Last spring, when walkers on the Lancashire moors came upon two hen harrier nests, they alerted local conservationists. Not because these powerful birds of prey represented a danger to wildlife, but because the harriers themselves are under threat. When they got the call, staff and members of the RSPB, helped by local volunteers, set up a 24-hour watch to protect the nests. Over the summer, under the gaze of their guardians, the harriers raised nine chicks, four of which were named by local schoolchildren: Sky, Hope, Highlander and Burt. By late summer, as they prepared to leave the nests, the fledglings were fitted with satellite tags so their movements could be monitored.
Annie the satellite tagged Hen Harrier found shot on a grouse moor this year
The Forest of Bowland, a striking landscape of boggy, open upland carpeted with heather and bracken, is home to some of the last breeding pairs of hen harriers in England. A male hen harrier’s silhouette gliding low over the moorland is an eerie sight greatly prized by bird lovers, but the bird is best known for its aerobatic displays of climbing, twisting and rolling, known as sky dancing. Like other birds of prey, the harrier has been protected by law since 1954, but while buzzards and peregrine falcons have recovered their numbers, in England, hen harriers are now close to extinction.
At dusk on 10 September last year, a few weeks after the juvenile birds had successfully left their nest, the 9.5g tag attached to Sky’s back abruptly stopped transmitting. Three days later, Hope’s signal was lost. Both birds had disappeared. The scientists and local bird-lovers who had worked so hard to protect them were convinced someone had deliberately shot these birds out of the sky. And they had strong suspicions about who was responsible.
The harrier is a stealth predator. A disc of feathers around its face gives it the piercing gaze and acute hearing of an owl. It can snatch a creature as small as a beetle or as bulky as a duck, but its favourite food on high moors is a plump little bird greatly prized by game shooters: the red grouse.
For four months after the “glorious twelfth” of August each year, wealthy sportsmen pay up to £3,000 a day to stand with a gun on private moorland while beaters – usually farm workers or local lads – flap and shoo grouse towards the shooters’ sights. Gamekeepers are employed on the upland estates to ensure plentiful supplies of wild grouse. Their job involves eradicating animals that might want to eat these small game birds: foxes, stoats, weasels and, in the days when it was legal to do so, birds of prey. When Hope and Sky disappeared, many suspected they had been killed by gamekeepers protecting grouse for the shooting season.
Since 2000, 20 gamekeepers have been found guilty of “raptor persecution” or poisoning offences on grouse moorland, including one who killed a hen harrier in Scotland. In 2013, the RSPB logged 238 reports of birds of prey being poisoned, shot or beaten to death. But convictions are vanishingly rare, especially in England. Even when a naturalist working for the government witnessed two hen harriers being shot out of the sky seven years ago, the Crown Prosecution Service brought no charges. The birds had been killed close to the royal estate of Sandringham in Norfolk and the only people known to have been shooting in the area that day were Prince Harry, his friend, William van Cutsem, and a Sandringham gamekeeper. The bodies were never found.
While many local people in Bowland celebrated its status as a stronghold for the hen harrier, the RSPB has struggled to win over significant parts of the community. Some locals said they felt insulted when the charity installed 24-hour watches on Bowland’s two hen harrier nests: the implication was that locals could not be trusted. “They come with an attitude – as if the bird is the most important thing in the world,” complained one local in the pub. “If you’re living in the countryside, a job is the most important thing in the world.”
“Are they gamekeepers that killed these birds? It’s supposition,” said Phil Gunning, a retired police inspector who runs a grouse syndicate, a small group of friends holding an exclusive right to shoot on 5,700 acres of Bowland each season. We were speaking on the landline in the Hark to Bounty pub, as there is no mobile phone reception on the moors. “There’s an awful lot of birds of prey out there and an awful lot of people don’t particularly care for them. You’d have to be pretty naive to say a gamekeeper has never killed a bird of prey but to generalise and say, ‘It’s gamekeepers’ is simply not fair.”
Gunning rejected the idea that his Bowland shoot was an anachronistic country pursuit for the upper classes. “We’re not toffs. We’re not the landed gentry. It’s just 10 chaps from various walks of life who enjoy each other’s company – farmers, retired dentists, a chef, an engineer.” A day on the high moors in pursuit of grouse, he explained, was the game shooter’s equivalent of a cricket fan playing at Lords, or a tennis lover getting to Wimbledon. “The killing process, it’s completely the opposite of bloodlust,” he said. “It’s not a fairground duck shoot where you go pop-pop-pop, it’s a supreme test of skill. These things are fully aerobatic, they can be going 60mph. If you want to shoot, you want to shoot on a grouse moor.”
The iconic Red Grouse, a game bird coveted, protected, managed and then executed, resulting in the illegal sacrificial slaughter of Hen Harrier, Peregrines and Goshawks.
The distinctively British sport of driving a small wild bird towards waiting guns became popular in the 19th century, establishing a rural tradition that has remained unchanged ever since. By 1900, the hen harrier had all but disappeared as a breeding bird in England and Wales. When grouse shooting declined after the second world war (overgrazing by sheep and the conversion of moorland to conifer plantations had destroyed much of the grouse’s heathery habitat), harrier numbers revived. Today, grouse shooting is booming. As a business it’s worth £67.7m a year in England and Wales, and the hen harrier has gone into dramatic decline once again. Ecologists calculate England’s heather-clad uplands can naturally support at least 300 pairs of hen harriers, but in 2012 and 2013, no hen harriers bred successfully in England at all.
Conservationists say there is no ecological reason for this wipeout – no habitat loss, no food shortages, no killer disease – only a conflict of interest between a lucrative business and one of our most impressive predators.
When Sky and Hope’s tags stopped transmitting in early September last year, the RSPB’s Investigations unit dispatched one of its detectives, Howard Jones, to discover what happened. The Forest of Bowland is a triangle of bleak Lancashire moorland which most visitors swiftly pass in search of the more scenic Lake District. I met Jones early one frosty morning in Slaidburn village car park, six weeks into his investigation. Unusually for an RSPB employee, Jones did not carry binoculars. Between supporters of the shoot and protectors of birds of prey, feelings were running high, he explained. “People get abuse just for watching birds on a grouse moor.” He wore all black, and although he usually rides a mountain bike to minimise the likelihood of his being seen, today he was driving a nondescript vehicle with blacked-out windows.
The first map above identified the exact spot within 20 feet of where each satellite tag had stopped sending a signal to the receiving satellite many miles above the earth. The second map below identifies the whole areas searched without finding a body or satellite unit. Had both harriers died of a natural cause their bodies and their satellite tags would have been recovered.
The two moorland locations in the Forest of Bowland where ‘Sky’ and ‘Hope’ both disappeared in September 2014 after their satellite tags stopped sending a signal just 3 miles from their natal nesting territories. Despite an exhaustive search of both locations no bodies or satellite transmitters were ever found. The disappearance of both satellite units was a telling clue that the most likely logical explanation for these losses was that both harriers had been shot, and the satellite tags then destroyed
Sky and Hope’s disappearance had been reported to Lancashire police but until their bodies were recovered, it was impossible to conclude that they had been deliberately shot. After the harriers’ tags stopped transmitting, Jones and another RSPB investigations officer had spent a week quietly scouring the moorland where the two birds disappeared, using handheld scanners. The weather was excellent, so the tags should have been recoverable if the birds had died of natural causes, but no signal was found. Jones concluded that whoever killed them had disposed of the tags and bodies.
Two years ago, Jones had caught a keeper beating two buzzards to death. In February 2013, members of the public found two live buzzards caught in a large trap designed to – legally – catch crows. They called the RSPB, and the next day Jones mounted a hidden camera over the trap. Four minutes after he left, a gamekeeper arrived, and let himself into the cage-like trap. What happened next was recorded on tape. The video is disturbing: you can hear the thud of stick on skull as the keeper beats the buzzards to death.
“He had an incredibly blase attitude to controlling birds of prey,” said Jones. “These sorts of crimes are committed on private land, hidden away – every time we detect one of these incidents it’s a minor miracle.” Jones called the police and his evidence helped convict the gamekeeper, who was given a 70-day suspended sentence.
In the hunt for Sky and Hope, covert surveillance was no help. The RSPB investigators went public straight away in the hope that someone would come forward with evidence. The local community was caught up in the harriers’ fate; children at the primary school who had named Sky were distraught; Blainaid Denman, who had led a hen harrier project for the RSPB in the area, said she felt “crushed”. Even Phil Gunning was outraged. He had been anxious to foster good relations between the grouse shoot, bird lovers and the local community. “I can say this on behalf of everybody in the area. They were all absolutely, totally and utterly disappointed,” he told me over the phone. “If they have been killed by somebody then it’s brought a whole load of nonsense on top of everybody’s head that we don’t need.”
Conservation groups have put substantial resources into preserving the hen harrier population. As a scientist working for Natural England, the government’s conservation watchdog, Stephen Murphy has spent the last eight years fitting hen harriers with £2,700-satellite transmitters to better understand the lifestyle of these birds, and the reasons for their demise. On an overcast day at the end of October, I clambered into Murphy’s battered Mitsubishi pickup for a tour of the Forest of Bowland where Hope and Sky had vanished.
Stephen Murphy holding a tagged Bowland Hen Harrier. Of 47 hen harriers Murphey has tagged since 2007, only four are alive today.
When Murphy discovered that Sky and Hope had disappeared, he was saddened, but not surprised. Of 47 hen harriers he has tagged since 2007, only four are alive today. His cheery manner subsided. “I seem to be impervious but I’m not. My wife knows. She comes in and says, ‘Something’s happened to one of your birds hasn’t it?’”
Murphy’s satellite tagging programme, which he was writing up for a PhD on the ecology of the hen harrier, has shed new light on the bird’s varied and nomadic life. Birds tagged in Bowland have been tracked making lightning trips 300 miles north to Scotland and beyond. One commuted so frequently between Scotland and Spain he was nicknamed McPedro. The small polygamous male and larger female behave so differently that early ornithologists considered them separate species; Murphy found that a male might fly 2,000 miles while his sister moved three miles in her entire life. “We’re dealing with a species that can shift time zones in a couple of hours or be a couch potato,” said Murphy. “That’s a hell of a range of behaviours to conserve.”
The tags could not, however, explain why so many birds were dying. Around 70% of hen harriers die of natural causes in their first year and of Murphy’s 47 tracked birds, 37 disappeared without a trace. There could be innocent reasons for this: transmitters were reliable but might fail, and it was possible a sudden loss of signal could be caused by a fox dragging a bird underground. If a body was taken into a den, or even if it lay in a ditch, the tag would be undetectable. “With regards to evidence – and Natural England is an evidence-based organisation – we didn’t have a lot to go on,” said Murphy. There was no way of telling how many birds had been trapped or shot. “For us to disentangle the persecution incidents from the rest is nigh on impossible without a body.”
If a harrier died naturally, its body would eventually be found. Teams of up to nine people, with tracker dogs, had searched, sometimes for weeks, for each of the 37 birds that went missing. The harrier-lovers’ conviction that grouse estates were behind their disappearance had been hardened by a case in 2011, when Murphy had fitted a tag to a juvenile hen harrier, Bowland Betty. Betty became a celebrity among birdwatchers who delighted in her rapid journeys between Wales and northern Scotland, searching for a mate.
During the wet summer of 2012, Bowland Betty’s signal abruptly ceased on the Yorkshire Dales near High Force. Murphy showed me what resembled a small aerial for an old-fashioned portable TV: it was a hand-held scanner mainly used by the US army to locate downed drones. It picked up a “grounded” signal that the satellite tag emitted if the bird stopped moving. He had taken it on to remote moorland to hunt for Bowland Betty in the area where he had received the last reliable fix from her transmitter. At 11am on 5 July, he found her. All that remained was a skinny carcass of bedraggled wet feathers on a patch of bilberries, the tag’s antenna sticking into the air. She had been shot. Whoever fired at her hadn’t been able to track her down with dogs and dispose of the tag because the shot had not immediately been fatal: Betty had flapped on for several miles before collapsing on the ground.
To gain a more complete understanding of how grouse shooting benefits the economy of upland Britain, I crossed the Pennines to meet Amanda Anderson, the director of the Moorland Association, at the home of one of her members, farmer Stephen Mawle. Over homemade cake in his grey stone farmhouse at the head of Coverdale in the Yorkshire Dales, Mawle explained how his expanding grouse shoot not only created jobs but funded a much wider conservation effort. According to the Moorland Association, just 10% of moor owners’ £52.5m annual spend on land management comes from government subsidies – the rest is private money, brought in by grouse.
Mawle employed three keepers whose work included controlling predators (foxes, stoats, crows) by legal means to ensure a healthy wild grouse population. He admitted that the presence of hen harriers was a threat to the profitability of the grouse shoots. “It’s one thing to let the lion prowl around your stock pen, it’s another to open the gate and let him in,” he said. “You’ve got a huge financial incentive for hen harriers not to nest on your land.”
“A landowner is not going to encourage them to settle,” added Anderson. She suggested that hen harriers could be easily scared off. “They are very flighty birds.”
These clients expected to shoot 75 brace (150 birds) in a day between them. Conservationists criticise the intensification of grouse shooting and argue that hen harriers are only killed because grouse shooters want to bag so many birds. It’s “not mass slaughter”, Anderson pointed out. “We don’t have any clients saying, ‘We’re not coming unless we shoot 200 brace,’” said Mawle. Then why not shoot fewer? “You’re not going to get people paying for 80 brace and only shooting 20. They want value for money,” he said. If the farm only offered “walked-up” grouse shooting – where bags are much smaller because no birds are driven towards guns – Mawle said he would not be able to charge more than £5,000. Much of the shoot’s revenue went into the Dales economy: Mawle bought his food at the local shop, serviced his farm vehicles locally and employed local people: the 30 beaters required to drive the birds towards the guns were paid £50 a day.
The funnel trap used legally by most moorland gamekeepers to kill an assortment of British wildlife that predate grouse and their eggs.
Three-quarters of the world’s heather moorland is found in Britain; the heather flowers purple in August, the bracken shines bronze in the autumn and the moors are dusted white with snow in midwinter. This wild landscape is preserved, Mawle argues, thanks to funds generated by grouse shoots. Managing his land for grouse, argued Mawle, provided conservation benefits that groups such as the RSPB would approve of. By legally trapping and killing stoats and foxes to ensure plentiful supplies of grouse, he helped conserve endangered birds: woodcock, snipe, golden plover, lapwing, ring ouzel, and “buckets and buckets of curlew”. Some birds of prey also thrived on grouse moors because of these plentiful food supplies: merlin were four times more numerous on grouse moors than in other locations (although this may be because, unlike hen harriers, they are too small to kill grouse).
If driven grouse shooting, in which beaters are used to send more birds towards the guns, was banned, Mawle argued, the cost of keeping the moorlands in their attractive, wildlife-friendly state would have to be met by taxpayer. He believed that anti-grouse-shoot campaigners were driven by a hypocritical distaste for those who take pleasure in killing wild birds. Perhaps grouse could be “harvested with nets as a food source which would achieve the objective of not allowing people to enjoy themselves shooting,” he said drily. “It’s completely illogical.”
Since May last year, in a bid to protect hen harriers, more than 20,000 people have signed a government e-petition calling for a ban on driven grouse shooting. The petition was started by Mark Avery, an intense, fiercely intelligent former director of conservation for the RSPB, who last year also launched Hen Harrier Day in protest at the grouse industry’s perceived persecution of the harrier. I spoke to Avery the day after he had travelled to Margate to admire Jeremy Deller’s painting of an enormous hen harrier grabbing a Range Rover in its talons, which Avery saw as a powerful statement about class-based power still defining what lived and died in the British countryside.
“I’m not a shooting person but I can imagine how shooting would be fun – it’s difficult to do and grouse shooting takes you to fantastic places,” said Avery. “But once you’ve shot 10 birds in a day, why do you have to go on to shoot 100? It seems like carnage rather than sport.” His call to ban driven grouse shooting was not supported by the RSPB but Avery remained convinced that, like fox hunting, the sport was “past its sell-by date” and would one day be banned. What about the argument that declining birds such as curlew thrive on land managed for grouse? Avery had visited a grouse moor earlier in the year. “There were golden plover and curlew and lapwing displaying and it was pretty impressive but if there had been a pile of 400 stoats by the road and however many foxes and weasels and a pile of illegally killed hedgehogs, badgers, peregrines, goshawks and short-eared owls then the lapwing and curlew don’t look quite so impressive. That is the trade-off.”
Moorland owners, Amanda Anderson explained to me, wanted to be allowed to move hen harrier nests. Brood management would guarantee that if more than one hen harrier nested in any 10km/sq area of grouse moor, government scientists would remove additional nests, raise the chicks in captivity and release the young birds into lowland areas. “There would not be a feather on a hen harrier chick’s head harmed,” said Anderson. This, she argued, was the key to stopping their persecution. Why would anyone harm hen harriers if they posed no risk to the grouse shooting industry? “It just needs the RSPB to give it a try.”
In the recovery group’s final meeting of 2014, however, it became very clear that the RSPB was not willing to give it a try. It refused to countenance moving nests until there was an end to the illegal killing of hen harriers and their population had recovered. It would be “ludicrous,” said Blanaid Denman, to remove the nests of a bird that barely exists, just to placate grouse shoots. RSPB negotiators expressed their fears about the long-term implications: if nests of one of the rarest breeding birds in England were removed and the chicks reared in captivity, which rare species would landowners want to control next?
In the weeks after the latest stalemate, these fears seemed to be borne out by a gamekeeper seeking permission to protect the pheasants he breeds by “controlling” buzzards. That case will be decided in the high court later this year. A rather eccentric populist-aristocratic campaign called You Forgot the Birds has also been launched against the RSPB led by the former cricketer Ian Botham, claiming that the charity neglects small songbirds in its veneration of birds of prey. “More and more people are realising that the hen harriers’ biggest enemy is the RSPB – not rogue gamekeepers,” Botham told the Mail on Sunday in November after the charity restated its opposition to moving nests. Hen harrier campaigners including Mark Avery were convinced that these were not the authentic concerns of bird-lovers but the increasingly rattled shooting industry: Botham runs a grouse shoot in North Yorkshire; the Mail on Sunday’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, also owns a grouse moor in Scotland.
The two sides were so polarised it was no surprise when moorland owners and the RSPB failed to reach an agreement at their meeting in November.
When I contacted RSPB investigator Howard Jones in late December for news on the loss of Sky and Hope, he was driving north to investigate another case of raptor persecution. “Unfortunately we’ve had no further information,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.” At least, he added, Sky and Hope’s siblings, Highlander and Burt, who had also been tagged, were still on the wing, exploring the uplands of Dumfries and Galloway, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and the South Pennines. “We hope they’ll make it through the winter and breed next summer,” said Jones.
Back in Bowland, Stephen Murphy was close to finishing his PhD. His satellite tags had provided vivid new information of the remarkable distances travelled by these unpredictable predators during their brief lives. When I called, he was still buzzing after another day on the chilly moors, seeking out his birds. But when I asked if things had improved or worsened in the decade since his studies began, his natural exuberance once again deserted him.
Grouse moorland is “the best and the worst place for the hen harrier,” added Murphy. “These birds span the whole range of human emotions. They inspire love and hate. There’s not many birds that do that.”
This story written by Patrick Barkham was first published in the Guardian in January 2015