The battle over saving the hen harrier

A Government-backed recovery plan should have ended the controversy surrounding this bird of prey; however, the conflict continues

- IAN COGHILL

The hen harrier is at the centre of a bitter conflict. The birds love grouse moors, where their habit of nesting in loose colonies allows numbers to build up to levels that result in the loss of grouse chicks being so great that the moor can become unviable. This, in turn, results in the collapse of grouse shooting, the disappearance of gamekeepers and the end of the control of foxes and stoats. These then kill the chicks of the ground-nesting hen harriers, the population of which consequently dwindles and may even eventually disappear. Thus, in the worst case, everybody loses. No grouse, no employment, the slow death of one of the world’s rarest ecosystems and, ironically, potentially no hen harriers.

An enormous amount of thought and effort has gone into trying to find how this mutually catastrophic outcome can be avoided. Millions of pounds have been spent on research to find a solution that ensures healthy and sustainable hen harrier populations whilst, at the same time, keeping the manifest economic and biodiversity benefits provided by properly conducted grouse shooting. After more than a decade of discussion and debate, a plan was agreed with Government, which was designed to find a way to get more hen harriers in England: the imaginatively titled Hen Harrier Recovery Plan (HHRP).

The HHRP included two elements that have continued to cause controversy: brood management; and the southern reintroduction. The reason they are controversial is simply that the RSPB and its fellow travelers do not like them. The antipathy towards brood management is so great that it has resulted in a judicial review and the southern reintroduction was condemned at a meeting in Parliament by the RSPB’s head of global conservation as in clear breach of the guidelines for reintroductions set down by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).