Tag: hen harrier

As many of you know, one of the six action points in DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Action Plan is to ‘reintroduce’ hen harriers to southern England.

As you’ll also know, over the last 12 months we’ve been trying to prise details out of Natural England about this ‘let’s divert attention from illegal persecution on driven grouse moors’ plan, and that has proved challenging to say the least.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far from a year’s worth of FoI requests:

28 Nov 2016: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: an update (here)

3 Jan 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: the feasibility/scoping report (here)

8 Jan 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: the project group and their timeline (here)

9 Jan 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: who’s funding it? (here)

9 Jan 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: a bonkers proposal for Exmoor National Park (here)

12 Jan 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: Wiltshire (here)

14 Feb 2017: Leaked email reveals Natural England’s views on Hen Harrier Action Plan (here)

23 Feb 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: donor countries (here)

19 July 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: new project manager appointed (here)

20 July 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: Dartmoor as potential new release site (here)

20 July 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: revised costs (here)

21 July 2017: Hen harrier reintroduction to southern England: project team visits France (here)

27 July 2017: RSPB statement on Hen Harrier reintroduction to southern England (here)

15 Aug 2017: Natural England Board making up justification for hen harrier southern reintroduction (here)

In early October 2017 we submitted another FoI request and Natural England asked for more time due to the “complexity and voluminous nature of the request” (it was neither complex nor voluminous, this was just another delaying tactic from NE).

That extra time has now expired and Natural England has released a limited amount of further information (although some has been withheld, for various reasons).

Part of the information NE released was a report from a fieldtrip to France (a potential hen harrier donor country) undertaken in June 2017 by two members of the Southern Reintroduction Project Team (Simon Lees from Natural England and Jemima Parry-Jones from the International Centre for Birds of Prey). Here’s the [redacted] report:

The two French researchers whose names are redacted from the above report are Dr Alexandre Millon and Dr Vincent Bretagnolle. Both of these guys have had long and productive careers studying various harrier species and both are highly respected within scientific conservation circles. Which kind of begs the question why they might be supportive of a plan to remove French hen harriers and take them to England where the species is on the verge of breeding extinction due to the continued & rampant illegal persecution of this species by gamekeepers?

What they should have told Natural England is, ‘Get the grouse moor managers to stop illegally killing English hen harriers and all your problems will be solved. Harriers will recolonise the southern lowlands all by themselves if they weren’t being illegally shot, poisoned, trapped and bludgeoned to death on the upland grouse moors’. Or words to that effect.

But anyway, it’s not their decision to make; that’s for the French statutory authorities to decide and you’ll note that Natural England recognises it could really do with support from the RSPB to present a ‘unified conservation case’. However, according to a statement issued by the RSPB in July this year:

“The RSPB has serious reservations about this approach to hen harrier conservation in England, and therefore is NOT supporting the project“.

We’ll come back to Natural England’s need to get the RSPB on board for this project in another blog post (due shortly). Cooperation and support from the RSPB is something that Natural England has identified as a potential hurdle in getting this project off the ground.

More soon….

UPDATE 12 December 2017: 2018 start date for reintroduction of hen harrier to southern England? (here)

Further to Tuesday’s blog about Natural England inviting the Ministry of Defence and Yorkshire Water to participate in the highly controversial hen harrier brood meddling plan (see here), we’ve heard back from Andrew Walker, Catchment Strategy Manager at Yorkshire Water (and we thank him for his prompt & courteous correspondence).

“Natural England asked YWS to support the trial of a Hen Harrier recovery plan which comprises a six point plan. The last of these was to scope out feasibility for trialling brood management for which we sought further explanation from Natural England. The explanation we received was that a group, chaired by Natural England, was currently working up a licence application for this trial. The proposal, we understand, is that all nests in the English uplands  – where the land is included within the geographical scope of the licence – could contribute to the density figure (generally expressed as 10km between nests) but that landowners will make the decision as to whether or not they wish a particular nest to be brood managed in this way.

We support hen harrier conservation and, on balance, decided to support the plan because we think that a multi stakeholder approach is more likely to be effective because we don’t see the population we may expect at this moment in time“.

It’s not clear how the temporary removal of protected hen harriers, for the sole benefit of the grouse-shooting industry, fits in with Yorkshire Water’s Biodiversity Action Plan. Nor how the later release of those brood meddled birds back to the same general area will help increase the harrier population, especially as their release will coincide with the peak period of the grouse shooting season (August, September & October) and we know from far too many examples that young harriers are ruthlessly (and illegally) targeted on grouse moors during this period, presumably as they might ‘disrupt’ the grouse drives and so reduce the number of grouse available to be shot.

It’s bad enough that Yorkshire Water permits driven grouse shooting (with highly toxic lead ammunition) on its landholdings, knowing full well the proven links between driven grouse shooting and the criminal persecution of birds of prey, especially in Yorkshire, the raptor killing capital of the UK. But to then sign up to the legal persecution of hen harriers (because effectively that’s what brood meddling amounts to) to appease the grouse shooting industry? Sorry, Yorkshire Water, your environmental credentials have just been flushed down the toilet.

It’s that time of year again when the Heads Up for Hen Harriers Project trots out more propaganda in an attempt to greenwash the criminal activities of the driven grouse shooting industry.

This project began a few years ago and we’ve criticised it many times for being a partnership-working sham (e.g. see here, here, here, here, here). You won’t be surprised to learn we’re going to do so again.

The idea behind this project is that sporting estates agree to have cameras installed at hen harrier nests to identify the causes of nest failure. This is a flawed idea right from the off. We all know the main reason behind the declining hen harrier population – illegal persecution on intensively managed driven grouse moors – it has been documented time and time and time again, in scientific papers and government-funded reports. So, if you put an ‘official Project camera’ on a hen harrier nest situated on a driven grouse moor, the gamekeepers will know about it and won’t touch that nest (although they’re quite likely to try and bump off the young once they’ve left the nest but are hanging around the grouse drives, away from the nest camera). So if the nest then fails for natural reasons (e.g. poor weather, predation), the Project will only identify those issues as the cause of failure, and not the illegal persecution issue. The grouse-shooting industry will then use those (biased) results to shout about illegal persecution not being an issue. We’ve seen this many times already.

This year, once again, SNH put out a misleading press release that claimed a ‘bumper’ year for project success, with 37 hen harriers successfully fledging from 7 of the 21 participating estates.

Photograph from one of this year’s nest cameras:

Sounds great, doesn’t it? And it is, in a way. We have no problem recognising the efforts of these seven estates – they’ve all hosted successful hen harrier breeding attempts and they absolutely should be applauded for their efforts. But, and here’s the rub, not one of these estates is on our radar as being a raptor persecution hotspot and we question how many of them operates as an intensively managed driven grouse moor. Hen harriers would just as likely have nested on these seven estates even if they hadn’t signed up to be part of the Heads Up Project, so for the Heads Up Project to claim these breeding successes as a Project success is highly disingenuous.

Several of these estates are managed as re-wilding projects, some of them have low ground shooting/stalking or walked-up grouse shooting and at least one of them has no game shooting whatsoever. One that comes anywhere near being a driven grouse moor is Langholm, and given that this is a highly-scrutinsed demonstration project (i.e. no illegal raptor killing allowed), and they’re not shooting grouse there, it doesn’t qualify as an intensively managed driven grouse moor, nor an estate of (current) concern.

So while SNH and the driven grouse shooting industry are busily trumpeting this as a great partnership success and real hope for hen harrier population recovery, the reality is that illegal persecution on intensively managed driven grouse moors remains out of the spotlight.

In our opinion this is a total greenwashing propaganda exercise. We expect nothing else from the driven grouse shooting industry but for SNH to be heralding it as anything but a sham is an embarrassment.

Unfortunately, Hen Harrier Species Champion Mairi Gougeon MSP appears to have had the wool pulled over her eyes. We have a lot of time for Mairi, and appreciate her efforts in using her political status to draw attention to this species’ plight, but have a look at this recent Parliamentary motion, lodged by Mairi but with the Dark Side’s fingerprints all over it:

This motion acheived cross-party support (by no doubt similarly well-intentioned MSPs) and as such will result in a Members Debate in Holyrood a week today:

We look forward to watching this debate (it’ll be available on Scottish Parliament TV – we’ll add a link nearer the time) and we especially look forward to some well-informed MSPs asking some probing questions to expose the Heads Up for Hen Harriers Project for the greenwashing scam that it is.

Brood meddling is one of the six action points in DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Action Plan, launched in January 2016.

Regular blog readers will know that we initially got some information out of Natural England about this controversial action point (see here, here, here, here), but for the last year all our requests have been refused for one reason or another, but mainly because NE considered the release of information would “prejudice” the internal licence application. This is, of course, complete nonsense.

In early October 2017 we submitted yet another FoI request, only to be told by Natural England that more time was needed to gather the requested information “because of the complexity/voluminous nature of the request“.

Natural England has now had the extra time it requested and the information it has released was neither “complex” nor “voluminous”. Once again, requested information has been withheld (for “confidentiality” purposes this time) but some info has been released.

The Hen Harrier Brood Meddling Group held its sixth meeting in June 2017 and here are the notes from that gathering:

Unfortunately these notes provide little information, mainly because much of the discussion was centred on the Brood Meddling Draft Project Plan, which has not been made publicly available.

We have submitted another FoI to ask for a copy.

The only other bit of information that NE released as part of this “complex and voluminous” request was a couple of letters to the Ministry of Defence and to Yorkshire Water, inviting them to get on board with the hen harrier brood meddling plan. Here is a copy of the letter to the MoD (the letter to Yorkshire Water was virtually identical so we won’t reproduce it here):

We have no idea whether the MoD or Yorkshire Water has agreed to sign up to the hen harrier brood meddling plan (i.e. to permit the removal of hen harrier eggs/chicks from their land).

Despite a thoughtful (but some might argue naive) position (see here), Yorkshire Water does permit grouse shooting on its land.

So does the MoD – here are a couple of photos of grouse butts photographed on a military firing range in North Yorkshire [photos by Ruth Tingay].

We await the Brood Meddling Draft Project Plan with interest.

UPDATE 7 December 2017: Yorkshire Water agrees to hen harrier brood meddling on its landholdings (here)

In September this year, Natural England told blog reader Mike Whitehouse that “work on the six actions set out in the [2016] Joint Hen Harrier Action Plan is progressing as expected. Ultimately we believe these actions will result in an increase in the numbers of hen harriers breeding in England“.

Earlier this month, in its response to Gavin Gamble’s e-petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting, DEFRA said this:

The [Hen Harrier] Action Plan was developed with senior representatives from organisations including Natural England, the Moorland Association, the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, National Parks England and formerly the RSPB. These organisations, led by Natural England, will monitor activities and report annually on progress to the Defra Uplands Stakeholder Forum and the UK Tasking and Co-ordinating group for Wildlife Crime’.

Naturally, we were curious about this ‘as expected progress’, nearly two years after the Hen Harrier Action Plan was launched, especially given the high number of dead or ‘missing’ satellite tagged hen harriers that have been reported since the Action Plan was launched.

[Photo of Hen Harrier Carroll, found dead in Northumberland in January 2017. A post mortem revealed she had died with a parasitic infection, but it also revealed two shotgun pellets lodged under healed wounds, one in the leg and one in the throat. Photo by Northumberland Police]

We were keen to see the annual report to which DEFRA referred in its response to Gavin Gamble – the one that had been submitted to the DEFRA Uplands Stakeholder Forum.

We’ve managed to get hold of a copy.

Here’s the report’s introductory blurb, highlighting the fact that no hen harriers bred on any English grouse moors in 2016, nor in 2017. Not a great start to a report about ‘progress’.

Now let’s examine the ‘progress’ that has been made on each of the six action points:

ACTION POINT 1 – MONITORING OF HEN HARRIER POPULATION IN ENGLAND

So, a number of hen harriers were satellite-tagged in 2016 and 2017. That is good, but this tagging effort started long before the launch of the Hen Harrier Action Plan and would have happened even if the Action Plan hadn’t been launched, so this can hardly be claimed as Action Plan ‘progress’. And most of these tagged birds (except two) have since been found shot dead or have ‘disappeared’ in suspicious circumstances.

Progress rating: 2/10 (and that’s being generous).

ACTION POINT 2 – DIVERSIONARY FEEDING

Progress rating: 0/10

ACTION POINT 3 – WORK WITH THE RAPTOR PERSECUTION PRIORITY DELIVERY GROUP (RPPDG) TO ANALYSE MONITORING INFORMATION AND BUILD INTELLIGENCE PICTURE

The RPPDG might well have been ‘focusing its efforts on the production of poison maps‘, but as we pointed out the other day, this so-called ‘delivery group’ hasn’t managed to deliver a single thing since the publication of its 2007-2011 poisoning map.

And what’s this about ‘hen harriers do not feed on carrion so the poisons map is not directly applicable to this species‘? Er, aren’t there records of hen harriers being killed by ingesting illegal poison? Yes, there most certainly are – see here. And what’s diversionary feeding if it isn’t the provision of dead food (i.e. carrion)? Of course hen harriers feed on carrion! And here’s a photograph of one doing exactly that, caught on a camera trap by SRSG member Stuart Williams in Orkney in 2015:

Progress rating: 0/10

ACTION POINT 4 – NEST & WINTER ROOST PROTECTION

Again, roost and nest watches started long before the launch of the Hen Harrier Action Plan and would have happened even if the Action Plan hadn’t been launched, so this can hardly be claimed as Action Plan ‘progress’. However, the development of a roost monitoring scheme with the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority seems to be a new thing, which is good, although this progress report doesn’t actually tell us whether it’s up and running yet.

Progress rating: 1/10

ACTION POINT 5 – SOUTHERN REINTRODUCTION

We’re not going to comment too much about this Action Point because we’ve got a more detailed blog planned for the very near future, based on some more information that has been dragged out of Natural England via FoI requests.

Nevertheless, ‘progress’ on this highly controversial Action Point has certainly been made (here’s what we know so far), even though we totally oppose this action.

Progress rating: 7/10

ACTION POINT 6 – TRIAL BROOD MANAGEMENT SCHEME

Again, we’re not going to comment too much on this Action Point because we’ve got a more detailed blog planned for the New Year, when Natural England will have finalised the brood meddling licence and thus will have to release it to the public for scrutiny. At the moment we know very little because NE has refused to tell us anything for a whole year.

Nevertheless, progress on this highly controversial Action Point has certainly been made, even though we totally oppose this action.

Progress rating: 5/10

So there we have it. Almost two years on from the launch of the Hen Harrier Action Plan, ‘progress’ has been made by the organisations already carrying out these so-called Action Points (e.g. RSPB, Natural England, Northern England Raptor Study Group, Forestry Commission), regardless of the Hen Harrier Action Plan. But there is absolutely no sign of ‘progress’ from the grouse-shooting industry on anything other than the two Action Points that are designed either to remove hen harriers from grouse moors (brood meddling) or to detract attention from the illegal killing of hen harriers on grouse moors (southern reintroduction).

Oh, and satellite-tagged hen harriers keep ‘disappearing’ or being found shot dead.

Perhaps this is what Natural England meant when they told Mike Whitehouse in September that progress is “as expected“.

Watch this space for further updates on brood meddling and the southern reintroduction, coming soon.

The Mail on Sunday ran a story yesterday suggesting that the RSPB was responsible for the catastrophic decline of the English hen harrier breeding population. It went like this:

 

You might think this article was the handiwork of the grouse shooting industry’s propaganda machine, You Forgot the Birds (YFTB). It’s got all the hallmarks – anti-RSPB rhetoric, dodgy use of science, published in the Mail etc. But there’s no quote from YFTB favourites, Ian ‘King of Bollocks‘ Botham or the equally scientifically-illiterate Ian Gregory.

Instead, there’s yet another idiotic quote from Andrew ‘More Crayons than Credibility‘ Gilruth of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), who suggests that the cause of the collapsing hen harrier population is the RSPB not killing enough predators. This disingenuous gibberish from Gilruth is akin to ivory poachers arguing that the loss of elephants in Kruger National Park is down to the failure of the National Park Authority to protect them – and nothing to do with illegal killing for profit.

So did this Mail on Sunday article originate from YFTB or from GWCT? It’s pretty hard to tell just from reading it, but what you might not know is that YFTB issued an embargoed press statement to journalists in late October 2017 (that wasn’t published) that went like this:

Gosh, spot the similarities?

Is the GWCT’s Andrew Gilruth now moonlighting for YFTB?

Late last week DEFRA provided its response to Gavin Gamble’s e-petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting, after the petition reached 10,000 signatures.

DEFRA’s response was entirely predictable and we have no intention of spending time on a detailed analysis of its complacency and denial; Mark Avery has already covered this well (see here, here, here).

Instead we wanted to pick up on just a couple of things that were mentioned, to set the groundwork for two forthcoming blogs.

First of all the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG). This cumbersomely-named group is basically the English/Welsh version of the PAW Scotland Raptor Group – just another charade of partnership-working, dominated by pro-gameshooting organisations such as the Moorland Association, National Gamekeepers Organisation, Countryside Alliance, BASC but also involves others such as the RSPB, Natural England, DEFRA. The DEFRA response to Gavin’s e-petition gives a nod to the RPPDG and claims the group is “working on developing tools to help tackle raptor persecution crimes“.

Part of the RPPDG’s remit is to provide publicity about raptor persecution ‘in order to build trust and transparency’. However, as far as we’re aware, at least in recent years, this group hasn’t provided ANY publicity for ANY raptor persecution crime.

Back in 2013 the group did publish a raptor poisoning map covering the period 2007-2011 (see here). Since then, this ‘delivery group’ has delivered bugger all. Although according to DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Action Plan, “the RPPDG have been publishing information on raptor poisoning since Feb 2013 and this is updated annually“. That was a lie – the group hasn’t published any information since that 2007-2011 poisoning map.

We’ll be returning to the subject of the RPPDG in another blog very soon, as we’ve got hold of some minutes from various RPPDG meetings that demonstrate how little it has achieved since 2013. We’ll be publishing those minutes for your entertainment.

The second thing we want to pick up on from DEFRA’s response to the e-petition is this paragraph:

‘The [Hen Harrier] Action Plan was developed with senior representatives from organisations including Natural England, the Moorland Association, the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, National Parks England and formerly the RSPB. These organisations, led by Natural England, will monitor activities and report annually on progress to the Defra Uplands Stakeholder Forum and the UK Tasking and Co-ordinating group for Wildlife Crime‘.

Wouldn’t it be useful to see a copy of the latest annual report on the progress being made on the 2016 Hen Harrier Action Plan? Remember, Natural England recently told blog reader Mike Whitehouse that “work on the six actions set out in the Joint Hen harrier Action Plan is progressing as expected“. What does “progressing as expected” actually mean?

Well, fortunately, we’ve managed to get hold of a copy of the most recent progress report (summer 2017), as submitted to the DEFRA Uplands Stakeholder Group, and it demonstrates very little progress indeed. Perhaps that’s what Natural England “expected“.

We’ll be publishing that report shortly.