What is the RSPB doing to protect hen harriers?

Earlier this week, Hen Harrier LIFE Project Manager Dr Cathleen Thomas took a look at how the UK's hen harriers had fared in 2018. Now she gives an overview of some of things that the RSPB is doing to help them.  

Here at the RSPB, we’re doing everything we can to protect hen harriers. Coming into the final year of the Hen Harrier LIFE project in 2019, our project team have already spoken with almost 12,000 members of the public about hen harriers. During these conversations, I’m always asked: ‘What are the RSPB actually DOING about this?’.

The aim of our Hen Harrier LIFE project is to catalogue the incidents of persecution and suspicious disappearances of the birds, which our team works hard to do, and until the project started, we had no idea of the scale of hen harrier persecution in the UK. Fitting tags to birds has given us unprecedented insight into the journeys and fates of individual birds. Importantly, this evidence is used to underpin the core work of our organisation.

Thor hatched in Bowland in summer 2018 and disappeared on 3 October (photo by Steve Downing)

The data gathered from the satellite tagging we’re doing is being analysed by our conservation science experts, to learn about the fates of the birds, and how this relates to land use patterns, investigating the habitat use of the birds and their dispersal patterns. We’re already seeing that some of our birds are travelling long distances, including visits to Ireland, France and Spain. The location data we receive from the tags shows us the population is moving across the UK and beyond, so we need to protect it by working alongside colleagues in other countries too.

The Hen Harrier LIFE project also involves working with college students studying gamekeeping and countryside management. We discuss the hen harriers and the broader issues around grouse moors to instigate an open debate about what the options are for future moorland management practices and what our moorlands could and should look like. Although some groups enter into discussion tentatively, it soon becomes clear that things cannot continue as they are. We hope that these students will enter employment at the end of their course more prepared for what the working world has to offer and their important role in ensuring the survival of some of our rarest species through legal and sustainable management of our countryside.

Beyond the LIFE project the RSPB is doing a wide range of other work to secure a future for the UK’s hen harriers.

We’re managing our reserves in a way that is sympathetic to the needs of hen harriers, using heather cutting techniques to promote highly diverse moorlands that are home to a range of species. Having successfully used these techniques for decades in some places and seeing flourishing habitats, we’re now advocating management practices to neighbouring landowners and statutory bodies with responsibilities around land management practices.

As a wildlife conservation charity, we have no powers to arrest criminals or take them to court, but our Investigations team share the intelligence we collect and work closely alongside the Police’s National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU), the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG) and the Partnership Against Wildlife Crime (PAW) across the UK, to ensure the scale of persecution is understood. We fear we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg and our evidence is informing policy and actions taken on by these groups. Our dedicated teams fight for hen harrier protection, push for wildlife criminals to be brought before the courts, and advocate for stronger sentencing for those convicted. We also train colleagues in the police forces and in the National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty to better understand wildlife law, and what kinds of trapping methods are commonly used by criminals. Raising awareness of what to look for in the countryside is a really important task. The community can help to be our eyes and ears and report wildlife crime.

RSPB Investigations officer Howard Jones raising awareness of trapping methods with police officers and national park staff (photo by Bob Smith).

We also work hard on policy and advocacy work with local and national governments, raising awareness of raptor persecution and calling for action to prevent it. We are calling for the licensing of grouse moors, to ensure they are managed in a sustainable and legal way. Our work has contributed to the instigation of the Scottish government’s review of sustainable and legal grouse moor management and we continually work with Westminster MPs to raise awareness and call for action. We are also in the process of a judicial review of the Natural England licence for a trial of a brood management scheme for hen harriers, which is a decision we have not taken lightly. When red lines are crossed, we will act.

There are certainly interesting times ahead for hen harrier conservation. With Chief Inspector Louise Hubble OBE and Superintendent Nick Lyall taking on new leading roles as Chair of the NWCU and RPPDG respectively, growing evidence of the scale of hen harrier persecution and a growing awareness across Europe of the scale of the hen harrier population decline, there are calls for immediate action. Scottish and Welsh governments also seem to be taking positive steps to protect birds of prey. Seemingly, they are starting to realise that the evidence cannot be ignored.

2019 is the fifth anniversary of Hen Harrier Day in the UK, and the tenth anniversary of raptor crime becoming a police priority. Momentum is certainly growing and pressure continues to mount for moorlands to be managed sustainably and criminals to be held to account. We are cautiously optimistic that positive change is coming.

In the new year, we’ll be blogging in more detail about the different ways we are tackling the plight of the hen harrier and working to secure its future in the UK.