21 May 2015
Harriered to Death
by R.J. Thomas
On a northern hillside there are strange goings on. Half hidden in a heather moor above the Forest of Bowland in North Lancashire are a small group of camouflaged figures, with survival rations and powerful binoculars, keeping a round the clock vigil. This is not, as you might first assume, the SAS on a covert training exercise but a group of bird watchers, members of the RSPB, the UK’s leading bird protection charity, and they are watching the nesting places of two hen harriers.
The hen harrier is Britain’s rarest native bird, a shy inhabitant of high moors and wild mountain sides. It is not a pretty bird, but it has a magnificent arrogance, a fierce intensity of gaze, and in flight it is a soaring rhapsody, dancing on the wind above the wild fells and purple heather. It is also a bird whose voracious appetite has led it to its present rarity. The hen harrier shares its favoured hunting grounds with the red grouse; and alas for the grouse, it is the hen harrier’s favourite meal, one every two days for preference. It will also eat mice and voles, and other small birds, but the easiest catch is grouse, which are generally present in large numbers in these wild places.
There are many grouse in the uplands of England and Scotland, not because they are naturally widespread but because they are carefully protected by another secretive army – of gamekeepers, employed by the estates and shooting syndicates that run these moors for grouse shooting. The moors, though beautiful, have no real economic value – they support a few marginally profitable sheep, and a number of walkers and hikers in season – but nobody has yet found a way of abstracting much money from their purses. But grouse are very profitable. Grouse shooting is the favoured sport of many well-heeled businessmen and rich investors, increasingly drawn to these uplands from all over the world. There is no shooting sport quite like the wild unpredictable grouse; and aficionados are willing to pay very large sums of money indeed, over £100 per bird shot, for sport on the best moors. That means the moor owner can be looking at income of £20,000 for a day’s let shooting, to say nothing of the local hotels and suppliers of kit and equipment who cater for the rich sportsman in these places. And indeed the gamekeepers – happy sportsmen are generous, a good day will often see the head keeper going home with £500 cash in his pocket.
Not surprisingly, those who work in the grouse business are not keen on hen harriers eating their stock in trade. Killing hen harriers was made illegal in 1954, but there have been a number of prosecutions of gamekeepers for doing just that – 20 in the last fifteen years for killing protected raptors (not all hen harriers). The breeding hen harrier population has dropped to just a few pairs in England – possibly just those two in the Forest of Bowland, now intensively monitored by the RSPB. Whenever possible it protects nests and electronically tags chicks to trace their movements. Tagged birds have disappeared along with their tags with astonishing frequency, the RSPB having no hesitation in blaming rogue gamekeepers or moorland owners (who would destroy the tags of shot birds to avoid them being traced). It has to be said that none of this is proven and it would be a high risk strategy indeed to try to destroy such a closely monitored target. But whatever the reason, the numbers of hen harriers diminish and the grouse moors continue to thrive and be key to Britain’s upland economy. Not surprisingly, in these wild places the relationships between the RSPB monitors and the locals, dependent on the Range Rovers rolling in each autumn, are increasingly fraught.
Contrast this with the situation in the south of England, in the Chiltern Hills to the north-west of London. The Red Kite, a large predator bird native to the British Isles, became practically extinct by the end of the nineteenth century. A campaign led by the RSBP and supported enthusiastically by Sir Paul Getty who owned a large estate in the Chilterns, began reintroduction of breeding birds in the late 1980’s, a programme which has been so successful that the birds are now ubiquitous in the area, and spreading rapidly across south-east England. In spite of odd rumours about lambs attacked and washing stolen from lines, the kite enjoys approval ratings that any politician would envy and is fed by many householders eager to see their forked tails hovering above gardens. What also helps the kite is that it does not seem to have any taste for pheasant – the Chiltern equivalent of the grouse. Indeed, by scaring off the pheasant chick guzzling buzzard it may even be the southern gamekeeper’s best friend. Though in a further twist of bird politics, further west, on Salisbury Plain, the RSPB is now monitoring the diminishing buzzard stock above the prime pheasant and partridge shoots of Berkshire and Wiltshire, with gamekeepers again been fingered for wiping out these predators on their valuable shooting stock.
Bird conservation is indeed a strange science. The public love those big cruel billed predator birds, even though they feed voraciously from Britain’s tumbling stocks of smaller delicate birds such as lapwings, curlew, pipits, golden plover. So much for the traditional Brit sympathy for the underdog (or underbird in this case); the man in the street seems to want the big rough predator to win.
The RSPB is one of the best funded of British charities with an income in excess of £100m last year. It can afford to pay for electronic equipment and wardens to monitor rare birds and even to buy land to run as bird sanctuaries – with over 300,000 acres, it is one of the largest landowners in the UK. It has been accused in recent years of becoming increasingly anti-landowner, anti-farmer, anti-shooter. This is not entirely so, though it is a controversial area internally. Quietly, the RSPB is working with other groups to try to form effective policies to reconcile the various conflicts of bird enthusiasts (whether conserving or shooting), knowing that the money and interest of the shooters is vital in managing habitats for all birds, not just the commercial targets of the shotguns.
In 1992, the RSPB and the Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust, a well funded research group with a particular interest in reconciling wild game shooting with broader conservationist objectives, began a joint study of a productive grouse moor, Langholm, in southern Scotland. The moor had been managed by gamekeepers in the conventional way, but with the agreement of the owners all management of the moor now ceased. Not surprisingly, the number of predator birds, especially hen harriers, increased dramatically, and the numbers of grouse went into steep decline. Within five years there were practically no grouse left on the moor – but a detailed survey showed there were no resident hen harriers either. They had literally eaten themselves out of lunch and home. The Langholm experiment continues still, testing the close dependence between the hen harrier and its prey, between the careful management of the moor and the survival of both species, and ultimately between those rich shooters and that fierce looking bird who soars above them, taunting them with its inviolate status.
Hopefully Langholm and similar experiments will help the warring groups, currently bad temperedly watching each other in the wild hills, reach a better understanding as to how to manage Britain’s uplands in the interests of all its inhabitants – if only for the sake of those few last lonely hen harriers.
