Tag: hen harrier

“NOT again. Surely.” So starts an opinion piece by Mark Smith in the Herald Scotland on the death of Tarras, a young female harrier found dead last month. The Herald Scotland is the longest-running national newspaper in the world with a circulation just over 25,000. Not hugely-read in national media terms, perhaps, but look how far we’ve come. Rather than unquestioningly printing lobbyist denials and the usual guff about how shooting estates are actually ‘just like nature reserves’ and ‘no-one manages the countryside better than a gamekeeper’, the author concludes his first sentence with the lines: “You’ve probably already guessed what’s coming next, haven’t you? She had been hunting on or near grouse moors.” Yes, of course we’d all guessed. ‘Disappearing’ Hen Harriers and grouse moors are rarely NOT found in the same sentence. We’ve heard it so damn often that it’s expected now. Even national newspapers have made the link.

Another week, and yet another Hen Harrier has ‘gone missing’/’disappeared’/’been killed’ near the now-traditional sinkhole for ‘lost’ Hen Harriers: a grouse moor. Grouse moors, those inhospitable, largely barren grouse farms where traps outnumber native predators and birds of prey (protected by law for decades) are routinely killed by the ‘professionals’ who insist we take them seriously when it comes to the future of the uplands. This (according to Raptor Persecution UK) takes to fifty-two the number of Hen Harriers that have ‘disappeared’ in suspicious circumstances (ie ‘we know you did it, we just can’t prove it’) since 2018. Let that sink in: 52 Hen Harriers have been put down in three years. The latest, Tarras, a young satellite-tagged female less than a year old, spent her short life “hunting on [a] grouse moor and roosting either on it or just off of it” when her tag was silenced less than month ago.

A recent article in the Lancashire Telegraph – reprinted below – is interesting, and perhaps not for reasons that are immediately obvious. We already know that Hen Harriers regularly make the ‘epic journey’ across the Channel, for example, and we already know that the crossing is dangerous. No, what is particularly striking is that a journalist whose social media feed doesn’t ordinarily feature wildlife (that’s an observation, not a criticism in any way) is covering an RSPB press-release and taking ‘ownership’ of a bird on behalf of a county which the vast majority of its residents (if they’re typical of everywhere else) won’t have even heard of…Partisan or not, anything that encourages local residents to think about Bowland’s harriers as ‘theirs’ is a very welcome step forward. Hopefully it will encourage an interest in the birds and – having learned about them – a desire to protect them.

As we and other sites (most notably the must-read Raptor Persecution UK) have noted many times, the relatively recent roll-out of lightweight satellite tags has been crucial in revealing the extent of Hen Harrier and Golden Eagle persecution across the UK. Originally developed to plot the wanderings of birds of prey outside the breeding season, the tags have pointed to the huge scale of illegal killing of raptors by the grouse shooting industry. Now artist Dan Evans is donating an evocative iol paiting of a male Hen Harrier to a fundraiser orgainsed by the Nidderdale Raptor Study Group, in conjunction with the Northern England Raptor Forum, to support the world-renowned RSPB Investigations Team to buy more tags to track more Hen Harriers…