A TALE OF COLLUSION AND LIES ABOUT BROOD MEDDLING FROM PROTECT.THE WILD

Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Hen Harier Brood Meddling: "Illegal killing of Hen Harriers has continued." Of course it has. Natural England may have had good intentions but landowners were only ever interested in how much money they make sellling grouse CHARLIE MOORES MAR 27 READ IN APP On the 14th March 2025 a blog on the Natural England (NE) website announced the ‘Conclusion of the Hen Harrier Brood Management Trial’. With a curious mix of exaggeration and understatement, John Holmes, NE’s Director, Strategy - Landscape, Peat and Species, wrote that “The experimental trial of hen harrier ‘brood management’ has ended, concluding that this activity has contributed to increased numbers of nesting hen harriers on some grouse moors. However, However, illegal killing of hen harriers has continued, and a range of approaches may continue to be required to maintain and build on the progress we have seen in recent years.” Of course the illegal killing of Hen Harriers continued. And while there is a grouse shooting industry it always will. Hen Harriers Hen Harriers are highly protected birds of prey. They have a varied diet, eating a lot of voles, some Meadow Pipts, and Red Grouse chicks. This is entirely natural, part of a normal upland ecosystem and predator-prey relationship. But it infuriates the shooting industry. Hen Harriers have had legal protection since 1954 and the Protection of Birds Act but in the eyes of extremely wealthy, often highly-subsidised moorland estate owners, every chick eaten is money lost. A chick eaten by a harrier is one less grouse to be sold to the guns. Shooting estates have openly said that if there are ‘too many’ Hen Harriers on a moor they can’t run a profitable business. The industry has had decades to come up with a more sophisticated response than raptor persecution. Requests for ‘help’ should be met with “These are highly protected birds. If you can’t run your business legally, we will close it down”. Instead, Natural England offered up, “These are highly protected birds, but we’re sorry you’re finding them an inconvenience. How about we bend Schedule One rules which forbid the disturbance of protected birds and their chicks and get the taxpayer to move them around the country for you…?” Adopt a Bird Brood meddling Which is exactly what Natural England did. Launched as part of a nonsensical ‘Hen Harrier Action Plan‘ and far more widely known as ‘Hen Harrier brood meddling,’ this highly controversial ‘experiment’ was a conservation sham sanctioned by DEFRA - the government department that, as anyone who has followed the iniquities of the equally sham ‘badger cull’ will know, has an appalling record when it comes to ‘seeking solutions’ focussed on landowners and protected species. Meddling was carried out by Natural England between 2018 – 2024. Remarkably (or perhaps not given the cosiness between governments past and present and shooting lobbyists) they partnered with the very industry responsible for the persecution that had led to the species’ catastrophic decline in England in the first place. The ‘plan’ allowed for the licenced removal of Hen Harrier chicks from grouse moors (once widespread Hen Harriers almost exclusively nest on upland moors now). The chicks were reared in captivity, fitted with lightweight satellite tags to track their movements, and then released back into the uplands. The idea - laughably - was that grouse shoots would ‘appreciate’ the lower density of Hen Harriers on ‘their’ moors and be persuaded not to kill harriers - birds remember protected by law since the 1950s. But this was always going to be a temporary reduction. As Natural England was repeatedly warned would happen, as they grew older the chicks naturally gravitated back to the optimal habitats on the moors where they found the right conditions, and massive (and unnatural) overstocking of Red Grouse. Many would be - and were - quickly and illegally killed. Or to put it in Natural England’s slightly coy language, “Satellite-tagged birds have not shown first-year survival rates at levels that would be expected from populations with no illegal killing.” Taxpayers pumped a colossal amount of money into this doomed ‘plan’ (a widely quoted figure from mid-2023 is £900.000), but no extra money was put into enforcing Hen Harrier protection. Chicks were all fitted with satellite tags, but there was no funding for random checks on moors (landowners refused point blank to allow that), no recruitment of extra investigators, no government-funded undercover surveillance. Neither was there an honest and much-needed calling out of the routine law-breaking by the shooting industry. The paper promises of that same industry - one with zero conservation credibility and serious long-term difficulties with the truth - amounted to absolutely nothing. In fact, as Mr Holmes explains in his blog, rather than being persuaded this was a workable 'solution' to the perceived problem “half of moorland managers thought that the trial had led to increased predation and disturbance of grouse by hen harriers on participating estates.” Adopt a Bird Profit first, grouse second, harriers a long way third… The parallels between DEFRA’s plan to exterminate badgers to appease the farming industry and Natural England’s plan to allow the removal of Hen Harrier chicks from moorland nests to appease the shooting industry are striking. Neither has achieved their supposed objectives: the farming industry is determined to kill badgers no matter what the truth about Bovine Tb, and the shooting industry will always kill Hen Harriers no matter how many ‘plans’ are put in place. It’s hard to know what Natural England honestly expected would happen. Protect the Wild will generously allow that the team at Natural England went into this ‘experimental trial’ with good intentions, that despite all the previous evidence of extensive raptor persecution and the lack of cooperation with the Police or other statutory bodies, they were actually hopeful they could prove that Hen Harriers and the shooting industry could happily co-exist. That the reluctant assurances they received would mean long-term change and respect for the law (and by extension respect for Hen Harriers). We weren’t ‘in the room’ of course, but (to draw an analogy from current events) neither were we on the call between Trump and Putin, but anyone with even half a brain could have predicted that Putin’s ‘promises’ would be broken as soon as he hung up the phone. Putin wants to be allowed to continue swallowing up part of Europe with no interference from NATO, and the shooting industry wants to be allowed to kill whatever it judges impacts its profits with no interference from Natural England, the Police, or the rest of us. We should be entirely clear-eyed about this. The grouse shooting industry kills Hen Harriers for one reason and one reason alone. It thinks that birds of prey - and Hen Harriers in particular - impact the profits it makes from selling Red Grouse to its clients. It went along with the sham ‘trial’ because it hoped it might make more profit by legally (for a change) getting rid of harriers, and it hoped it would convince an increasingly sceptical public that it was capable of farming birds for the gun without getting caught breaking the law. Never enough The nub of the problem is that like Putin and his land-grabbing, the industry doesn’t delineate ‘how much more’ it wants - it just wants more. The industry has never put a limit on how many grouse it can rear and sell (owners sell what they term ‘ surplus’, a vile term that should never be applied to wild birds or any other living animal). Estimates are that moors are currently stocked at up to ten times the natural density of grouse and estates are already allowed to legally trap and kill as many mammalian predators as possible to ensure things remain that way. There is no legal limit on how many birds can be shot. A group of around ten clients can expect to kill around 200 birds a day. The fee for the privilege of standing in a butt while a lackey feeds you a constant supply of pre-loaded guns runs into the thousands of pounds. A Tatler article once tellingly described the ‘sport of kings’ as “uniting everyone from old school aristocracy to modern-day billionaires” - how’s that for a jaw-dropping example of inclusivity…but it shows (even if slightly exaggerated) what is at the heart of the so-called ‘conflict’ between wildlife and moorland managers: money. Adopt a Bird The killing continued Given its concerns with ‘money above all else’, why would Natural England think the greedy shooting estates, bloated on their ‘aristocratic’ connections and used to obsequious unquestioning support from even modern-day media, might row back on ‘illegality’ when it was being handed everything it wants? This was never (to again use a current analogy) a ‘coalition of the willing’. This was an entirely one-sided ‘plan’ which would only ever benefit the shooting industry - and even then they couldn't give up on their routine fallback: criminality. Far from being even remotely grateful that they’d persuaded government to listen to their pitiful whining about ‘conflict’ (despite what they want us to think, only ever used by the industry in a financial context), estates simply carried on killing Hen Harriers. The remarkable Raptor Persecution UK (RPUK) website has kept a rolling tally, using their own formidable contact list and compiling police reports, of Hen Harriers killed since the ‘trial’ began. Thanks in very large part to RPUK, we know that in total fifteen Hen Harrier nests were brood meddled during the trial period and 58 chicks released back into the uplands. We know too that at least 30 of those brood meddled chicks were either killed or ‘disappeared in suspicious circumstances’ (a euphemism used for legal reasons to convey an element of doubt where there is almost total certainty). These killings - as GPS data from satellite-tagging proved - took place mostly on or close to driven grouse moors. Many were killed within a few weeks or months of being released. In addition to those 30 young birds, RPUK lists (by name in nearly all cases) another 104 Hen Harriers that were killed or ‘disappeared’ during the brood meddling trial period. As RPUK notes, that figure “will definitely rise” once police reports on further cases are published. Caught red-handed, the door should have been firmly shut on any plans to further appease the industry. Plans to dismantle it should have been set in place. Incredibly, though, the Moorland Association (a shooting lobbyist organisation made up of wealthy landowners) has suggested that it will come back to the negotiating table under a set of conditions which outrageously includes that the ‘trial’ requirement for brood meddled Hen Harrier chicks to be satellite-tagged should be dropped! That’s somewhat akin to burglars, rapists, and murderers demanding that DNA evidence be dropped from trials in court. Adopt a Bird No licencing A handful of Hen Harriers killed by the industry during a ‘trial’ specifically designed to placate it would have been a huge snub to Natural England. These actual figures - which only include birds that we know about and not the unrecorded ‘clean’ (untagged) individuals ‘nolled’ (as gamekeepers caught in a covert recording by the RSPB and broadcast on Channel 4 news) termed it - should have been a devastating rebuff that proved once and for all that estates are (to use the term applied to fox hunting by some police forces) little more than a collection of organised crime gangs. Indeed, the killing of Hen Harriers and other birds of prey has been identified by the National Wildlife Crime Unit as organised crime and the people involved are an Organised Group. As the renowned Northern England Raptor Forum put it in a blog, “That is what they are and we should never lose sight of that fact.” There is no good reason at all for this industry to exist. Alongsde a long list of damage and harm it causes, the fact is - as the ‘trial’ has proved - it will kill Hen Harriers as long as there are Hen Harriers to kill. But the response to these ‘bad actors’ is to suggest that ‘grouse moor licencing’ will somehow curtail their worst instincts. Even leaving aside its long and inglorious history of persecution and hatred of native predators, the more than a hundred Hen Harriers killed during the ‘Hen Harrier Action Plan’ should be enough for even the most pliant of ‘on the fence’ shooting neutrals to know that suggestion is absolute bollocks. We’ve explained our position before but as the evidence piles up, we will repeat it again. We will never support a grouse moor licencing system because: Licencing means accepting that the mass slaughter of grouse (and the killing of native predators on grouse moors) is ‘okay’. It is not. It legitimises it and we find that unacceptable; Birds of prey like Hen Harriers ostensibly already have all the legal protection they should need, the problem is that the laws are widely ignored. We see no reason to believe that situation will change; Right now there is barely any enforcement of existing legislation. No estate has ever handed over criminal gamekeepers voluntarily, and no extra police or investigators are currently being confirmed as part of the licencing ‘offer’; Landowners dont want it and won’t agree to it, and even if a licencing system could be made robust (which it won’t be as Scotland’s fox hunting licencing system has dramatically proved recently) defence lawyers will entangle any cases in the courts for years while estates carry on regardless; And licencing acts like a blank slate for all the criminality that has taken place over the decades since raptor persecution was made illegal. The future of ‘brood meddling’ Incredibly, John Holmes concludes his blog by saying “At time of publication, no decisions have been made on any future [brood meddling] licences.” In other words, the so-called ‘partnership’ between NE and the shooting industry has “now closed”, but there is still the possibility that licences for Hen Harrier brood meddling might be rolled out on a wider, annual basis. That is ridiculous. Numerous partnerships designed to protect birds of prey that involved the grouse shooting industry have failed. A recent example is The Peak District Bird of Prey Initiative which began in 2011. The RSPB quit in 2018, and the initiative was killed off in April 2023. In a very similar vein, in May 2023 three years after it was set up, the RSPB finally quit The Yorkshire Dales Birds of Prey Partnership - which involved BASC, CLA, National Gamekeepers Organisation, and Moorland Association - followed by the Northern England Raptor Forum walking away in September 2024. The Hen Harrier Action Plan was doomed from the outset. When one side mocks, taunts, and has zero respect for the other side, the outcome is inevitable. The well-worn quote about insanity and doing the same thing expecting different results applies here. The shooting industry has had since 1954 to stop killing Hen Harriers. It has had chance after chance to reform and instead it has become an increasingly reviled, distrusted, anachronism. Protect the Wild campaigns on three key issues: stopping fox hunting, stopping the badger cull, and stopping bird shooting. It is widely acknowledged that despite legislation banning hunting with hounds, Police forces and politicians have enabled fox hunting to continue with few consequences. It is becoming accepted that despite legislation protecting badgers, Defra has given landowners a green light to kill as many of them as they can. It would be a disaster for Natural England if they ignored the evidence and the results of their own ‘trial’ and enabled the shooting industry to continue killing birds of prey with impunity. Adopt a Bird By adopting a bird with Protect the Wild you will help us put ‘eyes in the field’ to tackle raptor persecution, our campaign efforts to get proper protection for all bird species, and change attitudes about shooting and the shooting industry. As an adopter you will receive an exclusive Protect the Wild adoption pack including our cuddly owlet, glossy photo, and an information fact sheet. SHARE LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2025 Protect the Wild Protect the Wild, 71-75 Shelton Street Covent Garden, London, W2CH 9JQ Unsubscribe Start writing