Tag: buzzard

Yet another Buzzard shot dead – this one found in rural Cambridgeshire around fifteen miles southeast of Cambridge. As Cambs Police point out all birds of prey are protected by law. Everyone knows that. Peppering a Buzzard with shotgun pellets will always be a deliberate act. There has been a speight of Buzzard killings in the last few months (this is the fourth we’ve written about since mid January). For many of us seeing a Buzzard is a thrill. They have returned to areas that they were persecuted out of, but there have been dark mutterings from pheasant shoot operators about there being ‘too many Buzzards’ for years – that of course despite the industry releasing around 60 million non-native pheasants and partridges every year, while there are less than 100,000 pairs of native Buzzards across the whole of the UK, with their numbers apparently declining slightly in Wales.

A report emerged yesterday of a joint agency investigation by Suffolk Police, Natural England, and the RSPB Investigations Team into yet another killing of a Buzzard. There are few details at the moment (with no mention on the Suffolk Constabulary website), but a tweet from Suffolk Rural & Wildlife Policing said that several guns had been seized along with the ‘professional’s’ weapon of choice against birds of prey – pesticides (a few grains of Carbofuran sprinkled on to a rabbit corpse makes for an illegal but cheap and highly toxic bait). Suffolk, a county stuffed with shooting estates, has form when it comes to killing Buzzards. In February 2018 two buzzard corpses were reported to Suffolk Constabulary in an incident described by naturalists as “appalling and abhorrent.” The bodies were found in woodland known as Little Carr, “on the edge of a shooting estate” on the banks of the River Dove, near Hoxne.