The news of three hen harriers vanishing in as many weeks has rightly received a lot of media interest and concern (for example see here and here). History* tells us that the most likely reason is illegal persecution but, unfortunately, not everyone seems as intent on helping us and the police find out what happened.
Hay fever, summer colds, England’s search for an opening batsman to partner Alastair Cook. Some things just will not go away. It appears we can add the steady stream of Ian Botham fronted “You Forgot the Birds” press releases to that list.
When a press release (now covered in the Daily Telegraph, see here) landed on my desk yesterday announcing that England's second-highest Test wicket-taker had decided to wade into hen harrier conservation, I honestly thought it was a joke. My suspicions were raised still further when I read the release and discovered Mr Botham was offering £10,000 to anyone who could take the eggs from one of the failed Bowland hen harrier nests into an aviary, raise the chicks and release them back into the wild. These would be the eggs which had been abandoned and were no longer viable. The RSPB is committed to bringing the hen harrier back from the brink of extinction, but we’ve not yet worked out how to bring them back to life. I can only assume Mr Botham is getting a little too excited about the new Jurassic Park film and is confusing fact and fiction again.
I could go on, poking fun at some of the surreal suggestions set out (I really could, I’ve had references to Monty Python from colleagues), but I’m not going to. It would be wrong to make light of what is in reality a very serious issue – hen harriers remain on the brink of extinction as a breeding species in England and three birds have disappeared from their last stronghold in a matter of weeks.
Nor am I going to go through and offer yet another point by point rebuttal of why brood management scheme isn’t justified on legal, moral or conservation grounds. I’ve done that plenty of times before (see here, here and here).
Instead I’m going to respond to one of Mr Botham’s points and one point only. I try to respond rationally to almost every situation and, away from sport, I’m not given to spasms of emotion. But the statement from Mr Botham that the RSPB are “rubbish at conservation” is just egregiously wrong.
At the end of last year, I was delighted to report on a huge range of RSPB achievements on and off our nature reserves (see here). These are not the achievements of a "rubbish" organisation. To come out with such offensive, ill-informed comments as that, I can only assume Mr Botham has never met any of the staff and volunteers I am honoured to work with. Indeed, my offer to show Ian Botham the work we do on and off our reserves has yet to be accepted.
One final thought. Buried at the bottom of the list of editor’s notes in the press release is this gem – “The You Forgot The Birds Campaign is funded by the British grouse industry”. Now many of us may have suspected this, but I don’t think they’ve claimed this in public before and who knows if they really do represent the whole industry.
It’s also interesting to note grouse shooting being referred to as an ‘industry. In many ways this seems right – after all, on some intensive grouse moors of northern England and southern and eastern Scotland, red grouse are produced on an industrial scale for shooting. Yet, any industry's licence to operate is in part dependent on social and environmental impact. This is why I have repeatedly said that the industry representatives should have a zero tolerance of illegal killing of birds of prey and do more to restore our uplands. Standards of social responsibility and delivering for the public good are concepts which seem notably absent from the You Forgot the Birds rhetoric.
The cause of hen harrier’s continued rarity and the solution to tackle this is clear. The RSPB will continue to focus on ending illegal persecution, rather than Ian Botham's dubiously legal nest-interference scheme based on half-truths and prejudices.
*Male hen harriers disappearing while part of an active nesting attempt is exceptionally unusual in most habitats. A 2008 Natural England report “A Future for the Hen Harrier in England?”, found that it was almost never recorded in most habitats, while nearly 70% of nesting attempts which failed on grouse moors, did so because an adult disappeared (see figure 4 on page 14). Government-commissioned research (here) has shown that the English uplands could support more than 300 pairs of hen harriers. The authors conclude that persecution, associated with the practice of managing moors for driven grouse shooting, is to blame for the harrier’s plight. What's more, Natural England has previously stated that there is compelling evidence that persecution, both during and following the breeding season, continues to limit hen harrier recovery in England.
It is, as you suggest, difficult to take this seriously, but I think we should.
I see that there is a problem for the RSPB here. Whilst watching over these nests, it would help if it was known that the adult male was no longer able to return. Sir Ian is offering a £10,000 reward to the first conservation group which moves the abandoned eggs into an aviary and then releases the fledglings back into the wild. If he is not aware that the eggs quickly become unviable perhaps he could arrange that the "grouse shooting industry" puts £10,000 towards a new HOTline to The Hawk and Owl trust. If the industry phones into the hotline whenever they shoot a male hen harrier, the HOT would, with RSPB co-operation, be able to remove the eggs before they become unviable.
I see a second possibility. For a while the "grouse shooting industry" has not permitted a single pair of hen harriers to nest on managed English grouse moors. Perhaps the RSPB could contact Defra and promise that if the "grouse shooting industry" permits hen harriers to settle on grouse moors, the RSPB will support brood relocation. Obviously, this was not possible up to the present time, because the "grouse shooting industry" had not put it's head over the parapet.