Talk about the protection of Hen Harriers and Grouse Moors at my local indoor members group meeting

75% eh? I sometimes ask myself whether it would be such a great loss.

Moorland managed for industrial scale grouse shooting is about as natural an ecosystem as a supermarket car park (and with the right ornamental tree planting between the parking bays they, at least, get winter Waxwings). Among the heather with all natural predators (like Hen Harriers, Short eared Owls and Golden Eagles ruthlessly exterminated the grouse attain such unnatural population densities that disease starts to take its toll - so they have to be medicated. Louping Ill is a viral disease spread by ticks, so anything that carries ticks has to get eliminated too. Alas poor Mountain Hares.....

The Isle of Man has heather moorland. It has grouse shooting too only not on the grandiose scale we get on the mainland. It also has something that England doesn't - A reasonable population of breeding Hen Harriers.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as that. The poor hen harrier has been hit from all sides. If it nests in fields of crops, they harvest earlier these days due to climate change, & the nests get destroyed. In tree plantations the scrub imbetween gets cut too early & the nests are destroyed. They have a big range of habitats but they are all disappearing. It needs a concerted effort to spot & protect nests, not just on heather moors. Maybe make more efforts in marshy areas to create suitable habitats.

Where we live they nest on the marshes between the dike & the estuary, where it doesn't normally flood in the summer. We also get a good winter population.    

It is really entirely different in this country to S W France.Hen Harriers here seem to be almost exclusively nesting on heather moors and are persecuted at nesting to protect the Grouse then they are also persecuted in winter roosting sites by shooting them.

We have habitat that would hold 300 plus nesting pairs and this year no nests were allowed to be successful.

Agree with Sooty on this,our local club records in one of the raptor "blackspots! here on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales and sighting of Hen Harriers is almost a mega tick.

Yes, I'm sorry about that, I read the other thread about your last 2 nests after I wrote my thoughts! This year was a bad one here for both hen & montagues harriers due to the rotton weather in May & June, also a severe food shortage caused by flooding in the winter plus a cold winter too. We were inland trying to locate a Montagues nest in a wheat field & saw the adult with a small mouse, which was stolen by a buzzard & this in turn was chased by a marsh harrier, all over one small mouse!!  

It's a shame that they don't breed elsewhere, like the Somerset levels for instance.

There are a few points raised on this thread, some of which are often quoted by conservation organisations like the RSPB which are misleading, potentially even blatantly false - so I'm going to play 'devils advocate' and argue a few points...

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"The majority of heather moorland in the UK is owned primarily for Grouse shooting and if it wasn't for that reason through management by the owners of the moors, we would lose the majority of heather moorland in the UK."

Possibly it is true that the majority of heather moorland in the UK would be lost if it wasn't owned and managed for grouse shooting, but heather moorland is generally of little use for 'development' or agriculture so I wonder how much would actually be lost. Presumably the greatest threats would be from forestry and potentially attempts to 'improve' grazing opportunities.

It is also worth considering that we may not have had as much heather moorland in the first place without grouse shooting - so the continuation of grouse shooting may be protecting some areas of habitat that were created, or allowed to develop, specifically for that purpose.

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"Moorland managed for industrial scale grouse shooting is about as natural an ecosystem as a supermarket car park (and with the right ornamental tree planting between the parking bays they, at least, get winter Waxwings)."

You could say the same thing about pretty much every other habitat in the UK. Over the centuries man has influenced the UK habitats so much that we no longer really have much that can be called 'natural'.

Sure, there is obviously control of top predators (both legal and illegal) on grouse moors, but the wildlife in all other habitats is also controlled by man - whether this is a result of herbicides and pesticides used on farmland, culling of foxes and deer (both of which may take place on some nature reserves), or 'habitat management' such as scrub removal etc.

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"The Isle of Man has heather moorland. It has grouse shooting too only not on the grandiose scale we get on the mainland. It also has something that England doesn't - A reasonable population of breeding Hen Harriers."

A breeding Hen Harrier population that fell by roughly 50% between the surveys in 2004 and 2010, despite the lack of much grouse shooting.

Could this indicate that illegal persecution is not the only reason for the decline of Hen Harriers in the UK? Perhaps it was just a poor year for rodents in 2010 so many Hen Harriers choose not to breed - data in future years may give more indication as to whether or not there is a problem with the Manx Hen Harrier population.

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"The persecution of the Hen Harrier over many has nearly wiped out the species in England all because people want to go out and shoot a grouse!"

Illegal persecution of Hen Harriers is clearly a real problem, and has without any doubt contributed to the decline (extemination?) of breeding Hen Harriers in England. However, is it really fair to say that illegal persecution is the main cause? If there was no persecution of Hen Harriers in England how do we know that they would not still be declining in numbers? Perhaps illegal persecution has contributed to, and hastened, a decline which could have occurred anyway but has gone unnoticed because of the obvious illegal persecution.

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"We have habitat that would hold 300 plus nesting pairs"

This is an often quoted 'fact' based on an assessment of the amount of habitat apparently similar to the habitat chosen by nesting Hen Harriers in the UK which is found in the UK as a whole, and taking into account the typical size of Hen Harrier territories.

The problem is that apparently suitable habitat is often not occupied by birds, even if there is no human persecution and no other reason that we know of for the absence of breeding pairs. The assumption that if there was no persecution we would have 300+ nesting pairs of Hen Harriers is one that cannot be upheld because we have no way of knowing whether there are other factors affecting their breeding distribution.

If similar habitat mapping studies were carried out for species such as Willow Tit, Tree Sparrow, Wryneck, etc, I wonder how many pairs of those species it would be determined should be present in comparison to the numbers we actually have breeding (probably well over 100, 000 more Tree Sparrow pairs than we actually have!).

Some interesting points Roy,our views might be a little different having lived,bird watched and recorded in one of the countries "blackspots" for 50 + years.I do find it a little worrying however when everything is blamed on the keepers in my view not all are bad but they are sometimes all lumped together

Really interesting comments Roy. Have they ever bred anywhere else? Its weird that they seem to have concentrated on moorlands.

I can only speak of local records and can only find nesting records for moorland or similar areas,Roy will probably have wider experience and have details of them nesting in other habitat.

Roy,think there are a couple of faults in your comment,the agricultural pesticides and herbicides are not intended to cull any animals just control pests and diseases they are a sorry side affect.The pity is they are used not by farmers for poisoning Hen Harriers but by the Grouse shooters.

The other culling you mention is legal and for sure nothing legal in culling Hen Harriers.

All your comment is really irrelevant as all everyone is concerned with is the illegal persecution of Hen Harriers.