Tag: hen harrier

RSPB clarifies position: No media black out on hen harrier persecution

Hen Harrier Holly 2015Further to this morning’s blog where we expressed concerns about what we thought was a new RSPB media policy NOT to release timely information about hen harrier persecution this year (see here), the RSPB has responded.

Martin Harper, RSPB Conservation Director, has written a comment on this morning’s blog but for those who might have missed it we’re repeating it here:

Hi,

There is no ‘media black out’. Transparency is absolutely key. Our approach this season is aimed at avoiding the rather pointless and near unending slanging match which has unfortunately characterised recent breeding seasons and instead giving those on the ground the best possible opportunity to allow our hen harriers to succeed. As I said on my blog, we will, of course, still report something as serious as a persecution incident in the usual way.

Best wishes

Martin Harper, RSPB Conservation Director.

END

Thank you, Martin, for your swift response and reassurance. It wasn’t clear from your blog that you would publicly report instances of 2016 hen harrier persecution (except to the police) so this clarification that you will inform the public is very welcome.

Meanwhile, the e-petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting is fast-approaching the 10k signature mark, which will trigger a response from Westminster. If you want to help speed things along, please sign HERE

RSPB news black out on hen harrier persecution? This can’t be right

hh LAURIE CAMPBELLIf we’ve interpreted this correctly, there’s something very odd going on with the RSPB this year.

Two days ago, RSPB Conservation Director Martin Harper wrote a blog entitled ‘Thoughts on this year’s hen harrier breeding season‘ (see here).

Much of the content isn’t new – it’s just reiterating the RSPB’s supportive position of DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Inaction Plan and Martin’s desire to see an improvement in hen harrier breeding success this year. However, there are a few additional sentences in this article, relating to the RSPB’s planned media strategy, that really require close attention and, hopefully, some clarification:

“To ensure focus remains on the conservation outcome we want, we won’t be providing day by day updates on the breeding season. Instead, we’ll provide a mid-season update on 6 June and then let everyone know how the season has gone in late August with a detailed update“.

Eh?

Does this mean that if hen harriers are persecuted during this year’s breeding season, we might hear about it on 6th June (although the news could easily be suppressed by the police if the persecution incidents happen just before 6th June – live investigation and all that) but if it happens after 6th June we won’t find out about it until ‘late August’?

If that’s the case, it’s an extraordinary move by the RSPB. It’s like telling the criminals, ‘Wait until after 6th June to bump off the harriers because there won’t be any publicity about it until late August’.

Nobody expects a ‘day by date update’ from the RSPB – we’ve never had that before and we wouldn’t expect it this year, but what we would expect is to be told, in a timely manner, if hen harriers have ‘disappeared’ in suspicious circumstances from active breeding sites, or if they’ve been found killed. That’s what the RSPB did last year, so why is this year so different?

Imagine this scenario. There are 20 breeding pairs of hen harriers across northern England this year (yes, hard to believe). What if one harrier got shot each week during the season. We might hear about the first three or four deaths on 6th June, but then nothing of the other 16 until late August?

How does a news black out “ensure focus remains on the conservation outcome we want“? It makes no sense at all, other than to give the grouse-shooting industry a PR-disaster-free ride in the run up to the Inglorious 12th. How is that in the interests of conservation?

And assuming the RSPB will again be involved in this year’s Hen Harrier Day (7th August 2016), are they really going to turn up with nothing to tell us?

Do they really want us to instead rely on the media propaganda that will inevitably be churned out by You Forgot the Birds throughout the season?

If our interpretation of Martin’s statement is correct, then it sounds very much to us like the RSPB has been knobbled.

What we should expect is a clarifying statement from Martin, something along the lines of ‘If you don’t hear from us during the breeding season, take that as no news is good news’.

It would be an absolute disgrace if hen harriers are persecuted this year and the RSPB stays quiet.

Please, Martin, tell us we’ve misunderstood.

Please sign this e-petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting HERE

UPDATE 15.05hrs: Martin Harper replies & says no media black out – see here.

Cairngorms National Park Authority responds to death of hen harrier ‘Lad’

HH Lad July 2015 Dave PullanFollowing on from yesterday’s news about the discovery of a dead hen harrier (suspected shot) on a grouse moor within the Cairngorms National Park (see here), Grant Moir, CEO of the Cairngorms National Park Authority has issued a statement (see here).

We’ve reproduced it here:

“It appears likely from the post-mortem carried out by SRUC that a tagged hen harrier has been shot in the National Park. It is a disgrace that there are still people who think shooting a hen harrier is acceptable in the 21st century.

Millions of people visit this incredible Park every year with 12 per cent of visitors coming here for wildlife watching earning millions for the local economy. 43 per cent of people in the Park are employed in tourism and every illegal raptor crime adversely affects this area and Scotland’s reputation. The National Park Authority will work with all our partners to try and ensure that raptor crime is a thing of the past and that populations and ranges recover in the Park.”

END

Good on the CNPA for issuing a statement (that’s more than the Environment Minister seems to have done), and this statement is marginally better than the one it issued nine days ago in response to questions about mountain hare massacres taking place on grouse moors within the National Park (see here), but once again it mostly just reads as empty rhetoric.

Pay attention to that last line: “The National Park Authority will work with all our partners to try and ensure that raptor crime is a thing of the past and that populations and ranges recover in the Park“. It’s all very well saying they’ll ‘work with partners’, but how, exactly, will that translate in to action?

The CNPA has talked a lot about partnership working and action, especially to address the issue of illegal raptor persecution on grouse moors within the Park, which it recognises as “threatening to undermine the reputation of the National Park as a high quality wildlife tourism destination” (see here).

For example, in 2013, a new, five-year ‘action plan’ was launched which aimed to ‘restore the full community of raptor species’ and one of the action points was for the SGA and SLE ‘to trial innovative techniques to increase raptor populations’ (see here). How’s that going? Anyone seen an increase in raptor populations? No, of course not. What we’ve actually seen is a long-term decrease of some raptors on grouse moors within the Park: the local hen harrier population has crashed (see here) as has the local peregrine population (see here) and there is no indication that these declines are about to be reversed.

Last year the CNPA hosted a high-level meeting with the Environment Minister and landowners, in which it was stated in a post-meeting CNPA press statement, “Among the topics discussed was raptor persecution and conservation, with a recognition of the progress made in recent years…” (see here).

What progress is that, then?

The last line of the CNPA’s latest statement in response to the death of hen harrier ‘Lad’ could translate as follows: ‘We’re not happy about this, it casts us in a bad light, we wish it would stop but we’re hopeless and helpless to bring about change’.

We’re not. Please sign the e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting HERE.

Photo of hen harrier ‘Lad’ by Dave Pullan

Hen harrier ‘Lad’ found dead on moor in Cairngorms National Park – suspected shot

Lad HHA young satellite tagged hen harrier named ‘Lad’ has been found dead on moorland in the Cairngorms National Park.

He fledged from a nest on an unnamed estate, also within the Park, in 2015, and was sat tagged as part of the RSPB’s Life+ Hen Harrier Project, where his movements were tracked until early September 2015, when he was found dead on moorland ‘near Newtonmore’. Full details can be read here.

The post-mortem results read as follows:

“The skin was split open on the left side of the neck parallel with the jugular groove. There was haemorrhage in the subcutaneous tissues in this area and a horizontal split in the trachea. There was damage to three feathers of the right wing consisting of a single groove mark perpendicular to the shaft of each feather.”

It goes on:

“Despite the failure to identify metallic fragments within the carcase the appearance of the damage to the wing feathers is consistent with damage caused by shooting. The injury to the neck could be explained by a shot gun pellet passing straight through the soft tissue of the neck. Both injuries could have brought the bird down and proved fatal.”

There’s lots of moorland ‘near Newtonmore’, and lots of it is intensively managed driven grouse moor, as can be seen in this photo taken in the area in July 2015 (photo by Andy Amphlett)

Burning Loch Cuaich 1 - Copy

The name of the estate where Lad’s corpse was discovered has not been given, but if you look at Andy Wightman’s excellent website Who Owns Scotland you’ll see a number of moorland estates that could all be described as being ‘near Newtonmore’. These include:

Pitmain Estate

Glen Banchor & Stone Estate

Cluny Estate

Drumochter & Ralia Estate

Etteridge, Phones & Cuiach Estate

Lynaberack Estate

So, was Lad, a young hen harrier just weeks out of the nest, shot dead on a driven grouse moor within the Cairngorms National Park? The post mortem report suggests he was, although it isn’t wholly conclusive and no doubt, no doubt at all, the grouse-shooting industry will pounce on this as ‘inconclusive evidence’. And if this was the first time it had ever happened to a hen harrier on a grouse moor, we might just give them the benefit of the doubt.

The thing is, as you all know, this isn’t a one-off. This hen harrier is the latest in a long, long miserable history of hen harrier persecution on driven grouse moors. To add further insult to injury, it happened inside the Cairngorms National Park, that so-called ‘jewel’ of Scotland.

In response, you might want to do the following:

  1. Sign this e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting HERE
  2. Email Environment Minister Dr Aileen McLeod and ask her how the Government intends to respond to this latest crime. She may not be in post after the May election but no matter, if she isn’t, the next Minister will still have to reply. Be in no doubt, your emails to the Minister do have an impact. Emails to: ministerforenvironment@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
  3. Email Hamish Trench, Conservation Director of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, and ask him how the CNPA intends to act on this news. Emails to: hamishtrench@cairngorms.co.uk

UPDATE 23rd March 2016: Cairngorms National Park Authority responds here

Increase in raptor persecution crimes in 2015

The Partnership for Action against Wildlife Crime (PAW Scotland) has just published the ‘official’ 2015 raptor persecution data, including their annual persecution hotspot maps.

The PAW Scotland press release can be read here and the hotspot maps can be accessed here.

20 crimes against birds of prey were recorded in 2015, which is an increase on the 18 recorded in 2014. The 2015 crimes included six poisoning incidents, five shootings, five disturbance incidents, three trapping or attempted trapping offences and one case of chick theft. The victims included red kite, peregrine, buzzard, goshawk, osprey and hen harrier. Surprisingly, golden eagle isn’t included in the list. We’ll discuss that below.

Having read the press release and looked at the hotspot maps, four things jumped out at us.

First is the increase in recorded raptor persecution incidents in 2015. It’s only a slight increase, from 18 to 20 recorded crimes, but nevertheless it is still an increase. This is important to note, especially in light of a recent statement made by Tim (Kim) Baynes of the Scottish Moorland Group (funded by the landowners’ lobby group Scottish Land & Estates). In December 2015, in response to the publication of the RSPB’s 20-year raptor persecution review, Kim said this:

“Bird of prey deaths……have fallen dramatically over the last five years in particular“.

At the time, Kim didn’t back up this claim with any evidence and as the 2015 data have now been published, it’s clear why he didn’t. Basically, the evidence wasn’t there. As Head of RSPB Scotland’s Investigation team Ian Thomson says in the latest PAW Scotland press release:

“These latest figures make it readily apparent that claims of a decline in the illegal killing of raptors are wholly without foundation“.

This time, Kim isn’t claiming that there has been a decline but he still tries to diminish the problem by saying “annual variations [in the number of reported persecution crimes] are now very small“. Another way of putting it, Kim, would be to say that no progress has been made!

The second thing to jump out at us is perhaps the most concerning of all, and that’s the withholding of data relating to a quarter of the recorded 2015 crimes. If you read the PAW Scotland press release, you’ll notice the following caveat written in the ‘Notes to Editors’ section:

‘Further details of 5 of the 20 bird of prey crimes recorded in 2015 are currently withheld for police operational reasons. It has therefore not been possible to include the locations of these incidents on the hotspot maps‘.

So here’s one of the maps purporting to show all types of raptor persecution crimes recorded over a three-year period in Scotland (2013-2015). Only it doesn’t show them all, as 25% are missing. Not only are 25% missing, but also missing are details of poisoned baits (no victims present) that were recorded during this period – for some reason they’ve been placed on a separate map. So when you look at this map, ignore the misleading title. It isn’t a map of ‘All Recorded Bird of Prey Crimes Scotland – 2013-2015’, it’s a map of SOME Recorded Bird of Prey Crimes 2013-2015, just the ones we’re allowed to know about.

ALL Raptor crimes 2013 to 2015

The purpose of publishing these annual hotspot maps and their associated data is, according to the PAW Scotland website, ‘to allow all the partner organisations to enter into meaningful discussions and work together to eradicate bad or illegal practices in Scotland‘. Presumably, because the maps and data are also placed in the public domain, the purpose is also to increase transparency and thus public confidence. What is the point of publishing a proportion of the data and withholding the rest? It just makes a mockery of the whole process. Why bother publishing at all?

The caveat in the ‘Notes to Editors’ section goes on to say:

‘The [withheld] incidents are, however, included in the figures provided in the summary tables accompanying the maps. The maps and background data will be updated, where possible, in future publications‘.

Sounds promising, but when you actually look at the summary tables you find large sections still marked as ‘withheld’:

Confirmed poisonings 2015

ALL raptor crimes 2015

These ‘withheld’ incidents, shrouded in secrecy, make it virtually impossible to cross reference known reported persecution crimes with those being touted as the ‘officially recorded’ crimes, which closes off any opportunity to scrutinise these ‘official’ data to ensure that incidents have not been ‘missed’ or ‘forgotten’ (we’re being kind). In other words, we are expected to accept and trust the ‘official’ data from Police Scotland as being accurate. Sorry, but having seen Police Scotland’s shambolic handling of some wildlife crime incidents we have limited confidence in their ability, either intentionally or unintentionally, to get this right.

This leads us nicely on to the third thing to jump out at us. As mentioned above, we were surprised not to see golden eagle listed as one of the 2015 victims. According to our sources, a traditional golden eagle eyrie was burnt out in 2015 – we blogged about it here. Why wasn’t this incident included in the 2015 PAW data? Or was it included and it was categorised in the ‘withheld’ category? Who knows. Do you see what we mean about the difficulty of cross-referencing known incidents?

The fourth thing to jump out was an entry in Table 5c (see above). The second line down tells us that a red kite was poisoned in Tayside in January 2015. That’s news to us. Does anybody remember seeing anything in the media about this crime? Any appeal for information? Any warning to the public that deadly poison was being used in the area? No, thought not.

The reticence of the police to publicise some of these crimes is deeply concerning, and especially when that suppression extends to details of crimes in ‘official’ reports that are supposed to demonstrate openness and transparency. Ask yourselves, in whose interest is it to keep these crimes under wraps?

Lush Skydancer bathbombs raise over £100K for hen harrier conservation

Henry LUSHIn August last year, Lush, the high street cosmetics store, started selling hen harrier-shaped bathbombs as part of their awareness and fundraising campaign to highlight the illegal persecution of hen harriers on driven grouse moors.

Lush is donating all the profits from the sale of these Skydancer bathbombs to the RSPB’s Hen Harrier LIFE+ Project, with the money specifically being used to buy satellite tags to fit on young hen harriers so their movements can be followed when/if they manage to fledge successfully.

A press release published this morning (here) tells us that so far over 30,000 bathbombs have been sold, raising £101,472 so far. That’s amazing!

Lush’s campaign will continue until August this year so there’s still plenty of time to go and buy a Skydancer bathbomb or two or three from your nearest Lush shop or online via their website.

Well done, Lush, for not only raising a huge amount of funds for such a vital project but also for bringing this campaign to the high street, which is exactly where it needs to be.

Above photo shows Henry Hen Harrier checking out the Skydancer bathbombs on the RSPB’s stand at last summer’s Birdfair.

There’s a guest blog on the RSPB website today written by Paul Morton from Lush Campaigns – see here.

lush skydancer

Head gamekeeper Simon Lester resigns from Langholm Moor Demonstration Project

Langholm moorThere had been rumours for a few days and now it’s confirmed: Simon Lester, the head gamekeeper at the Langholm Moor Demonstration Project has resigned.

A statement has appeared on the Langholm Project website and is reproduced as follows:

Simon Lester, the LMDP’s headkeeper, has resigned from the project and will be leaving at the end of March 2016. Simon has provided tireless leadership to the five-man keepering team which has undertaken the key management actions for the project. These have resulted in significant improvement of the heather habitat, the effective use of fiversionary feeding of hen harriers each summer and the management of parasites and predators. These measures have increased the numbers of red and black grouse, and breeding raptors, notably hen harriers. This mixture of traditional and novel management has been successfully demonstrated to hundreds of project visitors by Simon in collaboration with the project’s science team.

Despite a larger grouse population than at the start, the project has not been able to produce a sustainably large, harvestable surplus of driven grouse to economically underpin the management. LMDP is now close to its formal end point and the board is reviewing what can and should be achieved in the remaining term of the project. The project board would like to thank Simon for his exceptional contribution.

It’s an interesting time for him to go, eight years in to a ten-year project. The official statement doesn’t explain his reasons, and nor should it as they’re personal, but it will inevitably lead to speculation.

Perhaps it’s because there (supposedly) hasn’t been an opportunity to begin driven grouse shooting on the moor, which is one of the fundamental aims of this project, although it has been argued that the decision not to shoot has been a political one. Grouse densities at Langholm in 2014 had recovered to the same densities that had allowed driven grouse shooting to take place there in the early 1990s, so why the decision not to shoot now? Many of us think it’s so the grouse-shooting industry can claim that the Langholm Project has ‘failed’, in order for them to persist with their argument that driven grouse shooting can’t function with all those pesky raptors around, even though years of research at Langholm have not produced a scrap of scientific evidence to show raptor predation has a large impact on the red grouse population. According to Langholm Project director Mark Oddy (of Buccleuch Estates), what is required now is lethal raptor control at Langholm (see here). Ah, there’s that ‘local knowledge is just as important as scientific evidence’ piece of guff theory.

Given Simon Lester’s view on raptor culling (he thinks it should happen – see here and here), we thought he might have stuck around at Langholm to see his dreams fulfilled. Although perhaps he realises that the chances of licences being issued to kill buzzards, based on no scientific justification whatsoever, are limited.

Scrolling down the Langholm Project website, it’s fascinating to see what else has been mentioned, or more interestingly, what hasn’t been mentioned.

There’s a bit about one of the guest blogs that appeared on Mark Avery’s website (here) that reported on a presentation given at a GWCT seminar about the Langholm Project, but strangely, there’s no mention of the second guest blog (here) where Mark Oddy (Buccleuch Estates) proclaimed lethal raptor control as the next step forward in the Langholm Project. How odd!

Scroll down a bit further on the Langholm Project website and you’ll find a statement about the illegal shooting of hen harrier ‘Annie’, one of the Langholm-hatched birds. Strangely, there’s no mention of where Annie’s corpse was discovered other than “an area over 40km to the north west of Langholm Moor”. The statement is strangely quiet about the fact that Annie’s corpse was found on a grouse moor on, er, Buccleuch Estates, part of the same estate where the Langholm Project is based. Why so coy? Just because her corpse was found there doesn’t mean that’s where she’d been shot, so why exclude this important detail?

All very odd.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next at Langholm. Will they employ a replacement head keeper and continue for the final two years, or will they decide to close the project early and declare it a failure?

Scottish Moorland Group still in denial about hen harrier persecution on grouse moors

dunceThe Scottish Moorland Group (SMG) has today issued a press statement which refutes the findings of the latest scientific study that has shown hen harriers are being wiped out on Scottish grouse moors in North-east Scotland.

This is no surprise, of course. What is surprising is the ‘evidence’ (ahem) put forward by the SMG to dismiss the findings of the study. Here is their press statement:

Moorland group denounces ‘deeply flawed’ hen harrier report

The Scottish Moorland Group today denounced a report by a raptor study group claiming that sporting estates had virtually exterminated hen harriers in the North-East of Scotland.
The report, which was published using data from Aberdeenshire and Moray, is deeply flawed and shows a lamentable lack of evidence.

Tim Baynes of the Scottish Moorland Group said: “There are serious problems with this report, most notably that there has been very little Harrier surveying conducted recently in the area, with only 4% of harrier breeding areas covered in 2014. The authors identify 118 harrier breeding areas which they have traditionally surveyed but by 2012 only 38% of these were being covered, in 2013 it had decreased to 10% and by 2014 the number covered had halved again.

“We work with Scottish Natural Heritage and others in the Heads Up for Harriers Partnership and in 2015, five grouse moor estates were asked by the project to host nest cameras to determine the causes of Harrier nest failure, some of which were in the north east of Scotland.  In all cases nest failures were shown on camera to be due to weather or fox predation – nothing to do with human disturbance.

“Sadly, this seems to be another instance where raptor study groups have made little or no attempt to engage with land managers who could have helped their research. Even once data is produced, it often incomplete or only selectively shared in an attempt to besmirch grouse moor management. Looking backwards in this way is really unhelpful when collaborative initiatives are being developed by other organisations to ensure a more positive future.”

END

So, let’s start with Tim (Kim) Baynes’ assertion that “there has been very little Harrier surveying conducted recently in the area, with only 4% of harrier breeding areas covered in 2014. The authors identify 118 harrier breeding areas which they have traditionally surveyed but by 2012 only 38% of these were being covered, in 2013 it had decreased to 10% and by 2014 the number covered had halved again“.

It seems that Tim (Kim) is unable to read and/or comprehend scientific papers. Had he read the actual paper, he would have seen the following statement:

“There was thorough coverage of all suitable Hen Harrier breeding habitat during 1980-2014” (with the exception of one area where coverage was incomplete between 1980-1987).

He would also have read the following statement:

“Annual coverage was thorough and the vast majority of Hen Harrier breeding attempts were believed to have been recorded“.

So why would Tim (Kim) say that survey coverage of hen harrier breeding areas in 2012, 2013 and 2014 was only 38%, 10% and 5% respectively? Well, it appears that Tim (Kim) has chosen to ignore the methods section of the paper (there is a reason the methods section is there, Tim, it tells you how the data were collected!) and instead looked elsewhere to find some data that, on the face of it, support his claim of incomplete survey coverage. His data sources are the annual reports of the Scottish Raptor Monitoring Scheme, which do indicate that the number of checked hen harrier home ranges during this period is lower than the claims made in the paper. You can imagine Timbo, or one of his idiot subordinates, finding these data and thinking, ‘Yeah! We’ve got them now! Let’s write a press statement!”.

What thicko Tim (Kim) has failed to comprehend is (a) the data provided in the SRMS annual reports are grossly under-recorded (because not all raptor workers submit their data to the SRMS because they don’t trust SNH to use the data wisely – see earlier post on SNH’s failure to designate the Ladder Hills as a Special Protection Area for hen harriers!) and (b) the primary survey data used in the hen harrier scientific paper were collected by the papers’ authors. They did not rely on the SRMS data for their calculations. If they had done so, they would have mentioned this in the methods section of the paper. They didn’t mention it, because, they didn’t use SRMS data – they used their own! Is that simple enough for you to understand, Tim? By the way, what are your scientific credentials? Are you suitably qualified to assess the scientific rigour of this, or any other scientific, peer-reviewed publication? No, thought not.

Let’s now turn to another statement in Tim’s press release:

“We work with Scottish Natural Heritage and others in the Heads Up for Harriers Partnership and in 2015, five grouse moor estates were asked by the project to host nest cameras to determine the causes of Harrier nest failure, some of which were in the north east of Scotland.  In all cases nest failures were shown on camera to be due to weather or fox predation – nothing to do with human disturbance“.

Again, at face value, this appears to support the grouse-shooting industry’s claims that illegal persecution isn’t an issue for hen harriers on grouse moors. But Tim’s statement doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell you that those five grouse moors were in fact, not driven grouse moors. i.e. they were not intensively managed for grouse-shooting and neither were they on the radar as raptor persecution hotspots. So actually, the results from these nest cameras don’t tell us anything about the impact of persecution on hen harrier breeding success on estates where we know hen harrier persecution is endemic. What we’d like to see, as the Heads up for Hen Harriers project goes forward, is nest cameras being placed on driven grouse moors in areas where persecution is known to happen. It is pointless, propaganda-fuelling bollocks to place cameras on nest sites in areas where persecution isn’t an issue (walked-up grouse moors) and then use those results to claim that persecution isn’t an issue on driven grouse moors.

Gift of GrouseTalking of propaganda-fuelling bollocks, has anyone read this piece on the Gift of Grouse website? [UPDATE 8th Feb – the linked article is no longer available as its author has asked the Gift of Grouse website to remove it]. It’s a personal account of a young lad’s first ever experience on a driven grouse moor – Invermark Estate – last summer. James Common was there for three months as part of a team of ecologists (headed up by a gamekeeper’s daughter) employed to document biodiversity on the estate. We’ve already blogged about the (lack of) credibility of that team’s report (see here) but this latest article is more of a personal perspective of his time there.

Isn’t it interesting that Tim (Kim), who directs the Gift of Grouse project, would seek to discredit a scientific, peer-reviewed paper authored by acknowledged, experienced experts, but doesn’t question the ramblings of a young, inexperienced ecologist straight out of college?

As you’d expect, James’ account is very positive about management for driven grouse shooting (if it wasn’t positive there’s no way the Gift of Grouse project would be promoting it!) but it reveals an incredible level of naivety. For example:

“Hen harriers also performed admirably – shimmering males and roving ringtails were found with relative ease. Indeed, if these popular moorland denizens had not been present, I may have worried, but they were and so I stand fully content“.

Jesus. If this is the level of ecological curiosity displayed by a young graduate in the conservation sector then there’s no hope. Did he not think to question why, if the hen harriers were so prevalent, they haven’t bred successfully in the Angus Glens since 2006? Apparently not.

Now, Invermark Estate is certainly not the worst estate in the Angus Glens, although it’s had its moments (see here). It is one of the less intensively-managed estates in the region and as such, the level of biodiversity should be relatively good, in comparison to some of its neighbours at least (although where are its breeding hen harriers??). However, James thinks that it’s ‘a tad unfair’ that this ‘good’ estate is unfairly ‘tarred and feathered’ alongside other grouse moor estates where raptor persecution is frequently uncovered. That’s a fair enough comment, although he doesn’t mention that this estate has aligned itself with other, less impressive estates, under the banner of the Angus Glens Moorland Group. If Invermark Estate has chosen to closely associate itself with other estates where raptor persecution crimes keep cropping up, then why the hell should we make any distinction between them?

At least James has the sense to recognise that illegal raptor persecution does happen on some driven grouse moors. That’s more than can be said for Tim (Kim) and his cronies at the Scottish Moorland Group. Does he not realise that by continuing to deny the 30+ years of scientific evidence, his group just looks complicit with it all?

Addendum 7th February 2016 11pm:

For the amusement of those of you not on Twitter, the following is an exchange from earlier this evening featuring Scottish Land & Estate’s CEO, Doug McAdam, who seems to think that data published in a scientific, peer-reviewed paper don’t qualify as ‘verified’, whatever that means. He aborts the discussion when it gets a bit tricky….

Rob Edwards @robedwards53: Hen harriers virtually exterminated on sporting estates in northeast Scotland, says experts. [Links to his article in the Sunday Herald].

Doug McAdam @DougMcAdam: Well “the experts” study seems to be based on very limited data. Comment from Scottish Moorland Group here [Links to SMG press statement].

Simon Brooke @simon_brooke: Hold the front page, wrongdoers say their accusers are biased.

Doug McAdam: Have you even read/looked into the study? Other who have comment here [Links to Gift of Grouse blog].

Simon Brooke: They would say that, wouldn’t they? Do not look to partisan blogs for informed opinion.

Doug McAdam: So you haven’t read/researched it. Thought not.

Simon Brooke: No, I haven’t. Fortunately others have [Links to RPS blog]. Read it and weep. For shame.

Doug McAdam: I rarely put any store in blogs or accusations from anonymous sites. That site is no exception!

Simon Brooke: So we are to trust a pro grouse-shooting blog, but not an anti-crime blog? I wonder why.

Doug McAdam: I’m not telling you to do anything. Anonymous blogs lack credibility and are treated as such.

Simon Brooke: Given that all the assertions in the blog I indicated are easily verifiable….

Doug McAdam: I guess that’s where we differ on this. It hasn’t been verified at all. Accusations without evidence worthless.

Simon Brooke: Have you read the paper? The methodology section either does say what the blog claims it says, or it doesn’t.

Doug McAdam: Read blog you quote, your answer is there. Data not reported to SNH, kept secret etc. Just bizzare. Over and out.

Simon Brooke: It’s hardly ‘kept secret’ if its published in an academic journal.

Doug McAdam: I’m talking about the actual survey data. It’s not officially reported or recorded. Offline now. G’nite.

Hen Harrier Holly: cause of death unknown

Hen Harrier Holly 2015In November 2015 we blogged about the death of satellite-tagged hen harrier, ‘Holly’, one of several birds being monitored by the RSPB’s Hen Harrier Life+ Project.

Holly was a 2015 bird from a site on Ministry of Defence ground in Argyll. She fledged in August 2015 and in mid-October was reported to have dispersed to ‘the uplands of Central Scotland’. By November, data from her satellite tag suggested she had died but no further information was available at the time (see here).

Yesterday an update was posted on the RSPB’s Skydancer blog (here) as follows:

“As soon as her satellite tag data showed us she had died, we went to the site– an area of upland farmland and forestry to the north east of Glasgow – to look for her. We searched the area thoroughly but, unfortunately, we were unable to locate her. This is disappointing as we would have wished to submit the body to a government laboratory for a post mortem examination to try to establish how she died.

Survival rates for young harriers like Holly are low, with only around 1 in 3 surviving to a year old.  These youngsters will often die of natural causes such as starvation, but we cannot speculate as to the cause of death in her case.

We will of course provide an update if any further information comes to light“.

END

What the update failed to mention was that as well as dying from natural causes, young hen harriers are also highly susceptible to illegal persecution (see here).

Another sat-tagged hen harrier from the project, named ‘Chance’, has been overwintering in France (see here).

Photo of Holly by John Simpson

Catastrophic decline of breeding hen harriers on grouse moors in NE Scotland

A new paper has been published today, describing the catastrophic decline of breeding hen harriers on grouse moors in north east Scotland.

This won’t be totally unexpected news to many readers of this blog; it’s well known, and has been known for over 30 years, that hen harriers are illegally killed on most driven grouse moors in the UK. This paper can be added to the piles of other scientific papers that have documented the illegal persecution of certain raptor species on grouse moors (e.g. hen harriers, peregrines and golden eagles – see here for a brief list of some of those papers).

But what’s different about this latest paper is that it shows it’s not just grouse moor managers screwing over hen harriers in North East Scotland – it’s also the government’s statutory nature conservation advisor, Scottish Natural Heritage.

The paper has been published in the February 2016 edition of British Birds (vol 109, pages 77-95). Unfortunately we’re not permitted to provide a full copy of the paper here – you have to subscribe to BB to access that – but we can publish the abstract and we can discuss the contents. Here’s a screen grab we took of the abstract:

Rebecca et al HH paper - Copy

The paper’s authors are all members of the North East Raptor Study Group (NERSG) and/or the RSPB, and they have drawn on their own data (comprehensive and thorough monitoring from 1980-2014 where the vast majority of hen harrier breeding attempts were believed to have been recorded) as well as a wide array of other data that were collected as part of national surveys for other moorland priority species by various statutory and NGO agencies.

From these data (which included studies on habitat and prey availability), 118 hen harrier breeding areas were identified as being suitable, 87% of which were on managed grouse moors. In 2014, only one hen harrier breeding attempt was recorded. To say that is pretty damning would be a gross understatement. It’s as shameful as the data from the grouse moors of the neighbouring Angus Glens, where there hasn’t been a single record of a hen harrier breeding attempt since 2006 (see here). It’s important to reiterate that these data are from Scotland. Usually the bad news stories about hen harriers are from English sites, and the grouse-shooting industry will often point to Scotland as a reason why we shouldn’t be concerned – ‘Ah, there’s hundreds of hen harriers in Scotland and they’re all doing fine, what’s the big fuss about?’ (see here). Forget ‘concern’; this latest paper, along with several others, shows exactly why we are right to be outraged.

As mentioned earlier, this paper not only puts grouse moor managers in the frame (again), but it also reveals SNH’s role in this sordid tale. Before we discuss that, it’s worth looking at this map to get your bearings. The purple boundary depicts the monitoring area of the NERSG, including the following important areas for hen harriers: lower Deeside (blue back-slashed hatch), upper Donside (blue forward-slash hatch), the Glen Tanar Hen Harrier SPA (orange zone), and the Ladder Hills potential SPA (brown zone). The green border shows the Cairngorms National Park boundary as of 2014.

NERSG monitoring area - Copy

The following text is para-phrased from the paper:

In the mid-late 1990s, SNH was considering the Ladder Hills as a proposed Special Protection Area (pSPA) for hen harriers and in 1995 and 1999 SNH approached the NERSG and RSPB for information regarding Annex 1 species that were using this area. The NERSG and RSPB strongly suspected that illegal persecution of hen harriers (and other raptors) was taking place at the Ladder Hills: in 1998 (a national  hen harrier survey year), eight of the nine hen harrier nests located in the Ladder Hills failed, with no obvious biological causes, and most pairs disappeared between survey visits (harriers often attempt to re-nest following a natural failure). In 1999 only three pairs were located in the Ladder Hills. Based on the data received, in early 2000 SNH proposed the Ladder Hills SSSI as an SPA, with hen harrier as the main qualifying interest.

Subsequent discussions between NERSG and RSPB with SNH revealed that landowners had objected to the proposal, claiming there were insufficient numbers of hen harriers and questioning the authenticity of earlier data. In some years data was collected by NERSG members with informal access and in others by workers with full access arrangements. ‘Full access arrangements’ means that RSPB fieldworkers participating in the 1998 national hen harrier survey were required to liaise fully with Estates over access and report their findings (to the Estates), and in extreme cases were accompanied by a gamekeeper during survey visits. We’ll come back to this.

In late 2000, the SNH position was that raptor persecution was likely on the Ladder Hills, but also that other factors such as habitat condition and prey availability might have also been contributing to the low occupancy and poor productivity of hen harriers. NERSG and RSPB did not support the ‘habitat and prey deficiency’ hypothesis and were convinced that human interference was the primary cause of the decline, yet this was difficult to prove.

A decision on SPA classification was deferred in 2000–03 while SNH commissioned further population survey and monitoring, and assessed prey availability and habitat suitability. In 2002 and 2003 these studies extended to other areas in Aberdeenshire and Moray to enable comparison. The assessment concluded: “There are large areas of breeding habitat with suitable nest sites available across the site and no evidence of lack of prey” (R. MacDonald, SNH Area Manager, Grampian, in litt. to Ian Francis, February 2004). Nevertheless, breeding numbers did not recover and the site was removed from the pSPA list following review. Concurrently, the site was designated as an SAC under the EU Habitats Directive and is now also part of the recently established Cairngorms National Park.

The paper’s authors welcomed the SAC and subsequent National Park designations, but do not consider them as appropriate substitutes for an SPA for hen harriers. They say that in the 1990s they had one of the best areas in the UK for this species. Grouse moor owners and managers did not agree with this assessment (and possible SPA designation) presumably because they believed their management would be open to greater scrutiny. The authors contend that SPA designation should have been pursued using either the average hen harrier breeding figures from the 1990s, as had been done for similar notified pSPAs in Scotland, or on the basis of the suitable ecological conditions, with the expectation that harriers would recolonise the area with protection.

The authors point out that the Scottish Government appears committed to eradicating hen harrier persecution and enhancing its breeding status but the Ladder Hills scenario is inconsistent with these objectives. There was no support for the ‘habitat and prey deficiency’ hypothesis following the commissioned research, and no reasons were given for the non-designation of the pSPA. The habitat and prey availability at the Ladder Hills SSSI/SAC are still considered suitable for breeding hen harriers and if harriers were to recover in North East Scotland, the site should be reconsidered as a pSPA.

[End of para-phrasing].

The Ladder Hills case study provides a fascinating insight to several things. First of all, it shows just how weak SNH has been in standing up to influential landowners. We’ve known this for some time but to learn that it was happening as far back as 16 years ago is surprising (to us at least, maybe not to some older readers of this blog). Even after commissioning further research to identify potential threats to hen harriers (which ruled out lack of suitable habitat and lack of prey availability as potential causes), and despite accepting that persecution was indeed one of the causes of breeding hen harrier failures in this region, SNH dropped their proposal to designate the Ladder Hills as a Special Protection Area. What’s the point of commissioning research (with tax payers money) if you’re then going to totally ignore the findings? Talk about not fit for purpose! SNH buckled when they were in a position, with strong supporting evidence, to create an SPA for this species. Not that designating a site as an SPA will automatically lead to species protection – look at all the other hen harrier SPAs in the UK (see map below, taken from RSPB’s Hen Harrier Life+ Project website – they’re all failing miserably – but at least the designation would have given conservationists some leverage to apply some pressure with European legislative backing.

HH SPA map

The second point of interest from this paper is the revelation that RSPB fieldworkers who were participating in the 1998 National Hen Harrier Survey were required to inform Estates about their survey visits and any subsequent survey results pertaining to their land, and in some cases were accompanied to those sites by the Estates’ gamekeepers. Is it just coincidence that many of the hen harrier nests that were recorded in NE Scotland during that survey year ‘mysteriously’ failed, and the number of sites found the following year dropped significantly from previous years? We don’t think so. Two + two = four, not five.

This issue of ‘transparency and trust’ is quite timely, given the blog we wrote four days ago about landowners wanting access to raptor study group data (see here). Tim (Kim) Baynes of the lairds’ lobby group Scottish Land and Estates stated that ‘The persecution of raptors is becoming a thing of the past, but there is also a duty on [the] raptor lobby to engage and share information“. Given the contents of this latest paper, he’s having a bloody laugh. Indeed, the authors write: “Levels of trust and cooperation between most raptor enthusiasts and grouse-moor estates in NE Scotland are at an all time low“. And who can blame them?

The authors discuss several potential solutions to help conserve hen harriers in NE Scotland, including the use of buffer zones around nest sites (already routinely used by SNH to protect harriers at windfarm development sites), the use of nest cameras, the use of supplementary feeding, and encouraging more golden eagles to reach natural densities in these areas as they’re predicted to naturally suppress the hen harrier population. All good suggestions, but all doomed to failure if the grouse-shooting industry is allowed to continue behaving with impunity.

UPDATE 4th Feb 2016

Two other blogs have been written about this paper and are both well worth a read:

Mark Avery here

Ian Thomson (Head of Investigations, RSPB Scotland) here