James Delingpole suggests potting a few of the most gorgeous (and protected) birds in the country. And he has the RSPB in his line of fire too!
What do you think?
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Sooty,
We still only have your unsupported word for it that Buzzards i) eat a lot of Kestrels and ii) are causing Kestrel numbers to decline. Not much better than Delingpole's assertion that Red Kites and Sea Eagles are to blame.
Even if Buzzards do feed on Kestrels that doesn't necessarily mean there is a negative effect on the population. Competition for food could perhaps be significant, due to the large dietary overlap, but I don't know of any evidence that this is important. I found one paper on Buzzard diet ("Diet of Common Buzzards (Buteo buteo) in southern Norway determined from prey remains and video recordings"), which doesn't report any Kestrels or other birds of prey at all (admittedly this was quite a small study).
Goshawks are known to have local effects on Kestrel numbers, but there aren't that many of them around at all anyway so their total effect must be quite small (The decline of Common Kestrels Falco tinnunculus in a forested area of northern England: the role of predation by Northern Goshawks Accipiter gentilis).
Ultimately, the origin of this story was the reported 36% drop in Kestrel numbers between 2008-2009 (www.bto.org/.../roadside_raptor.html). It isn't really plausible to attribute such a large rapid drop this to gradual changes in the levels of predation, road deaths or agricultural changes, rather than e.g. weather conditions for that year. Taking a longer view, there isn't much evidence of a long term decline in Kestrel numbers since the late 1980s (www.bto.org/.../wcrkestr.shtml) (excluding the last 2-3 years).