier Taskforce” (see here) and subsequently booted the Moorland Association off the national Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG), see here, a move warmly welcomed by many in the conservation sector.
The Moorland Association isn’t used to this sort of humiliation. It’s been used to getting its own way, benefiting from the power and influence of some of its members, including the dukes and lords who held sway with the establishment figures of the day. It all seems to be falling apart now though, so it wouldn’t come as any surprise to learn that the Moorland Association had decided to pick up the ball and walk off the pitch, leaving DEFRA and Natural England’s brood meddling ‘trial’ in the gutter.
There’s some evidence to support this theory – I’m told that aside from not engaging in brood meddling this year, some grouse moor owners have also refused access to Natural England staff who wanted to go on to estates and fit satellite tags to other, non-brood meddled hen harrier chicks.
In my FoI to Natural England I asked how many satellite tags NE fieldworkers had fitted to hen harrier chicks this year. This is the response:
That’s an interesting (and short) list. I’m guessing that the three nests in Northumberland are at Kielder (non-grouse moor) and I’m pretty sure that the Cumbria nest is subject to an ongoing police investigation and that the ‘singleton’ chick was a rescue job. The inclusion of the nest in Lanarkshire is a bit bizarre because as far as I’m aware, NE fieldworkers aren’t licenced to tag chicks in Scotland.
Anyway, the table is clear that Natural England didn’t satellite tag many (any?) hen harrier chicks on grouse moors in England this year. I guess we’ll have to wait for Natural England’s end of season report to find out more details – that report is expected sometime this month, along with an updated list on the fates of all the satellite-tagged hen harriers that NE has been monitoring for several years, including all those subject to ongoing police investigations.
We can all speculate about why grouse moor owners might not want to support the continued satellite-tagging of hen harriers by NE (here’s a big clue, here’s another, and here’s another) but fortunately there are other landowners who do support it and provide open access to not only NE field staff but also to those from the RSPB, so hen harrier tagging will continue, with or without support from the grouse shooting industry.
The main question now is what will Natural England do about the hen harrier brood meddling ‘trial’? The licence for the seven-year ‘trial’ has now expired and we should expect a robust scientific review of whether it has addressed the questions it set out to answer (spoiler alert – it hasn’t).
It should also include an assessment of why brood meddling didn’t take place this year and whether that reduces the (misplaced) confidence NE senior staff have previously placed in the grouse shooting industry as a ‘partner’ in this ludicrous pantomime.
The Northern England Raptor Forum (NERF), a collective of regional raptor fieldworkers, is the latest organisation to walk away from the Yorkshire Dales/Nidderdale Bird of Prey Partnership.
You may recall this so-called ‘partnership’ in Yorkshire was established in 2020, with representatives from the grouse-shooting industry, the raptor conservation community, RSPB, Natural England, Police, the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority and the Nidderdale AONB (now renamed Nidderdale National Landscape) Authority.
The ‘partnership’ was modelled on the similar (now disbanded) ‘bird of prey partnership’ in the Peak District National Park, which, unsurprisingly given the participants from the grouse-shooting industry, was an abject failure (see here).
Photo by Ruth Tingay
The RSPB was the first organisation to walk away from the Yorkshire Dales/Nidderdale Bird of Prey ‘partnership’ in May 2023, citing well-evidenced concerns about the toxic behaviour of the grouse moor owners’ lobby group, the Moorland Association (see here).
Later that year, in December 2023, the CEO of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority wrote a damning press release about continued raptor persecution in the Park and said that the ‘partnership’ was preparing to publish another evidence report but that, “Sadly all of this will count for little whilst the persecution of birds of prey continues” (see here).
That report (covering confirmed and suspected illegal raptor persecution crimes in the area during 2022-2023) was duly published earlier this year in May 2024 and demonstrated that the so-called ‘partnership’ was failing to have any significant effect on the rampant criminality associated with driven grouse moors in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and Nidderdale National Landscape (see here).
Set amidst this background, at the end of August 2024 NERF wrote to the Yorkshire Dales/Nidderdale ‘partnership’ secretariat to say it was suspending its involvement in the ‘partnership’ following the Moorland Association’s recent expulsion from the national Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG), another so-called ‘partnership’ set up to tackle raptor persecution, that one failing miserably since its establishment in 2011.
If you recall, the Moorland Association was booted off the RPPDG in July 2024 by the National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) because Andrew Gilruth (Moorland Association CEO) appeared to be trying to sabotage the NWCU’s new Hen Harrier Taskforce, set up to tackle the illegal killing of hen harriers on grouse moors in England and Wales (see here and here). Quite reasonably, I think, the NWCU called out Gilruth/Moorland Association for “wasting time and distracting from the real work of the Hen Harrier Taskforce” (here).
In light of this, NERF told the secretariat that by remaining on the Yorkshire Dales/Nidderdale Bird of Prey ‘partnership’ with the Moorland Association, NERF “risks facing reputational damage by association“.
It looks like NERF’s long-standing patience has finally run out. I applaud them for walking away from this absurd charade.
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.
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).
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.
Two criminal investigations are underway following the discovery of two dead hen harriers earlier this spring.
According to Natural England’s most recent update on the fates of its satellite-tagged hen harriers (updates are periodical – the most recent was April 2024), the following two harriers have been found dead, one at an undisclosed location in Northumberland and another at an undisclosed location in Devon:
Hen harrier ‘Susie’, female, Tag ID: 201122, satellite-tagged in Cumbria on 21 July 2020. Date of last transmission: 12 February 2024 in Northumberland. Notes: “Recovered awaiting PM” [post mortem].
Hen harrier R2-M1-23, male, Tag ID: 213927, satellite-tagged as part of the brood meddling trial /sham on 19 July 2023 at site BM-R2-Cumbria. Date of last transmission: 7 March 2024 in Devon. Notes: “Recovered awaiting PM”.
You might remember ‘Susie’ – she’s the hen harrier whose chicks were brutally stamped on and crushed to death in their nest on a grouse moor in Whernside in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, in June 2022 (here).
I hadn’t seen any media about the latest two dead hen harriers so in May I submitted an FoI to Natural England to ask for the details of the post mortem reports to determine whether they’d been killed illegally.
Natural England responded in June and told me the information was being withheld under Regulation 12(5)(b) which states:
“A public authority may refuse to disclose information to the extent that its disclosure would adversely affect: (b) the course of justice, the ability of a person to receive a fair trial or the ability of a public authority to conduct an enquiry of a criminal or disciplinary nature”.
Natural England also told me:
“Natural England can confirm the investigations for the two Hen Harriers cases are live. As such it is our view that this exception covers the information we hold in scope of your request and therefore we are withholding because if it were to be disclosed at this stage it could comprise the result and have a serious impact on the ongoing process and proceedings“.
Natural England’s response suggests that criminality is indeed suspected but I’ll await confirmation before adding these two to the ever-growing list of hen harriers that have been illegally killed / disappeared in suspicious circumstances since the brood meddling sham began in 2018 (the running tally currently stands as 123 hen harriers).
These are the second and third known investigations this year, following the suspicious disappearance of a hen harrier called ‘Shalimar’ on a grouse moor in the Angus Glens on 15 February 2024 (see here).
Although I was at a wildlife crime forum in London last month where a police officer from the NWCU’s Hen Harrier Taskforce told the audience that there were currently five investigations ongoing, although no details were provided.
Last week I blogged about how the Moorland Association (grouse moor owners’ lobby group in England) had been booted off the ‘partnership’ designed to tackle illegal raptor persecution in England and Wales (the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group – RPPDG), after the Moorland Association had published an inflammatory blog that looked to be an attempt to sabotage the National Wildlife Crime Unit’s (NWCU) new Hen Harrier Taskforce (see here).
Grouse shooting butts in Yorkshire Dales National Park. Photo by Ruth Tingay
It seems that the Moorland Association’s inflammatory blog wasn’t an isolated incident, but more like the last straw for the NWCU.
A series of FoI responses has revealed some fascinating correspondence between the Moorland Association and the NWCU, about the Hen Harrier Taskforce, in the run up to the Moorland Association being booted out of the RPPDG last week.
I’ll post some of the correspondence below (there’s more to come) and although the names of the individuals have been redacted, it’s clear to me (from some other information released) that the Moorland Association’s correspondent is CEO Andrew Gilruth.
You can see that the Moorland Association is following a familiar line that we’ve seen from shooting industry organisations in recent years – that of putting pressure on the police to change the narrative on raptor persecution crimes (e.g. BASC did it here; National Gamekeepers Organisation did it here and again here) but this time the NWCU has called it out and has suggested that the Moorland Association is “wasting time and distracting from the real work” [i.e. that of tackling illegal raptor persecution, in this case hen harriers].
The Moorland Association’s response is to accuse the NWCU of “entirely unprofessional conduct” (cue official complaint). From what I’ve read, the NWCU has acted with patience and professionalism in the face of an arrogant and disruptive influence.
The following two files show correspondence between the NWCU and the Moorland Association from 21 December 2023 – 10 June 2024 and from 20 June 2024 – 8 July 2024:
This year is the 10th anniversary of Hen Harrier Day and it’ll be marked by an event at Carsington Water in Derbyshire on Saturday 10th August.
This year’s event is organised by the charity Hen Harrier Action and runs from 11am – 4.45pm on Saturday 10th Aug. Entry is free although you’ll have to pay for parking (calculated by the hour, max of £7 for the day).
The programme for the day looks like this:
In addition to events on the main stage, there’ll be over 20 stalls from the following organisations:
I’ll be there with my fellow co-directors from Wild Justice – Mark Avery and Chris Packham, and we’ll be looking back on the first ten years of Hen Harrier Day campaigning and looking forward to what comes next.
I hope to see some of you there – especially any of the #Sodden570 who were there when it all began amidst Hurricane Bertha at Derwent Dam!
For full details of this year’s event at Carsington Water please click here.
Eight hen harrier chicks have fledged on the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve this year, continuing to buck the trend in south Scotland.
The results of last year’s national Hen Harrier Survey demonstrated a steep regional population decline of 32% across the Southern Uplands and of four Special Protection Areas (SPAs) designated for hen harriers in this region, they were only breeding successfully in one – Tarras Valley.
Three of this year’s eight chicks have been satellite tagged – two females (siblings) and a male – with funding provided by the RSPB and charity Hen Harrier Action.
The three were named Ceilidh, Gilda and Red by Langholm Academy’s Head Girl and Boy and members of the raptor group and were tagged by licensed fieldworkers from the RSPB.
Photos of Ceilidh, Gilda and Red, copyright RSPB Scotland:
Tarras Valley was previously a driven grouse moor (known as Langholm Moor) but was bought from Buccleuch Estate a couple of years ago after an epic fundraising effort and is now a community-owned nature reserve, supported by the Langholm Initiative.
The Tarras Valley Nature Reserve team is working towards the development of a five-year action plan and many restoration projects are already underway – have a look around the TVNR website here to see what’s already been started and what else is planned.
Unsurprisingly, there are some in the grouse shooting industry who have been, and continue to be, critical of this community-owned project and seem desperate for it to fail, or at least for it to be perceived as a failure.
I mentioned last month that the Chairman of the Scottish Gamekeepers Association, Alex Hogg, recently told a Parliamentary Committee that the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve was a “species desert” and “there is nothing there at all” [now that it’s no longer being managed as a driven grouse moor].
His assessment seemed to be based not on any detailed surveys he’d undertaken, but on a single car journey he made recently over the moor. He obviously missed the hen harriers and all the other resident and visiting birds, not to mention all the other species that have been recorded on site in the last couple of years.
It’s a common theme, this slagging-off former grouse moors that are now part of a significant rewilding effort, because the gamebird shooting industry wants everyone to believe that managing a moor for grouse is the best and only suitable option for the land.
Some grouse moors do have big numbers of wader species, that’s without doubt, but it’s not a good indicator of wider biodiversity on the moor. The main reason those waders do well is because predators are ruthlessly and systematically destroyed, some legally, others illegally, for the benefit of producing an artificially-high population of red grouse for paying guests to shoot at. The benefit to the waders is simply a convenient by-product of that.
Well done to the team at Tarras Valley Nature Reserve and the army of volunteers who are helping to encourage a wide suite of habitats and species to re-establish and thrive here, including those hen harriers.
The grouse moor owners’ lobby group in England, the Moorland Association, has at long last been booted off the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG), the so-called partnership for tackling raptor persecution crimes in England & Wales.
The trigger for this expulsion seems to have been the Moorland Association’s inflammatory blog earlier this month where it looked to be trying to sabotage the work of the police’s new National Hen Harrier Taskforce (I wrote about it, here).
The Moorland Association has now posted a new blog (here) where it claims to be ‘perplexed’ about its expulsion from the RPPDG:
Hilariously, in addition to being ‘perplexed and ‘bemused’, the Moorland Association’s response includes this line, which made me laugh out loud:
“We regret this decision, as the Moorland Association has been a loyal member of the group since it was established and has arguably achieved more than any other partner in reducing wildlife crime, with bird of prey numbers at record highs“.
I’ve written about the failure of the RPPDG many times since its inception in 2011, and have argued that it simply won’t work when there is a clear conflict of interest amongst some of the ‘partners’ whose sole intention seems to be to undermine progression on tackling these crimes. We’ve seen similar when the Peak District Bird of Prey Initiative collapsed last year (here).
From the beginning, the RPPDG has been dominated by organisations from the game shooting industry and the group’s perpetual lack of results (it’s achieved precisely nothing in terms of effectively tackling raptor persecution) has been consistently supported by a series of Tory DEFRA Ministers whose wilful blindness has been off the scale (e.g. Therese Coffey here, Rebecca Pow here, Richard Benyon here, Rebecca Pow again here, Richard Benyon again here, and Trudy Harrison here).
Let’s see what happens with the RPPDG now the Moorland Association has been removed from its position of influence.
Well done to Chief Inspector Kev Kelly, head of the National Wildlife Crime Unit (and current stand-in Chair of the RPPDG) for a courageous (and in my view, long overdue) decision to remove the Moorland Association from the RPPDG. I imagine he considered the consequences of making such a decision (i.e. a nasty, spiteful backlash from certain quarters) but decided the potential benefits to the partnership outweighed the cost. It’s an impressive example of integrity and I applaud him for it.
UPDATE 1 August 2024: Police call out Moorland Association for “wasting time & distracting from the real work” of Hen Harrier Taskforce (here)
UPDATE 22 November 2024: Revealed: letter of expulsion to Andrew Gilruth (CEO, Moorland Association) from Head of National Wildlife Crime Unit (here)
Raptor Persecution UK 