hen harrier – Page 70 – Raptor Persecution UK

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

Henry LUSH In 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

There 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

dunce The 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:

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.

Talking 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 2015 In 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

More shameless spin-doctoring from the Gift of Grouse

Tim (Kim) Baynes, Director of the grouse-shooting industry’s propaganda campaign, The Gift of Grouse, is shameless. He must be to have penned his latest bout of spin-doctoring, this time pointing the finger at raptor workers.

Before we begin, here’s a definition of a spin doctor:

“A person whose job involves trying to control the way something is described to the public in order to influence what people think about it“.

Ladies and gentlemen, the spin doctor is IN.

The following article, authored by Tim (Kim) Baynes, appears in today’s Courier and is entitled: ‘Trust needs to develop quickly between raptor groups and land management‘.

Despite the grouse season ending more than a month ago, our moorland continues to fire passions on all sides.

Since Jim Crumley’s last column, The Courier letters’ pages have been alive with debate. Yet, much of the criticism levelled at estates does not reflect what I see on our moors.

The Gift of Grouse campaign demonstrates the benefits of moorland, including species conservation.

Since then, a number of reports have been publicised. One looked at species present on Invermark, the estate cited by Jim Crumley. It found that 81 different bird species were breeding or feeding there, including a range of ‘red-listed’ most at risk birds. Amongst those present were 10 species of raptor including peregrine, golden eagle and hen-harrier.

Similar is happening on many Scottish estates. Yet disappointingly, the politics of the past – pitting raptor enthusiast versus gamekeeper – are still being played. The RSPB’s report uses incidents from two decades ago to influence present-day policymaking. But, official figures from the past five years demonstrate raptor incidents are now in the teens per annum, with only some linked to land management. There is always work to be done but the law is tough on anyone convicted of wildlife crime, and even higher sentences are likely soon.

At the heart of this is continuing mistrust between some raptor enthusiasts and land managers. There are also internal rivalries within the raptor groups on who monitors which area, and this leads to secrecy. This is a serious issue as land managers need to know which birds are on their land in order to better manage them, but the survey results are often not shared with them, even when funded by bodies such as Scottish Natural Heritage.

To break down mistrust, we must develop ways of maximising both raptors and prey species alongside grouse. It should not be an either/or scenario. The persecution of raptors is becoming a thing of the past, but there is also a duty on raptor lobby to engage and share information. Trust is developing in some places but it needs to spread – and rapidly.

ENDS

Oh god, where to begin?

For context, perhaps we should begin by pointing out to those who don’t already know, Tim (Kim) Baynes is employed by the lairds’ lobby group Scottish Land & Estates as Director of the Scottish Moorland Group. The Scottish Moorland Group is chaired by the one and only Lord Hopetoun – he of the Leadhills (Hopetoun) Estate – an estate with one of the worst records of illegal raptor persecution in the country.

Tim (Kim) is right in his assertion that there is distrust between some raptor workers and some landowners. Of course there is, and with bloody good reason!

Scottish Land & Estates (SLE) portrays itself as a wildlife-crime-fighting organisation and frequently points to its membership of the Partnership for Action Against Wildlife Crime (PAW Scotland) as evidence of this. SLE has consistently stated that it is working hard to eradicate wildlife crime, and particularly illegal raptor persecution. The thing is, many raptor workers simply don’t believe them. Why not? Well probably because SLE has not sought to expel several member estates that have been implicated, over many years, in raptor persecution crimes. It would be an easy thing for them to do, but they haven’t done it. Until they do, raptor workers (and the general public) are justified to view SLE and their land-owning members with deep suspicion.

Another good reason for distrusting SLE is their continued denial of the extent of illegal raptor persecution, and their denial that the grouse-shooting industry (some of whom are members of SLE) is in any way implicated with these crimes (e.g. see here and here for just two recent examples). Where clear evidence has been provided, (e.g. 81% of all reported poisoning incidents in Scotland between 2005-2014 were on land used for game-shooting – see here), SLE has simply dismissed the figures and slagged off the RSPB for providing them (here).

RSPB persecution review 1994 2014 land use

In his article for the Courier, Tim (Kim) tries to claim that grouse moors are ‘good’ for species conservation and refers to a recent ‘study’ of breeding birds on Invermark Estate to back up this claim. The problem is, the full details of that ‘study’ (and a couple of others) have not been made available for public scrutiny, despite several requests to see it, and therefore has naff all credibility, especially when the ‘study’ of breeding birds was conducted, er, outside of the breeding season (see here).

But what interested us the most about Tim’s (Kim’s) article in the Courier was his (false) accusations (he’s good at those) about the raptor study groups. He said:

“There are also internal rivalries within the raptor groups on who monitors which area, and this leads to secrecy. This is a serious issue as land managers need to know which birds are on their land in order to better manage them, but the survey results are often not shared with them, even when funded by bodies such as Scottish Natural Heritage”.

This is absolute rubbish. The Scottish Raptor Study Group comprises 12 regional branches. These branches organise raptor monitoring within clearly-defined geographic regions, to avoid over-lapping and thus avoid ‘double-counting’ as well as ‘double disturbance’ of sensitive species. All the raptor workers who monitor Schedule 1 species are licensed (by SNH) to do so. These Schedule 1 disturbance licences are issued for specific areas; so if you have a licence to monitor, say, golden eagles in one area, you can’t use the same licence to monitor them in another area unless your licence specifically includes another area. Again, this is to regulate the amount of disturbance to sensitive species. There is no “internal rivalry” – raptor workers simply get on with monitoring in their own patch.

Raptor workers DO share their data – they provide their results to the Scottish Raptor Monitoring Scheme (SRMS) and have been doing so since 2002! Tim (Kim) is obviously annoyed that landowners aren’t given access to those data “in order to better manage” those species. We all know what he means by “better manage” and that is precisely why raptor workers would be reluctant to share location data about highly persecuted species with dodgy landowners. Duh!

Tim (Kim) tries to imply that raptor workers are funded by SNH and as such, the data they collect should be made publicly available. Again, he either misunderstands the system or he’s trying to spin it so that raptor workers look like the bad guys. The truth is, raptor workers are not ‘funded’ by SNH, or by anyone else. SNH does provide SOME funding to the SRSG, but this amounts to a small contribution towards raptor workers’ fuel costs. It certainly doesn’t cover the full fuel costs (the funding is actually well below the commercial mileage rate claimed by consultants) and it does not cover the thousands and thousands of hours of time that raptor workers put in to their monitoring efforts. As such, the data collected by raptor workers belong to the individual raptor worker; not to SNH, not to the SRSG, and not to anybody else. These raptor workers are volunteers – nobody pays for their time, experience and expertise. They can do what they like with their data. That they contribute those data to the SRMS is to their credit, and they do so because they know their data will be useful to conservation and scientific organisations who want to keep tabs on species’ populations. Tim (Kim) Bayne’s inference that raptor workers are the problem is disgraceful.

Trust him and the grouse-shooting industry? Not a bloody chance. Not until we see SLE expelling the estates where persistent raptor persecution continues. Not until we see SLE supporting the work of RSPB Scotland’s investigations team. Not until we see SLE acknowledging the extent of illegal raptor persecution. Not until we see healthy, sustainable breeding populations of raptors such as golden eagles, hen harriers, peregrines, over a period of years, on driven grouse moors in central, eastern and southern Scotland.

By the way, Kim, you still haven’t provided an explanation for why hen harriers have been absent as a breeding species in the Angus Glens since 2006 (here). Try and spin-doctor your way out of that.

Countryside Alliance (aka Leery lunatics on acid) think hen harriers doing just fine

image001 - Copy Here’s some more comedy gold from the Countryside Alliance (Leery lunatics on acid, for you anagram fans). The following letter was published in a recent (January) edition of Countryfile mag:

Hen harrier ups and downs

The article about raptors in November’s issue repeated the often made, but incorrect, claim that the poor breeding numbers of hen harriers in England are caused by activities of shooting estates. In reality, the hen harrier had disappeared from mainland Britain by the end of the 19th century, due to loss of habitat and persecution. Birds started to increase after the Second World War until the 1990s when the species again went into decline. Numbers are creeping up again and there has been a 300% year-on-year increase in nesting attempts for 2015 – many of which took place on grouse moors. While there are conflicts between hen harriers and shooting interests, it is simplistic and unhelpful to attribute their decline solely to gamekeepers. Hen harrier numbers are equally poor in areas where shooting does not take place but which are suitable for their breeding. Charlotte Cooper, Head of Media Relations, Countryside Alliance.

It’s not the first time the Countryside Alliance has been in full-blown denial about the extent of hen harrier persecution on driven grouse moors (e.g. see here), and undoubtedly it won’t be the last.

The real reality (not the CA’s version of it) looks like this, this, this, this, this, this etc etc. The persistent denial of what everyone else knows to be true (including the Westminster & Scottish governments), is yet another reason why DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Action Plan is set to fail. There are many other reasons too, and some of them have been described here.

The e-petition to ban driven grouse shooting closes this Thursday. So far, over 30,000 UK citizens have signed it. It’s a much more effective Action Plan than anything DEFRA and it’s grouse-shooting-hen-harrier-killing-mates have come up with. Please sign HERE

DEFRA finally publishes its Hen Harrier Action Plan

hh LAURIE CAMPBELL DEFRA has today published its long awaited Hen Harrier Action Plan.

As expected, the six ‘actions’ that apparently will contribute to the recovery of the hen harrier are as follows:

Monitoring of hen harrier populations in England and the UK
Diversionary feeding of hen harriers on grouse moors
Analyse monitoring data and build intelligence picture
Nest and winter roost site protection
Reintroduce hen harriers to southern England
Trial a brood management scheme

In its current format, the Action Plan provides a general overview and outline of all six actions. There’s very little detail available, which makes it a difficult plan to critique in full, but a few things did jump out.

Diversionary feeding has proven to be successful at deterring hen harriers from eating loads of red grouse at the Langholm Moor Demonstration Project. However, in this action plan grouse moor owners are only being ‘encouraged’ to use diversionary feeding as a course of ‘best practice’. That means that they are not obliged to implement diversionary feeding as a first course of action to reduce the conflict, which seems a bit odd.

Monitoring of hen harrier populations and the subsequent analysis of those data will continue, to ‘build the intelligence picture’. Nothing new there, and monitoring would continue with or without this action plan anyway. How those data will be used isn’t all that clear. The action plan states that a direct benefit will be ‘increased awareness of any hotspots of illegal activity and may allow better preventative measures to be taken at specific sites‘. That’s hardly inspiring. The hotspots are already well known (just look for the nearest driven grouse moor) and there’s not much that can be done if adult males are being killed away from the nest whilst they forage on neighbouring ground. We saw that last May with the ‘disappearance’ (killing) of five adult males.

Nest and winter roost site protection. Again, the nest sites (when the birds have been allowed to settle) are already well monitored and that would continue without this action plan. Protection of roost sites is much more problematic, especially when the harrier killers are armed with night vision and thermal imaging kit, and there isn’t any information about how this protection might be delivered.

The plan to reintroduce hen harriers to the lowlands of southern England needs much further scrutiny. At the moment the proposal is based on an unpublished feasibility report so it’s hard to comment on that. Nevertheless, the general principle of reintroducing the hen harrier is open to question. One of several IUCN criteria that have to be met before a reintroduction of any species can go ahead is that the cause of the species’ (local) extinction needs to have been both identified and rectified. If persecution of the hen harrier is the main reason for its absence in these areas, where’s the evidence that persecution has been addressed?

The final action point is undoubtedly the most controversial – a trial brood management (meddling) scheme. Brood management, in this context, means removing hen harrier eggs/chicks from driven grouse moors when hen harriers have reached a certain density on that moor (or on nearby moors) and rearing them in captivity and then releasing them at fledging age. We’ve blogged about this a lot, ever since the Hawk & Owl Trust announced almost a year ago that it was the way forward. It’s not an action we would support under any circumstances, no matter what the hen harrier population size is. In our view, it amounts to legalised persecution. If driven grouse shooting can’t exist without the need to remove hen harriers then it either needs to lower its expectations (bag size) or cease to exist.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to read what this action plan says about the proposed brood meddling trial. It refers to a paper that was published last August (Elston, Spezia, Baines & Redpath: Working with stakeholders to reduce conflict – modelling the impact of varying hen harrier densities on red grouse populations). The action plan says brood meddling will be guided by hen harrier densities as determined in this paper. The generally accepted consensus is that once there are 70 breeding pairs of hen harriers in the English uplands, then brood meddling can be considered (depending on the density of hen harriers at a local scale). However, this calculation was made based on the cyclical boom and bust of red grouse populations. Not only have those natural grouse cycles now been eradicated (by the use of medicated grit – see here), but post-breeding densities of red grouse are currently higher than in previous years (an incredible mean density of 382 red grouse per km2, according to the GWCT – see here), which means that those moors can support a higher density of hen harriers. In real terms, this means the target density for hen harriers should be increased accordingly (i.e. there should be more than 70 breeding pairs before brood meddling is implemented).

Having said that, we’re not too concerned about the immediate onset of a brood meddling trial in England because we simply can’t see the driven grouse shooting industry tolerating 70 (+) pairs of breeding hen harriers. Last year there were six successful pairs in the whole of England – an area capable of supporting 300+ pairs. And that pathetic figure was a result of the driven grouse shooting industry supposedly ‘being on side’ and ‘fully supporting hen harrier conservation’!

Interestingly, Martin Harper (RSPB Conservation Director) has blogged about the launch of the action plan (here) and although he acknowledges it isn’t perfect, he says he welcomes it. Eh? The last we heard, the RSPB was still challenging the brood meddling aspect of the plan – what’s changed?

No doubt we’ll be blogging more about the action plan as the 2016 hen harrier breeding season pans out.

Download DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Action Plan here: DEFRA hen-harrier-action-plan-england-2016

No breeding hen harriers on Angus Glens grouse moors since 2006

hh LAURIE CAMPBELL We were just doing a bit of background research on claims made by the grouse-shooting industry’s propaganda campaign website, The Gift of Grouse (more on that shortly) and we thought we’d share some startling figures.

The following data are from the Scottish Raptor Monitoring Scheme (SRMS) annual reports. The SRMS was established in the summer of 2002 (website here) and is currently a consortium of eight organisations who pool their data to provide information on raptor trends across Scotland (distribution, abundance, breeding success etc).

Here are their results on hen harrier monitoring in Angus from 2003-2014 (2015 data not yet available).

2014: 26 x HH home ranges checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2013: 23 x HH home ranges checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2012: 30 x HH home ranges checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2011: 31 x HH home ranges checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2010: 23 x HH home ranges checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2009: 1 x HH home range checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2008: 27 x HH home ranges checked; 2 occupied by breeding pairs; 0 fledglings.

2007: 15 x HH home ranges checked; 0 occupied by breeding pairs.

2006: 5 x HH home ranges checked; 5 occupied by breeding pairs; 1 pair fledged 3 young.

2005: 4 x HH home ranges checked: 4 occupied by breeding pairs; 2 pairs fledged total of 7 young.

2004: 5 x HH home ranges checked; 4 occupied by breeding pairs; 1 pair fledged 5 young.

2003: 5 x HH home ranges checked; 5 occupied by breeding pairs; 2 pairs fledged total of 7 young.

Pre-2003 data are unavailable (as the scheme only started in late 2002) but a comment next to the 2003 data is quite telling: “Noteworthy are the two pairs that successfully reared young on the grouse moors of Angus, the first for many years“.

So, despite comprehensive monitoring efforts since 2007 (with the exception of 2009 when only one known home range was checked), hen harriers have failed to breed successfully on the grouse moors of the Angus Glens since 2006.

Why is that?

And why hasn’t the Gift of Grouse campaign mentioned this on their website, on their social media accounts, in their press releases, or during the parliamentary receptions they’ve been enjoying at Holyrood where they’ve been feted as environmental champions by some pretty naive MSPs?

Location of shot hen harrier revealed as Cabrach

In the week before Christmas, RSPB Scotland published a 20-year review of crimes against birds of prey. We blogged about it (here) and mentioned that a few things within the report had caught our eye and that we’d come back to them. Here’s the first of those things.

Cabrach shot HH 2013

Table 3 in the report (see above) included a listing for a hen harrier that had been shot in June 2013. We knew about this crime as it had previously been listed in the Scottish Government’s 2013 Annual Wildlife Crime Report, but this was the first time that a location had been given – Cabrach, in Moray.

Cabrach is a parish which is ‘almost entirely under the aegis of the Glenfiddich and Cabrach Estate’ according to this fascinating report (here) and has been at the centre of raptor persecution investigations for a very long time. In 1998, a joint RSPB and Police investigation recorded ten persecution incidents between February and May. These included the discovery of 24 poisoned baits (ten rabbits, six pigeons, six grouse and two hares) that had been laid out on the hill. Three illegal pole traps were also found on the estate as well as an owl with legs that had been smashed in a trap. A dead peregrine was also discovered in the back of the head gamekeeper’s Land Rover – tests revealed it had been poisoned with Carbofuran. The head gamekeeper was convicted (for possession of the dead peregrine) and fined £700 (see here) but prosecutions for the other offences were not forthcoming, presumably due to the difficulty of identifying an individual culprit.

In April 2006 another gamekeeper on this estate was filmed shooting two buzzards that had been caught inside a crow cage trap. After he’d shot them he hid them inside a nearby rabbit hole. He was convicted and fined a pathetic £200 (see here). What wasn’t mentioned in court was that the corpses of another eleven shot buzzards had been retrieved during the investigation from nearby rabbit holes. Here they are listed in the RSPB’s 2006 persecution report:

Cabrach 11 shot buzzards 2006

And so what of the hen harrier shooting in June 2013? We think that this is the crime for which a 58-year old man was reported to the Fiscal in January 2014 (see here) because the hen harrier shot at Cabrach was the only listed hen harrier persecution incident in the RSPB’s data for June 2013 (see top table above).

So, if the 58-year old man was reported to the Fiscal almost two years ago, time is now running out for a prosecution – this case will become time-barred in six months time (June 2016). Let’s hope the Crown is on top of it and that there’s good enough evidence to secure a conviction. It hasn’t been reported whether the 58 year-old man has any connection to the Glenfiddich and Cabrach Estate and so at this stage it shouldn’t be assumed that he has.

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