Monday 10 December 2012
Written by a good friend of mine - it appears that Grouse Moor owners and their keepers have gone back to the Victorian times and are happy to shoot everything they consider a threat regardless of the law and the desire of the rest of the country.
DEATH OF BOWLAND
BETH
Bowland Beth, a first year
female Hen harrier has been shot and recovered from a Yorkshire grouse moor.
I visited The
Forest of Bowland in Lancashire towards
the end of May in 2012. Bowland had once been the stronghold of breeding Hen
harriers in England. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there had been 20+
pairs. Then there’d been a decline which was reversed from 2003 to 2008
followed by a severe decline to none in 2012.
I was told that
at the moment the outlook for Hen harriers in England was dire. Perhaps this was
going to be the year when Bowland would lose its breeders, they were down to
single pair and that was in the north of England. Maybe I would be lucky and see Bowland Beth – named after the character
Bet Lynch in the TV soap opera Coronation Street. She was a female fledged at Bowland in
2011 and she had been fitted with a satellite transmitter. Satellite tracking
has revolutionised our knowledge of the Hen harriers comings and goings. From them
it may be possible to evolve a strategy to protect harriers. I’d already seen
the video recording made at that nest and I knew she was the most precocious of
the four chicks, the first to fledge.
I was shown a
print out from the satellite tracking Beth’s
journeys. On 23rd July
last year she left The Forest of Bowland and flew to the Yorkshire Dales
spending the autumn and early part of the winter on a grouse moor Bethween
Grassington and Pateley Bridge. Did she have some ancestral map in her brain
that enabled her pin point the best foraging areas but also the best places to
roost? She returned to Bowland on 2nd February 2012. In mid-March she again headed back to the
grouse moors in Yorkshire before returning to Bowland. In April she returned to
the grouse moors in Yorkshire and to my amazement, within the next ten days,
she travelled 450 kilometres to a point just north of Inverness. What racial
memory pulled her in that direction, were her ancestral ties linked to the
Orkneys? Anyway two days later she was
back in Bowland. I marvelled at the
mobility of this fine bird. I was told
that RSPB staff had seen her ‘skydancing’
and ripping up bits of heather so it looked like she is about to breed if she
can find a mate.
She had no luck
finding a mate, so on 1st May she left Bowland heading for
Drumnadrochit, passed through Forsinard in the flow country – that would have
been a good place to stay - and reached Thurso on 8th May. An epic
journey of 510 kms.
Over the next
twelve days she wended her way back south again and was in the Grampian
mountains by 20th May. What an adventurous, feisty lady she was and
no sign of a mate yet.
I had endless discussions
with conservationists and a grouse moor owner about what was being done to save
the Hen harrier from extinction in England. As long ago as 2006 The Environment
Council set up a Hen Harrier Stakeholders
Committee to try and resolve the conflict between the conservationists and
the owners of the grouse moors. At the moment there isn’t any conflict because
there aren’t any Hen harriers on grouse moors in England
If Hen harriers
were ever allowed to breed undisturbed and numbers increased sufficiently a
scheme has been discussed in which a quota of surplus Hen harrier chicks would
be translocated from grouse moors, reared artificially and then re-located back
to their original sites in the autumn. This has the potential to allow for Hen harriers
and driven grouse shooting to exist side-by-side. At the moment the status of
the Hen harrier as a breeding bird in England hangs by a thread and is
threatened by extinction. The government
have now made a commitment that there will be no extinction of English wildlife
by 2020. If they act immediately the Hen harrier can be saved as a breeding
bird in England.
Unbeknown to me
as I left to catch my train home, Bowland
Beth was homing in on the Forest of Bowland. When I’d last heard of her she
was in the Grampian Mountains. Now she was back in Bowland and quite close to
the nest site where she fledged in 2011. I missed her by about 5 hours.
She stayed at
Bowland for a couple of days and then on 25th May headed north-east
using the prevailing wind to settle on the grouse moors around Pateley Bridge.
This is where she had spent her last autumn and winter. It seemed as though she
had found a good billet for the summer. Her immediate future was secure.
When I got back
there was a message telling me that on June 3rd Beth was still near Pateley Bridge and letting me know that she was
fine.
Another fix on
11th June showed that Beth
had contracted her foraging range to the grouse moors around Nidderdale and
Colsterdale. This was probably due to
several days of prolonged rain. It was one of the wettest Junes in living
memory. Heavy cloud cover meant that for several days there was no accurate fix
on her. On about 14th June I was becoming concerned for her. Maybe
the transmitter had failed. The manufacturers were contacted and asked whether
the last fixes were reliable. I now felt sure that something had happened to Beth sometime between 8th and
11th June. Beth’s approximate
position on a map was known. The landowner
was contacted. He couldn’t have been more co-operative and arranged for the
head keeper to help in the search. Using a hand-held scanner Beth was located at 11 am on 5th
July. She was lying face down in a patch of heather and blueberry. The
satellite tag was plainly visible. A post-mortem showed that she had been shot.
A pellet had broken her leg and nicked the femoral artery. Tests showed really
good traces of lead embedded in the bone. Beth
probably would have been able to fly a few miles before she bled out and
collapsed onto the grouse moor where she was found.
Bowland Beth was a beautiful bird, an amazing bird. Her story is remarkable. We
should be celebrating her life now and her becoming a parent and tracking her
sons and daughters.
We will probably
never know what happened. Perhaps this fearless, naive bird went a wing beat
too far and had to run the gauntlet to regain the grouse moor which she knew as
home. We grieve that, illegally, she was cut down in the prime of life. I hope
she has not died in vain.
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1 comments:
heart breaking! it really makes me angry that these landowners feel they have the right to shoot every living creature. about time they were properly punished
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