Bird of
prey 10 times more likely to die on English grouse moors than other habitats
Tue 19
Mar 2019 16.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 20 Mar
2019 13.07 GMT
Hen
harriers are 10 times more likely to die or disappear from or near to English
grouse moors than any other habitat, according to a long-term study which
reveals the scale of the illegal persecution of the endangered raptor.
An
analysis of hen harriers over a decade found 72% of 58
satellite-tagged birds were confirmed or considered “very likely” to have been
illegally killed. Just 17% of juvenile hen harriers survived beyond their first
year around grouse moors in northern England and southern Scotland, compared
with 36% across the Scottish mainland, where persecution has also been
recorded, and between 37% and 54% on Orkney, where there are no grouse moors.
The hen
harrier is almost extinct as a breeding bird in England, despite
scientific studies indicating there is suitable habitat to support more than
300 pairs on English moorland. Conservationists fear the
protected bird is being illegally killed by some gamekeepers because
it eats red grouse. However, because the birds are killed in remote places,
often on private estates, there is seldom evidence of wrongdoing and
prosecutions are rare.
The study
of 58 birds, fitted with satellite tags by Natural England researcher Stephen
Murphy, and published
in Nature Communications, found just seven were still flying at the
end of the 10-year study period in 2017. Of the dead birds which were
recovered, postmortems showed that five had died of natural causes and four had
died because they were illegally killed, while the tags of another four birds
had failed. The vast majority, 38, simply disappeared, their tags abruptly
ceasing to transmit data with no indication of malfunction.
No comments:
Post a Comment