Beak, Tooth and Claw by Mary Colwell

Beak, Tooth and Claw by Mary Colwell

Author:Mary Colwell [Colwell, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-10T22:32:37+00:00


How to unravel the different agendas driven by food production, tradition, money, sport, culture and community vision? The hen harriers and waders find themselves tossed around on stormy waters, unable to find a place to settle that is not dictated by human wants and needs. Simon Lester and I watched a wild bird of prey grab slaughtered chicks from an intensive poultry farm to feed its young, which in turn, if they should fledge successfully, have a high likelihood of being killed by custodians of a sport steeped in a British class system founded on the riches of Empire. The travails visited on bird by man – and it is mainly men – felt as raw as the wind and unfathomably complicated.

Simon, now retired from his role as a gamekeeper on both pheasant and grouse estates, was one of those who worked hard to find a way forward. ‘If we want these uplands subsidised by driven grouse shooting,’ he told me, indicating the open moor around us, ‘then there has to be a mechanism to allow that to happen. I for one wouldn’t like to see a countryside devoid of raptors, but I think there has to be a measure of when enough is enough?’ But I don’t know who decides that – there is no wildlife handbook with the answers laid out. We live in such a human-made environment, no one knows what a ‘natural’ number of any species is, and agreeing it is very difficult. Simon also wasn’t too encouraging about the efficacy of the many meetings that had taken place over the decades. ‘There was a lot of conversation, but I think the frustrations began after the meetings. Perhaps part of the problem stems from the fact that it was always the same people sitting facing each other over the table for years and years. We need fresh thinking and new ideas.’ Simon would favour a whole toolbox of options to be available to keepers of driven grouse moors to enable them both to do their job and to allow hen harriers to share the habitat. But it is a wish-list that many conservationists won’t accept. It includes diversionary feeding, but also the option for the lethal control of common raptors like buzzards, and Simon also supports what is called ‘brood management’.

Brood management, or brood meddling as opponents call it, is a controversial way of limiting the number of hen harriers on a grouse moor. It is part of DEFRA’s Hen Harrier Action Plan, an attempt to rescue this beleaguered bird from national extinction. It was proposed as a trial based in northern England and time limited to two years, 2019 and 2020, and was (and is) being administered by Natural England. The idea was that once an agreed quota of harrier pairs for a moor has been reached (usually one pair per 10 square kilometres), eggs and or chicks from ‘excess’ nests are removed under licence and reared in captivity. The fledglings are then released in the same area, but away from the moor.



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