Protection amounts to little Bill Baston/FLPA

The British authorities stand accused of turning a blind eye to “blatant” killings of endangered birds of prey. A new study found 81 confirmed attacks on protected raptors during 2016, but not one prosecution.

“In most other countries, they would never have allowed this to occur,” says Arjun Amar, a bird conservationist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

The cases included 40 shootings and 22 poisonings of hen harriers, peregrine falcons, red kites and buzzards. Yet the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which carried out the Birdcrime study, says they were “the tip of the iceberg”.


Most of the incidents were on moorlands in Scotland, the Peak District and North Yorkshire that are used for commercial grouse shooting, the report says. Raptors hunt grouse.

Persecution is the main factor limiting the growth of populations of raptors in much of the country, says RSPB investigations officer Guy Shorrock. “There are laws to protect these birds, but they are clearly not being put into action.” In recent years, six people on average have been prosecuted annually for offences against birds of prey, he says. He wouldn’t speculate on why there were none last year.

Scale of the problem

The number of killings is small compared with some other European countries. More than 20 million birds are killed or captured over Europe each year, mostly during mass migrations over the Mediterranean, according to a 2016 study by BirdLife International and others. Perhaps 80,000 of those are raptors.

However, the impact of the British losses may be greater because the local raptor populations are so small, says Amar.

The number of breeding pairs of hen harriers, which are among Britain’s rarest raptors, has declined by 27 per cent in the past 12 years to just 545, with just three in England, according to the report. “We know that the number one factor limiting the population size of hen harriers is persecution on grouse moors,” says Amar.

Earlier this year, government agency Scottish Natural Heritage reported the results of a programme to fit young golden eagles with satellite tags. A third of the 131 tagged birds disappeared “under suspicious circumstances”, mostly in areas managed as grouse moors. “Persecution of young eagles is suppressing the golden eagle population in the central and eastern Highlands, and hampering overall recovery from historic, widespread persecution,” the report said.

UK prosecutions sometimes fail even when the evidence appears strong. In May, a prosecution against a former gamekeeper, who had been filmed by the RSPB apparently shooting a hen harrier, was dropped days before going to court.

“There are few countries where the direct persecution of raptors associated with a specific land use is so blatant and so obvious as it is with grouse shooting in the UK,” says Amar. “My students here in South Africa really struggle to believe it, especially when they see so much anger [from Europe] being directed at South Africa’s inability to control rhino poaching.”

The RSPB wants grouse shooting to be allowed only under licence. This would allow bans on estates where gamekeepers or others shot or poisoned raptors. In Spain, which also has a tradition of attacking birds of prey, “they have teams of trained dogs to detect poison use on hunting estates, and where poisoning is detected, they can ban hunting”, says Amar.