A report on hen harriers published by the RSPB just days ahead of last month’s debate on Wild Justice’s petition to ban driven grouse shooting highlighted the 43 per cent decline in the number of hen harrier chicks fledging in 2024 compared to 2023. Although the report acknowledged that several factors had been cited as possibly contributing to the decline, including poor weather potentially impacting prey availability, it was suggested that other pressures could have contributed to the lower figures and that the two regions with the most significant declines were managed for grouse shooting and linked to several confirmed and suspected Hen Harrier persecution incidents in recent years. Hardly surprisingly, the implication that it was illegal persecution and not the weather that resulted in last year’s fall triggered the tabling of a Parliamentary Question in which the government was asked what steps they were taking to introduce licensing of grouse shooting in England.
2024 was indeed disappointing for hen harrier breeding success in England. It was also an appalling breeding season for red grouse and the other species of ground nesting birds that share our upland habitat to breed. They, along with the hen harrier, are particularly vulnerable during the breeding season and the constant cold and wet weather experienced in April and May last year saw many nests fail. With the bad weather continuing into June and early July the impact on those chicks that had initially managed to survive was also disastrous.
However, last year’s figures for hen harriers should be kept in perspective. In 2013 no hen harriers nested in England and despite the lower figures for 2024 they were significantly higher than any of those recorded prior to Natural England issuing the first licence for Brood Management in 2018. Before that, the highest number of successful nests was in 2005 when 15 were recorded, and the highest number of chicks fledged was 46 in 2006. As you can be seen from the below chart, last year’s figures of 25 successful nests and 80 chicks fledged are still considerably higher than any of those recorded prior to the start of the Trial, thanks to the efforts of moorland managers.
It is unfortunate that the RSPB should attempt to disregard the weather as being the main contributing factor to last year’s decline, implying instead that it was other more sinister pressures that were the cause, and using that as a means of furthering its relentless campaign against driven grouse shooting. But then the RSPB has had no part in the considerable success of Defra’s Hen Harrier Brood Management Trial, even going so far as to actively try and prevent it, the Court of Appeal in November 2021 upholding the decision of the High Court to dismiss legal challenges that had been bought against the Trial by the RSPB, the High Court having dismissed their application on all the seven grounds they had put forward.
The reintroduction of hen harriers to southern England, like the Trial Brood Management Scheme, is another of the six component parts of Defra’s Hen Harrier Action Plan which was published in 2016, the purpose of which is to understand and reverse the decline of hen harriers in England. Whilst the reintroduction of a species is an internationally recognised conservation tool, the RSPB appears not to support its use when it comes to the hen harrier. Indeed, correspondence from Defra and Natural England that was obtained by the Countryside Alliance under the Freedom of Information Act clearly showed that someone within the RSPB was responsible for preventing Natural England’s southern reintroduction of hen harriers using chicks from Spain in 2019. In doing so, they were intentionally undermining attempts to improve the conservation status of hen harriers in England.