Tag: hen harrier

Two separate High Court applications have been submitted this week, seeking a judicial review of Natural England’s highly controversial decision to issue a hen harrier brood meddling licence.

As a quick re-cap for new blog readers, in January this year, Natural England issued a licence to Jemima Parry-Jones (International Centre for Birds of Prey [ICBP], Newent, Glos) permitting the removal of hen harrier eggs and chicks from some nests on grouse moors in Northern England, to protect artificially-high stocks of red grouse being farmed for shooting. The licence permits the ICBP to rear the young hen harriers in captivity and then release them in August back to the same grouse moor areas from where they were removed, where they will once again be put at risk of being illegally killed.

This licence is fundamental to DEFRA’s hen harrier brood meddling plan, which forms part of its ludicrous Hen Harrier Action Plan. For background reading on hen harrier brood meddling, please see here.

The ICBP is being paid by the Moorland Association to undertake the brood meddling work, and the licence is supported by the members of the Hen Harrier Brood Meddling Project Board, which includes Rob Cooke (Natural England), Adrian Jowitt (Natural England), Steve Redpath (Aberdeen University), Jemima Parry-Jones (ICBP), Adrian Smith (GWCT), Philip Merricks (Hawk & Owl Trust), Amanda Anderson (Moorland Association), Robert Benson (Moorland Association).

In early February, lawyers acting on behalf of Mark Avery decided to challenge the lawfulness of Natural England’s decision to issue this licence by way of a judicial review. The lawyers agreed to work at reduced rates and Mark successfully raised over £26,000 via crowdfunding to support the legal action.

In late February Mark’s lawyers sent a ‘pre-action protocol letter’ to Natural England, outlining the perceived legal inadequacies of the decision to issue the licence. The letter also invited Natural England to revoke the licence and undertake a proper public consultation on the issue of hen harrier brood meddling.

In March the RSPB also sent a pre-action protocol letter to Natural England on the same issue.

Natural England’s response letters have been seen as unsatisfactory by Mark and by the RSPB and so yesterday Mark submitted an application to the High Court seeking permission for a judicial review, because, as Mark’s lawyer says,  “My client believes that the decision to grant this licence is unlawful as it is in breach of EU law – it takes criminal activity as its starting point and looks to ease the path for those who break the law, often for profit, for the purpose of shooting red grouse“.

Today the RSPB has also announced it, too, has submitted an application seeking a judicial review.

Good stuff.

There was an article in The Guardian yesterday about Mark’s application.

As many of you will know, part of DEFRA’s ludicrous Hen Harrier Action Plan is the proposed reintroduction (not really a reintroduction) of hen harriers to southern England.

We know, through a series of FoIs, that Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire is the currently proposed reintroduction site and the proposed start date is 2018.

We also know, via FoIs, that several countries had been approached as potential hen harrier donors, including the Netherlands, Spain, Poland and France (see here). Of these, only France seemed a realistic prospect and the Southern Reintroduction Project Team has been spending a lot of time (and tax-payers’ money) on seeking approval from the French authorities.

However, there is a persistent rumour (and we emphasise that this is nothing more than a rumour at the moment, albeit a frequently spoken one by several different sources) that the French Government has said “Non!” to providing the UK with French hen harriers for relocation to Salisbury Plain. The reason for this refusal, according to rumour, might have something to do with Natural England’s outrageous decision to issue a hen harrier brood meddling licence permitting the removal of hen harrier eggs and chicks from grouse moors across northern England.

That would seem a perfectly legitimate reason for the French authorities to refuse – why on earth would they donate hen harriers if those very same hen harriers (assuming they’re not shot on sight) might end up having their future offspring removed from the wild and taken in to captivity, just so a bunch of grouse shooters can kill more red grouse for fun?

Of course, the French authorities’ decision (if true) may have nothing to do with brood meddling at all – it may simply be based on the UK’s complete and utter failure to protect hen harriers from illegal persecution.

We’ve submitted another FoI to Natural England to try and find out what’s going on, but on past performance we’re not holding our breath.

Meanwhile, where does that leave the proposed reintroduction project? Perhaps the Project Team will now approach Scotland for donor birds? We know, via an FoI to SNH, that as of 6 February 2017 SNH had not received any correspondence about being a potential donor source. SNH wrote:

“We can advise there has been no approach from Natural England or others involved with this project, but that if SNH received such a request we would assess it by our own normal licensing processes and the Scottish Translocation Code, as it would relate to a reintroduction project seeking Scottish involvement / donor stock“.

But then there’s Russia. We know, again via FoI, that Philip Merricks of the Hawk & Owl Trust told a Reintroduction Project Team meeting in October 2016, ‘that Russian counterparts had suggested that sourcing birds there was relatively straight forward provided that proper channels were followed’. The Project team ‘agreed to pursue sources closer to home for now’.

So will they now approach Russia to ask them to donate hen harriers for release on Salisbury Plain? Current political sensitivities suggest this might be a bit, er, awkward.

In January this year, Natural England issued a licence to Jemima Parry-Jones (International Centre for Birds of Prey, Newent, Glos) permitting the controversial removal of hen harrier eggs and chicks from some nests on grouse moors in Northern England, to protect artificially-high stocks of red grouse being farmed for shooting. The licence permits the ICBP to rear the young hen harriers in captivity and then release them in August back to the same grouse moor areas from where they were removed, where they will once again be put at risk of being illegally killed.

This licence is fundamental to DEFRA’s hen harrier brood meddling plan, which forms part of its ludicrous Hen Harrier Action Plan. For background reading on hen harrier brood meddling, please see here. The ICBP is being paid by the Moorland Association to undertake the brood meddling work, and the licence is supported by the members of the Hen Harrier Brood Meddling Project Board, which includes Rob Cooke (Natural England), Adrian Jowitt (Natural England), Steve Redpath (Aberdeen University), Jemima Parry-Jones (ICBP), Adrian Smith (GWCT), Philip Merricks (Hawk & Owl Trust), Amanda Anderson (Moorland Association), Robert Benson (Moorland Association).

In early February, lawyers acting on behalf of Mark Avery decided to challenge the lawfulness of Natural England’s decision to issue this licence by way of a judicial review. The lawyers agreed to work at reduced rates and Mark successfully raised over £26,000 via crowdfunding to support the legal action.

In late February Mark’s lawyers sent a ‘pre-action protocol letter’ to Natural England, outlining the perceived legal inadequacies of the decision to issue the licence. The letter also invited Natural England to revoke the licence and undertake a proper public consultation on the issue of hen harrier brood meddling.

This pre-action protocol letter is the first step in the process of judicial review and Natural England should respond within 14 days (deadline 14 March 2018). If Mark’s lawyers find Natural England’s response inadequate, they will move to begin formal legal proceedings via judicial review.

Today, the RSPB has announced that it, too, has started proceedings and has sent its own pre-action protocol letter to Natural England. We don’t know the details of that letter but we expect the specifics to be very similar to the letter sent by Mark’s lawyers.

We now have to wait for Natural England’s response(s).

Assuming Natural England stands by its decision-making process, and permission is granted by the courts to proceed with a full judicial review, we might expect Natural England to temporarily suspend the brood meddling licence while legal proceedings are underway, much in the way that SNH suspended its General Licence Restriction on Raeshaw Estate while that judicial review was heard.

Interesting times ahead.

UPDATE 17 April 2018: Legal challenge against hen harrier brood meddling continues, x2 (here)

Do you want to see justice for Hen harriers?

Do you oppose DEFRA’s outrageous Hen harrier brood meddling scheme?

Do you want to support a legal challenge against the brood meddling licence that Natural England has recently issued?

Here’s how you can help.

#justice4henharriers

The Moorland Association’s plan to block publicity about the failed Peak District Bird of Prey Initiative has spectacularly backfired.

Journalists have picked up on the news that the RSPB has terminated its involvement with the project and yesterday evening the failed Initiative, and more importantly, the reasons behind its failure, featured prominently on several BBC regional news programmes including East Midlands Today and Look North.

The videos for both programmes are available on BBC iPlayer but only until 7pm this evening.

BBC East Midlands Today (here) – starts at 4.35

BBC Look North (here) – starts 10.00

Both programmes are worth watching if you get the chance as there are similarities but also differences. For example, David Hunt from the RSPB features in both programmes (and delivers a very strong message, calling out the Moorland Association by name. Well done!) whereas Steve Bloomfield from BASC only appears in the East Midlands programme and Amanda Anderson from the Moorland Association only appears in the Look North version.

For those who missed the archived footage, here are the relevant quotes:

David Hunt (RSPB): “Instead of seeing numbers rise of peregrine and goshawk we’ve actually seen the numbers drop over the lifespan of the Initiative, and against all of that there’s been a refusal from one of the partners in the Initiative, the Moorland Association, to acknowledge that one of the leading contributing factors in this drop in numbers is illegal killing of birds of prey“.

Steve Bloomfield (BASC): “We share their [the RSPB’s] frustrations and I think this needs to be a wake up call for the shooting community that these issues are going on and causing problems. There are huge amounts of benefits to the shooting interests on these estates to other wildlife. We musn’t lose that“.

Amanda Anderson (Moorland Association): “We’re all really disappointed that they’ve [the RSPB] left this really important collaborative Initiative. We all want the same thing, and that’s a sustainable, healthy assemblage of birds of prey across the Peak District National Park. We just differ in our view of how to achieve that“.

In the Look North programme, the BBC reporter Mark Ansell closed with this:

“The Peak District National Park Authority declined to be interviewed but they have said in a recent report that the Bird of Prey Initiative has failed to meet its targets. They go on to say that there is confirmed evidence of raptor persecution, and in a statement they say they’ll be looking for an increase in birds in the breeding season before committing to working with the other organisations in the Initiative beyond 2018”.

Following the announcement earlier this week that Natural England has licensed the highly controversial brood meddling trial for hen harriers (see here), the Northern England Raptor Forum (NERF) has issued a damning statement in response.

Quoting from the statement (which we encourage you to read in full on the NERF website, here), NERF’s main reasons for objecting to this trial are as follows:

• The Hen Harrier is near extinct as a breeding species in England (an average of just 3 successful nests per year over the last 9 years, ranging 0-6 nests annually) and is threatened thoughout the year as the pattern of disappearance of satellite tagged juvenile birds confirms.
• Bowland and the North Pennine Special Protection Areas {SPAs} are both designated for their supposed breeding populations of Hen Harrier at 13 and 11 pairs respectively. In 2016 and 2017 there were none in either.  The UK government has a legal responsibility to correct these serious infractions and restore the species to a favourable status.
• Given the species’ fragile status we would expect Natural England to be focused on protection and addressing the known principal reason for the species’ demise which by their own admission (‘A Future for the Hen Harrier?’ NE 2008) is that of illegal persecution.
• Recent nesting pairs have only occurred on land which is not used for driven grouse shooting. As such breeding birds cannot possibly impact on the overall economics of driven grouse shooting estates. To contemplate interference via brood management with potentially the very first nesting pair to repopulate any one or more estates is outrageous and an affront to sound species’ conservation.
• Research has shown the natural carrying capacity of Hen Harrier habitat in northern England to be 300+ pairs! Therefore as a minimum we would expect to see the upland SPAs, protected under EU Directives, demonstrably supporting their designated populations of Hen Harrier. Across the whole region we’d also expect to have at least 70 breeding pairs, below which published reports show there would be no economic impact on Red Grouse numbers. Only when these thresholds are reached should the case for brood management be considered anew.
• Adequate protection against illegal persecution must be evidenced first and a growth in breeding numbers seen. There is no point in expending an estimated £0.9-1.2 million, to release young birds after hand rearing, into a dangerous environment where continuing illegal persecution severely diminishes their chances of surviving their first winter.

NERF is clearly angry (justifiably) about Natural England’s decision to licence this brood meddling trial at a time when the hen harrier’s breeding population is so desperately small, due to illegal persecution. So angry, in fact, that the last paragraph of the NERF statement is unusually forthright:

‘NERF is left dismayed that Defra and Natural England, as protectors of our natural environment should promote this untimely and unnecessary intervention which seems wholly contrary to the best principles of conservation.  As such NERF members are now intent on re-evaluating areas of cooperation with Natural England‘.

Natural England has finally given the green light to the highly controversial hen harrier brood meddling scheme and has issued a licence for the five-year trial to begin this year.

As many of you already know, brood meddling is one of six action points in DEFRA’s ludicrous Hen Harrier Action Plan, designed to rescue the English hen harrier breeding population from virtual extinction.

For the benefit of new blog readers, here’s a quick overview of what brood meddling is about:

Hen harriers have been wiped out as a breeding species on driven grouse moors in England. Even though this is a protected species of the highest conservation priority, it has been, and still is, illegally persecuted, with impunity, by grouse moor owners and their gamekeepers. There is enough room for over 300 breeding pairs in England: last year there were only three successful pairs, and none of those was on a grouse moor (prime habitat). So, here’s DEFRA’s ‘rescue’ plan.

Instead of throwing absolutely everything in to catching and prosecuting these criminals (because that’s what they are), the Government is instead going to allow the temporary removal of hen harriers from grouse moors during the breeding season. Eggs/chicks will be collected from nests (‘brood meddled’) and hatched/reared in captivity for a few weeks. The idea is that by removing the hen harrier eggs/chicks, the adult hen harriers won’t prey on as many red grouse chicks (which are already at a ridiculously artificial high density thanks to intensive management), which means there’ll be even more red grouse available later in the season for paying clients to shoot in the face, for a bit of fun. The grouse moor owners and their gamekeepers will be happy and there’ll be no need to kill any more hen harriers. Sounds good, right?

But wait. What about those young hen harriers that have been reared in captivity? What happens to them? Well, they’ll be released, at fledging age, back to the moorland areas from where they were first removed. They’ll no longer be a threat to the grouse moor owners’ profits because all the red grouse chicks will have grown in to adults so they won’t be as vulnerable to hen harrier predation.

Perfect. Everybody lives happily ever after (except the red grouse).

There’s just one tiny problem with this plan.

Those young hen harriers will be released back on to the moors around the same time that the grouse shooting season opens on 12 August. Those young hen harriers are going to be flying around the moors looking for food and the red grouse will react by either trying to hide or by scattering in all directions. This will disrupt the grouse ‘drives’ which is when the red grouse are flushed in lines towards the grouse butts and the waiting guns. Guests who have paid thousands of pounds for the chance to stand in a grouse butt and shoot those grouse are not going to be happy if there aren’t many birds available for them to blast to smithereens.

So what do you think’s going to happen? You don’t need to be a genius to work it out. And indeed satellite tag data has shown time and time again that young dispersing hen harriers are routinely killed on grouse moors, especially during the first few months of the grouse shooting season in August, September and October, because grouse moor owners and their gamekeepers will not tolerate anything that threatens to disrupt their lucrative grouse shoots.

Nobody will get caught/prosecuted, the grouse-shooting industry will deny all knowledge (they’ll deny it’s even happening because they’ll be careful to hide the evidence), there’ll be further delay in the Government considering any other kind of action (such as licensing or banning driven grouse shooting) because it’ll say the five-year trial needs to run its course, and so we’ll end up back where we started with virtually no hen harriers and the untouchable, filthy grouse shooting industry still getting away with their crimes.

Despite knowing all this, yesterday Natural England finally issued a licence that will permit brood meddling to begin this year. We’ve been asking for the details of this project for a long, long time and Natural England has put every possible obstacle in our way while the licence application was being considered. Reading the details that have just been released, it not hard to see why they would want to keep it under wraps for so long.

The most important documents for you to read are these:

Hen Harrier brood meddling trial project plan

Brood meddling licence 2018_2020

Letter to licensing applicant

Additional conditions for brood meddling licence 2018_2020

Technical assessment of brood meddling licence application

These documents (above) will provide you with a good overview of what’s going on. There are other documents that go in to more detail for those who wish to know more, and these are provided at the end of this blog.

Here are the main points about the brood meddling plan:

• The licence covers moorland throughout northern England
• No eggs or chicks may be taken into captivity unless the threshold of two nests within 10km is met
• Nests can only be brood meddled where the harrier pair has the potential to reduce the shootable surplus of red grouse
• No hen harrier pair can be brood meddled in consecutive nesting attempts (this assumes individuals can be identified)
• Hen harriers cannot be brood meddled without the landowner’s consent
• Hen harriers cannot be brood meddled until a release site has been determined and the ‘local team’ has been approved by Natural England
• All brood meddled hen harriers will be satellite-tagged prior to release
• Hen harriers cannot be brood meddled until satellite-tags have been procured
• The Moorland Association is procuring the satellite tags (yes, really!)
• A ‘new’ type of satellite tag will be used
• The Moorland Association and GWCT, as members of the Project Board, will have access to the hen harrier satellite tag data (yes, really!)
• Natural England is responsible for analysing the satellite tag data (yes, really!)
• Hen harriers removed from a Special Protection Area designated for hen harriers (Bowland Fells SPA, Nothern Pennines SPA) must be returned within the boundary of that SPA
• Hen harriers removed from sites outwith an SPA will be returned to ‘suitable habitat within the trial area and where practical close to the area from where they were taken’
• There is a recommendation that hen harriers ‘should not be released within sight of burnt heather strips’ (!!)
• Brood meddling will be undertaken by the International Centre for Birds of Prey (Newent, Glos) – the brood meddling licence holder is Mrs Jemima Parry Jones of the ICBP. Natural England tried to redact this information without realising it had already been released in response to one of our earlier FoIs, and they also made a hash of the actual redaction: ‘Dear Jemima’ is a bit of a giveaway!
• The Moorland Association will pay the ICBP to undertake the brood meddling trial and has entered into a five-year legal contract with the ICBP to ensure funding throughout the trial
• Brood meddled eggs/chicks will be held in captivity at the ICBP in Newent
• At approx 3 weeks old, captive hen harriers will be removed to a temporary aviary at a suitable release site where a ‘local team’ will look after them
• There must be 24hr site security at the release aviary
• Details of release sites have not been given
• The trial can be stopped at any stage if a number of things happen. One of these is if ‘there is higher than expected mortality of birds post release’. This is suspicously vague and may well become a contentious issue, a bit like the Hawk & Owl Trust’s so-called ‘immoveable provisos’ on illegal persecution that turned out to be quite moveable after all.

That’s quite a lot to digest so we’ll return to some of these details in due course.

The big question now is, how many grouse moor owners will ‘allow’ a pair of nesting hen harriers on their land? The grouse shooting industry is kind of backed in to a corner, and it’s all of its own making. Grouse moor owners probably all thought brood meddling was a great idea when it was first mooted, as they thought those ‘brood meddled’ harriers would be removed from their moors and dumped hundreds of miles away in southern England as part of the proposed reintroduction scheme down there. Now they’ve been told that’s not going to happen – brood meddled hen harriers have to be returned to the upland moors.

What will the grouse moor owners do? Do they play ball and allow hen harriers to breed on the moors (because DEFRA et al are going to be pretty upset if it looks like the grouse shooting industry is not cooperating)? But if they do that, they run the risk that ‘their’ nest may not get brood meddled, especially if neighbouring moors refuse to ‘let hen harriers in‘, and so then they’ll be stuck with an unwanted hen harrier pair plus offspring.

It’s all going to get quite interesting in the next few months.

Here are the additional documents released by Natural England for those who want more detail of this disgraceful decision:

SSSI notice proforma supplied with brood meddling licence

Summary of brood meddling licensing decision

Habitats Regulations Assessment of brood meddling licence application

Brood meddling licence application

Information from the applicant on project submitted in the form of a draft Habitats Regulations Assessment

Applicants email response to further information request

Information from applicant in response to further information request

UPDATE 17 April 2018: Legal challenge against hen harrier brood meddling continues, x2 (see here)

In response to a Parliamentary question about the reintroduction of hen harriers to lowland England, a DEFRA Minister responded as follows:

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, this response didn’t come from Dr Therese Coffey MP or Michael Gove MP. It came from Ben Bradshaw MP back in 2004, who at the time was the Under Secretary of State at DEFRA, under the leadership of Margaret Beckett.

The question came as part of a series of Parliamentary questions posed by James Gray MP (Conservative, North Wiltshire) in response to the launch of Operation Artemis, a police-led initiative aimed at tackling the illegal persecution of the hen harrier. Mr Gray wasn’t a fan (no surprise when you look at his background) as you can see from this Early Day Motion from Labour MP Tony Banks:

We haven’t been able to find the exact quote from Mr Gray on Hansard, but it’s clear he wasn’t in support of Operation Artemis, and judging by this (scroll down to the bottom), a number of his fellow Conservative MPs agreed.

Operation Artemis was launched in the spring of 2004 and part of the initiative was for police officers to visit every single estate where there was the potential for hen harriers to breed. The idea was that police officers would provide landowners and gamekeepers with a code of best practice to help any hen harrier breeding attempt, and invite those land owners and gamekeepers to sign up to support the initiative.

Here is Paul Henery (Police WCO for Northumberland) and Chief Constable Richard Brunstrom at the launch (photo by Guy Shorrock)

There was apparently strong support in Wales, but in England, landowners and gamekeepers reacted with fury. Here is a cutting from the RSPB’s Legal Eagle newsletter in July 2004:

And here is the astonishing response from the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation (take note of the suggestion that the limited police budget for this scheme could be decimated by police officers having to respond to a barage of complaints, which could then be withdrawn at the last minute):

Fourteen years on, the hen harrier’s breeding population in England remains critical, the illegal persecution of this species continues unabated, it is virtually impossible to secure a conviction even when high definition video evidence of the crime is available, the Conservative Government has approved the removal of hen harriers from grouse moors to allow a few hundred rich folk (including a number of Conservative MPS) to shoot 0.75 million red grouse in the face for a bit of fun, and thinks that importing hen harriers from France in to southern England under the guise of being a conservation initiative is a great idea, even though illegal persecution continues (which means the scheme does not meet the required IUCN guidelines for reintroductions).