There has barely been time to digest the appalling news of the ‘disappearance’ of two breeding male Hen Harriers from Cumbria’s RSPB’s Geltsdale Reserve, but there’s already news of another suspicious disappearance of a Hen Harrier to get our heads around.
This time it’s a young female called ‘Sita’. She was satellite-tagged in Lancashire’s Forest of Bowland in 2024 with a tag paid for by funds raised by the charity Hen Harrier Action. Sita ‘vanished’ in the Yorkshire Dales National Park (YDNP). A raptor persecution hot spot, the YDNP, like so many of the UK’s upland ‘national parks’ is riddled with grouse shooting.
Sita spent her first winter in the Yorkshire Dales, but her tag suddenly and unexpectedly stopped transmitting on 27 February 2025. Her last known location was a roost site on an unnamed grouse moor within the park.
Her disappearance is being investigated by North Yorkshire Police (who don’t have a good reputation amongst pro-wildlife activists in the area), and presumably also by the Hen Harrier Taskforce, run by the National Wildlife Crime Unit. Raptor Persecution UK (RPUK) notes rather pointedly that three months since Sita disappeared there has been no “public appeal for information or announcement about her suspicious disappearance in what is one of the UK’s worst raptor persecution hotspots”.
National parks and grouse shooting
Supposedly at the centre of efforts to tackle the climate crisis and widely perceived as ‘nature havens’, national parks are dominated by intensively managed grouse moors. An investigation in 2021 by Rewilding Britain reported that grouse moors make up a quarter of the Yorkshire Dales. Across the UK, 44% of the Cairngorms national park, 28% of the North York Moors, a fifth of the Peak District, and 15% of Northumberland national park – a total of 852,000 acres, an area more than twice the size of Greater London – is owned and managed for killing grouse.
Raptor persecution is a part of doing business on these moors, with many estates simply not tolerating birds of prey under any circumstances. Persecution has been so bad in both the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales parks that the RSPB, normally an organisation willing to be friends with anyone no matter what, has walked away from initiatives supposed to tackle raptor persecution because of shooting lobbyists.
Set up in 2011 by the National Park Authority, the Peak District Bird of Prey Initiative‘ was intended to restore populations of birds of prey (or raptors) to 1990s levels, but it crashed in April 2023 amidst ongoing deliberate (and illegal) persecution of those same birds of prey on the numerous driven grouse moors that blight the park (see ‘Sun sets on on failed Peak District Bird of Prey Initiative’).
As a statement at the time indicated, the Peak District National Park (which occupies a huge area of uplands to the south and east of Manchester) is (or at least should be) home to “populations of iconic species such as the peregrine, goshawk, merlin – the UK’s smallest raptor – and the hen harrier, one of the most persecuted birds of prey in the country. A supporting cast of other raptors includes the short-eared owl, with increasing sightings of red kites and ospreys.”
Far from being the natural paradise for birds of prey that it ought to be, though, the Peak is a hot spot for persecution. As the statement goes on to say,
“Despite more than a decade of the initiative, which included representatives from the landowning and gamekeeping community, experienced raptor surveyors, conservation groups, the police and other bodies, populations of many of the key species have not increased at the rates initially hoped for with some seeing no improvement at all. Whilst hen harriers have returned to the area, successful breeding currently remains limited.
Those involved in the annual surveying of raptors within the study area – largely comprising the National Park’s ‘Dark Peak’ uplands, have recently stated they no longer felt they could continue supporting the group. The RSPB stepped down as a member of the initiative in 2018.
Incidents of shooting, poisoning, trapping, nest destruction or the disappearance of satellite-tracked birds active within the Peak District have featured in every year of the initiative’s monitoring.”
In June 2023, RPUK reported that an FOI submitted by Dr Ruth Tingay to the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority had revealed that the RSPB had walked out of a so-called Birds of Prey ‘Partnership’ after the grouse moor owner’s lobbying group Moorland Association engaged in what RPUK termed “all too familiar propaganda techniques”.
In information revealed by the FOI, the RSPB says that “unless the industry accepts the scale of the challenge around hen harrier recovery, further endless dialogue isn’t worth having” especially when ‘moorland representatives’ were not willing to accept that satellite-tagging data was proving the “clear pattern and scale of the issues affecting species like harriers”.
Satellite tags – Peregrines are hiding them in their nests apparently…
Satellite tagging – fitting chicks of birds of prey with highly reliable, lightweight GPS tags which can record the birds’ locations – has become invaluable, collecting indisputable data on the last movements of raptors before they ‘vanish’ or ‘mysteriously disappear’ on grouse moors. It’s little wonder that the Moorland Association was lobbying for the dropping of the requirement for young birds involved in Natural England’s ridiculous ‘brood meddling’ scheme to be tagged (see Hen Harrier Brood Meddling: “Illegal killing of Hen Harriers has continued“).
Even Natural England – which has seemed happy to give shooting an endless supply of ‘last chance’ cards – recognised the importance of tags in proving persecution when they (rather obliquely) stated “Satellite-tagged birds have not shown first-year survival rates at levels that would be expected from populations with no illegal killing.”
Remarkably, rather than acknowledge the obvious truth, grouse shooting’s supporters are now unifying around wild suppositions and flat-out untruths. They are making nonsensical claims on various media that Hen Harriers that have been ‘pinged’ repeatedly on grouse moors until the moment they suddenly ‘vanish’ into thin air, have actually been turned into harrier mince in the blades of wind turbines hundreds of miles away.
Even more ludicrously, like some deluded drunk in a run down country pub jabbing his finger from the far end of the bar at imaginary ‘ignorant townies’, some are certain that persecution is nothing to do with gamekeepers at all, but is actually down to Peregrines, a bird of prey that may indeed take the occasional harrier but which are also ruthlessly persecuted on grouse moors by – er, gamekeepers.
What neither the turbine-or-peregrine-fantasists can explain is why the bodies and the tags are NEVER recovered from below the turbine or the bottom of a Peregrine’s nest. Satellite tags don’t stop working because the bird wearing them has been killed. They keep transmitting. Field workers go out and look for them but can almost never find them. Peregrine nests are typically monitored, especially in regions where they overlap with Hen Harriers. If tags were there (or even nearby), they would be found.
So difficult are these tags to find, the National Wildlife Crime Unit is turning to detection dogs – who have noses 100,000 more times sensitive than our own – to find hidden raptors and the tags they were wearing. Even they would have struggled to locate one tag fitted to a Golden Eagle that disappeared on a Perthshire grouse moor in 2016, but which was – remarkably – found in a Highland river wrapped in lead in 2020. Peregrines are beautifully evolved for fast flight and hunting, but even the most deluded shooting fanatic would have to admit that they’ve not evolved to the point where they are using welding equipment…
Sita
It may be that Sita, yet another satellite-tagged Hen Harrier to disappear from a grouse moor, will turn up. She may even turn up alive.
