Hi everyone. Well, unfortunately no news is not good news when it comes to hen harriers! Things have gone worryingly quiet here on the harrier front – in fact, we’ve not had a single sighting on the Reserve for three weeks now (though a female was seen on low moss land to the north of Geltsdale last week). However, we still remain optimistic that there’s a chance of a late nesting attempt here for two main reasons:

1) Geltsdale often doesn’t get territorial or nesting birds until well into May. This is particularly the case in springs following a season with no nest(s). We’ve not had a nest here since 2006, so in the absence of any returning birds we’re dependent on unpaired (often immature) harriers which could turn up anytime before early June.
2) This spring, hen harrier action seems to be very late and slow nationwide. Even at Bowland, breeding activities are well behind previous years. Also, many harriers are still being seen at lowland/coastal sites even at this late stage, when one would have expected them to be back on their upland breeding grounds. There has been some speculation that this might be linked to prey availability, with the coldest winter in two decades having potentially depressed populations of field voles across the board. Studies have shown that field vole availability is a crucial factor influencing the settling of harriers early in the nesting season. Males rely heavily on these small rodents as a food source when they are courtship feeding their mates and provisioning her during incubation. Field vole populations generally run in a ‘boom-bust’ cycle of 3-5 years, with numbers building up to a peak then crashing before a steady recovery phase – and so on…However, these cycles can be quite localised, so areas as large as Geltsdale or Bowland may well have more than one population ‘block’, and these could be at different phases of the cycle. So, in theory, there will probably always be a part of the Reserve with a good vole density.  Having said all that, a severe winter could certainly reduce vole numbers en masse, and even ‘peak’ populations may then be too low to support a pair of nesting hen harriers. In such circumstances, harriers may:

· wander away from traditional breeding grounds in search of  an area with a better food supply
· suspend any breeding attempt for that year or
· delay breeding to coincide with a ready supply of passerine/wader/grouse chicks.

So, taking all these factors into consideration, there is certainly still a chance of things kicking off here at Geltsdale, and we continue on full steam ahead for the next month. And I’ll be sure to keep you posted on any developments…