As we reported earlier this month, on 14 April 2025 Natural England (NE) quietly released a blog titled “Conclusion of Hen Harrier Brood Management Trial”. In it John Holmes, NE’s Director, Strategy – Landscape, Peat and Species, wrote that “The experimental trial of hen harrier ‘brood management’ has ended…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.”
‘Brood meddling’ – a conservation sham sanctioned by Defra (the government department that licences the equally sham ‘badger cull’) – allowed for the licenced removal of Hen Harrier chicks from grouse moors. The chicks were reared in captivity, fitted with lightweight satellite tags to track their movements, and then released back into the uplands…
…where, as everyone and their dog repeatedly warned Natural England would happen, they were killed by gamekeepers like the ones recorded brazenly discussing ‘nolling Jets’ (killing Hen Harriers) by the RSPB and broadcast by Channel 4 News.
In total fifteen Hen Harrier nests were brood meddled during the 2018-2024 trial period and 58 chicks were released back into the uplands. Just a few weeks ago we wrote that 30 of those brood meddled chicks had either been killed or had ‘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.
Now we can add four more with their dates of last contact…
- ‘Dina’, a female last known position near a grouse moor in the Lammemuirs, south Scotland: 12 January 2025
- A female last known position a grouse moor in the North York Moors National Park: 03 February 2025.
- ‘Beanie’, a female last known position Scotland. ‘Site confidential – ongoing investigation’: 04 April 2025.
- ‘Gill’, a female last known position Scotland. ‘Site confidential – ongoing investigation’: 10 April 2025.
In addition to this quartet, another ‘brood meddled’ female Hen Harrier was found dead in the Yorkshire Dales National Park this spring. She is listed as ‘awaiting post mortem’ and the date of last contact was 02 April 2025.
Natural England’s “Dead Tagged Hen Harrier Spreadsheet’ (No, not an official name of course but it may as well be!)
We know about these five harriers because Natural England keeps a downloadable spreadsheet that they sporadically update – presumably when the data and police reports pile up so high someone feels they really can’t keep it hidden any longer…
Listed at what is officially called the’ Hen harrier tracking update overview’, the spreadsheet makes for incredibly grim reading.
Remember, this is the official collation of data for brood-meddled satellite-tagged Hen Harriers only. It doesn’t include the untagged Hen Harriers targeted by gamekeepers. Remember also that Natural England set up brood meddling to appease shoot operating landowners and that those same landowners ‘promised’ that brood meddling would stop illegal persecution. Or at least help them think about stopping illegal persecution…
We’ve added the highlighting to the end column (Column J: ‘Status’) to make it clear where we think the eyes of the general public should be drawn. Yes, some of the birds listed as ‘Dead’ died of natural causes (one was almost certainly predated by a Goshawk, for example), but far too many have simply ‘disappeared’, vanished over grouse moors where the statistics (thanks almost totally to satellite-tagging) prove unequivocally that mortality due to illegal killing is highest in areas managed for grouse shooting. Many of the birds illegally killed were youngsters (or to use Natural England’s own 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.”)
Little wonder that the shooting landowners’ lobby group Moorland Association (MA) wanted the requirement for Hen Harrier chicks to be satellite-tagged DROPPING from the terms of any new ‘brood meddling’ licences…
Is this April 2025 ‘dead harrier spreadsheet update’ why Natural England ended ‘brood meddling’?
Natural England appears to have sidestepped an ‘awkward conversation’ with their gun-toting colleagues at the MA though. Its April blog was edited to add that one approach it would NOT be taking was to dole out more brood-meddling licences (at least not to the Moorland Association, which appeared to have submitted the sole application): “After the detailed assessment of this specific application, and taking into account the results of the trial, Natural England has made the decision not to issue a licence in this instance.”
In our original article we said unequivocally that it would be “ridiculous” if brood meddling continued. We stated that “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.”
We’re wondering now whether Natural England’s Mr Holmes updates his blog suspending ‘brood meddling’ in the full knowledge that new data on ‘disappearing’ harriers would soon be published by – er, Natural England.
Maybe we’re crediting NE with too much forethought, but by getting ahead of the news it could be argued that NE were taking (for once) a sensible approach to meddling by killing it stone dead. Publish any sort of equivocation after just announcing yet more dead ‘brood meddled’ Hen Harriers and Natural England would look even more out of touch, disingenuous, and (frankly) foolish than it does now.
But Natural England doesn’t seem to care all that much about appearing foolish when it comes to Hen Harriers or it would never have sanctioned its ‘rewarding criminal landowners’ scheme in the first place…
A rolling tally of the dead and missing
We assume that, like us, the vast majority of people reading this like and are excited by Hen Harriers. Many of us will remember the first we ever saw, or have memories of trips to protected moorland in the summer (or coastal saltmarshes in the winter) when a day out was suddenly made all the more thrilling by the sight of a Hen Harrier floating past. If we were especially lucky we may have seen a courting pair ‘sky dancing’.
Seeing a Hen Harrier will always be special, but – and perish the thought we should ever get bored of seeing one – they should be far more common than they are. The reason they aren’t is the shooting industry. There is plenty of habitat to nest in, there is plenty of food to survive on. There are also far too many criminals willing to kill them.
The incomparable Raptor Persecution UK website has kept a rolling tally of Hen Harriers confirmed (NOTE ‘confirmed’) missing or illegally killed in the UK, most of them on or close to grouse moors, since 2018 “because that is the year that the grouse shooting industry ‘leaders’ would have us believe that the criminal persecution of hen harriers had stopped and that these birds were being welcomed back on to the UK’s grouse moors.”
The four Hen Harriers in Natural England’s April 2025 update will bring the total to 138.
One is one too many
138 may not seem like a particularly high number set against the millions of pheasants, partridges, grouse, and ducks the industry kills every year, but the entire UK and Isle of Man Hen Harrier population was surveyed in 2023 and estimated to be just 691 territorial pairs, of which 653 are found in the UK. In 2024, Natural England and partners recorded a total of just 34 breeding attempts in England.
As a percentage that 138 is highly significant, and many of the birds killed ‘on or close to grouse moors since 2018’ were young birds that never had the chance to breed. Killing one really is killing one too many (plus, of course, it’s breaking the law!).
It was almost unheard of twenty years ago to blame the shooting industry for widescale raptor persecution, but over the last decade it has become an accepted fact. There has been an increasing willingness to state that illegal killings on grouse moors are checking any possibility of population growth here. But there still hasn’t been a willingness to take the next obvious step: ending bird shooting.
And by that we mean ALL bird shooting.
It is one thing to focus in on grouse shooting, but the truth is that grouse moors are increasingly finding conditions in the uplands less amenable to the massive over stocking of Red Grouse that it depends on, and are releasing vast numbers of pheasants and Red-legged Partridges on the sub-optimal lower slopes of their moors instead.
To a Hen Harrier (and the clue is sort of in the name) one prey item looks very much like another. Estates don’t kill harriers because they specifically go after grouse: they target them whatever they hunt if it means one less target to sell to their complicit clients.
