Last week yet another young Hen Harrier disappeared ‘in suspicious circumstances’ (the phrase used in official announcements which essentially means ‘we know what happened, but we can’t prove it’). ‘Red’ hatched in a nest on the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve in 2024 and ‘disappeared’ on a grouse moor in County Durham in January 2025. Charlie Moores visited the Tarras Valley in 2021 for a short series of podcasts (which are no longer available sadly), and looks back on the thrilling potential of what was then a fledgling reserve – and the fears that everyone had for ‘their Hen Harriers’ once they left the reserve for moorlands further afield…
The Langholm Initiative
Back in December 2021 – and some ten months before I started working with Protect the Wild – I was invited up to Scotland to record a short series of podcasts. They were made to support the Langholm Initiative, a community buyout centred around Eskdale and Langholm (a burgh in Dumfries and Galloway just 20 miles north of Carlisle) that aimed to turn a ‘knackered old grouse moor’ into the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve. The buyout involved local people and the Duke of Buccleuch, one of the richest men in the UK who at the time owned a staggering 217,000 acres of moorland, farms and forestry (the Duke’s family seat at Drumlanrig features on bloodbusiness.info) including Langholm Moor and the Tarras Valley.
The buyout attempt began when Buccleuch Estates announced in May 2019 that they planned to sell 25,000 acres of Langholm Moor and the Tarras Valley. Community interest in buying at least some of the land grew rapidly and the Langholm Initiative launched a fundraising campaign on behalf of the community. ‘The Impossible Dream’ – as it was termed initially – took off. The campaign attracted national interest and support from all over the world, and in just six months attracted £3.8m in grants and funding, including £200,000 raised via an online crowdfunder. When I visited at the tail end of 2021 the community had already bought 5,200 acres of land which included upland moor, ancient woodland, meadows, peatlands and a river valley. Plans were well underway to create a nationally important reserve.
Building on the success of the first fundraiser, a second was launched to buy an additional 5000 acres. The money had to be raised by May 2022 or the land could be put up for sale on the open market, and the chance to manage a whopping 10,000 acres could be lost. Hence the podcasts – a small but hopefully significant contribution to that second fundraising effort. And why on December 7th 2021, just two weeks after Storm Arwen battered Scotland and northern England ripping up trees and bringing down power lines, and on the very same day that Storm Barra battered Scotland, I found myself in a car overlooking the Tarras Valley with Jenny Barlow, Estate Manager of the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve, and Angela Williams, Development Manager of the reserve, before we drove along the track that winds through the valley and out the other side…
Potential
December is not the best time of year to enjoy the wildlife of the Scottish uplands. It’s cold, summer migrants have left, and most wildlife is hunkering down in survival mode. The day I visited the area was lashed with wind and rain. There were no Hen Harriers, the heather wasn’t a vibrant purple, the air was not full of pipits or larks or humming with bees. But then I wasn’t there to see wildlife, I was there to hear about the potential of the reserve, about what it would become. About the Hen Harriers that would breed there, the butterflies and the plants, the Red Grouse and (if they could buy part of the mountains in the distance) the Ptarmigan.
Many years ago (back in the 1970s), I was living in Lancashire and lucky enough to have a grandmother who strongly encouraged her two young grandsons in their growing passion for birds. She would regularly ferry my brother Nial and me to a patch of wetland and farmland that would become Martin Mere, a world-renowned Wildfowl and Wetland Trust Centre. The reserve was still in the planning stages and – remarkably – Peter Gladstone, the then-warden, was also incredibly supportive of the two pre-teens who kept showing up and asking about wintering Hen Harriers and Short-eared Owls. Some days he would point to an area of the reserve and actually allow us to go wandering out over the fields to ‘have a look’. It’s unthinkable that anyone would be allowed to do that now, but looking back it’s clear he wanted us to share the enthusiasm and the vision he had for what he could see was going to be a hugely important site for geese, ducks, raptors, and shorebirds. I haven’t been back for many years now, but I will always feel connected to Martin Mere.
Sitting in the car with Jenny and Angela, I was reminded of how I felt all those years ago. As we talked I found myself connecting with a site with similarly huge potential. They were weaving stories, filling in a rather bleak and barren landscape with pictures of the wildlife that would be there, the colours that would emerge, the life that would come back, over time, to that ‘knackered grouse moor’. It was genuinely inspiring, exciting, and unexpectedly optimistic. I’d seen my first Hen Harrier at Martin Mere. I’ve seen them in many places since, but I knew that if I ever came back to Tarras Valley I would see another, perhaps displaying pairs, even chicks. Protected and safe.
I so wanted to help in some way. I didn’t work for a platform like Protect the Wild back then, but I wanted the excitement of those conversations to be captured in the podcasts I planned. I wanted them to matter. The second fundraiser felt so important. It was vital to get that extra land – not just for the wildlife but for the remarkable team that was planning the future of the reserve, for the community who clearly cared hugely about the valley and the uplands. Vital, too, for the young people who might spend a lifetime trying to protect wildlife after coming to such a wonderful place, seeing its potential, and feeling ‘connected’ to it.
The team did in fact manage to buy the extra land. They are now one of South Scotland’s biggest community landowners, and now legally own 10,500 acres of the Tarras Valley and Langholm Moor. I’m not saying for a second that my podcasts played much of a part – everyone I spoke with back in 2021 were determined to make ‘the dream’ a reality, and they did. It’s an incredible achievement. And Hen Harriers breed in good numbers now: a Facebook post in December 2024 stated that “2024 has been another incredible year for Tarras Valley’s hen harriers! Eight chicks successfully fledged this year, including Ceilidh, Red, and Gilda, who we’ve been thrilled to follow as they explore new territories across the UK.”
The Shooting Industry
The December post from the reserve is both exciting and heartbreaking. ‘Red’, who features so prominently, is dead. Two other Hen Harriers from Tarras Valley disappeared in similar suspicious circumstances, also last seen on English grouse moors, in 2021 and 2022.
We know this because all the birds hatched at Tarras Valley carry ‘satellite tags’ as part of an RSPB programme to gather more information about the movements of these massively persecuted birds of prey. The tags give GPS locations and are worn like tiny rucksacks. They are incredibly reliable, continuing to transmit even after a bird dies. Assuming – that is – the bird dies a natural death. If it is shot and killed on a grouse moor the tag is usually removed and destroyed so the body can’t be traced. That happens routinely, which is why ‘Red’ and so many other Hen Harriers are said to have ‘disappeared’ and why their deaths can’t be proven to be down to persecution.
Understanding where persecution was taking place is why Hen Harriers began to be fitted with satellite tags in the first place. They have proved that persecution is undoubtedly what is happening to these wonderful birds. Amongst a very varied diet (which includes voles and Meadow Pipits), Hen Harriers take grouse chicks – chicks from moorland stocked at levels up to ten times higher than densities found on unmanaged moors. The RSPB says that the majority of raptor persecution incidents are associated with land managed for bird shooting, and a rolling tally kept by Raptor Persecution UK states that ‘Red’ is actually the 134th Hen Harrier to go ‘missing’ or to be illegally killed since 2018 (the year Natural England issued a licence to begin a Hen Harrier brood meddling trial on grouse moors in northern England which they claimed – erroneously and idiotically of course – would end persecution).
Utter indifference
Meanwhile lobbyists for the shooting industry claim that all is well because the number of Hen Harrier chicks being born has been slowly rising.
In fact, though, in September 2024 Natural England reported that there had been a drop in breeding attempts, recording a total of just 34 breeding attempts in England (down from 54 in 2023) of which only 25 were successful, and while the number of chicks was rising – from pathetically low levels at the turn of the century and thanks to the efforts of pioneers like the communities at Langholm and the RSPB – as we have said repeatedly (see Hen Harriers and Greenwashing for example) counting chicks simply doesn’t take into account what will happen to those birds when they start ranging more widely. Many of them will be killed. Killed while they are still young and before they can breed.
It doesn’t really matter how many chicks are born, how much potential a site like Tarras has, how much a community pours its heart into conservation if Hen Harriers are routinely shot on grouse moors. Estates and their employees, gamekeepers like the ones recorded and exposed on Channel 4 talking about taking out ‘bombers’ (their name for Hen Harriers), don’t want more Hen Harriers, they want fewer. Shooting lobbyists talk about clamping down on wildlife crime, but do absolutely nothing about it. It collectively owns far more land than the handful of buyouts and conservationists, they are barely regulated, barely monitored, and simply can’t be trusted. The entire industry is appallingly indifferent to what the rest of us want.
It’s why Protect the Wild has always opposed licencing the grouse industry. There’s no point whatsoever giving it a ‘licencing lifeline’ when the industry has no intention of stopping the persecution, there are no extra funds for enforcement, and the regulations are already being watered down to the point where they are ineffective (much like has happened with the Hunting Act 2004 and the numerous exemptions that have allowed foxhunting to continue).
Neither do we think that it is nearly enough to campaign for a ban on driven grouse shooting. The climate emergency is already altering the way ‘grouse moors’ are run. They are increasingly less viable, and many estates are ramping up pheasant and partridge shooting, exploiting birds which can live out their short lives on less prime moorland (often at lower altitudes than grouse), are reared in pens before release, and are less fussy when it comes to diet. Thousands of these non-native birds can be released in small areas. Anyone who doesn’t think that the gamekeepers will go less hard on Hen Harriers for taking young pheasants or partridges needs their head looking at.
Neither I nor Protect the Wild are spokespeople for the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve of course, but it seems to us that the only answer – the only way that the Hen Harriers born at Tarras will survive to repopulate landscapes across Scotland and England – is to end bird shooting altogether. Not parts of it, but all of it.
Only then can all that hope, that energy, that passion for wild landscapes and biodiversity, and all that potential really be fulfilled.
