Rise in population of crows and avian predators linked to pheasant shoots

Call for ecological impact assessment of huge numbers of non-native gamebirds released in UK by shooting industry

Patrick Barkham

Tue 2 Jul 2019 00.01 BSTLast modified on Tue 2 Jul 2019 00.25 BST

Large-scale pheasant and partridge shoots are boosting the populations of avian predators including crows, jays, ravens and buzzards, which are feeding on millions of the non-native gamebirds, according to a new study.

Despite gamekeepers legally trapping and shooting many avian predators to protect pheasants and partridges, researchers found “multiple positive associations” between areas of lowland Britain with large numbers of reared pheasants and partridges and higher populations of avian predators.

Ecologists say crows, ravens and other avian predators are feeding on many of the pheasants and partridges, which are released as young birds into the countryside. Pheasants killed by vehicles on roads also provide carrion for birds such as buzzards.

About 43m pheasants – a non-native species originally from Armenia and Georgia – are released into the British countryside each year, with only 13m birds shot, according to the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) data analysed in a second new paper published in British Birds by the wildlife campaigner Mark Avery.

Other European countries release far fewer gamebirds – 3m captive-reared birds are put into the Spanish countryside each year, with about 15m in France – and Britain has higher overall densities of versatile, medium-sized predators such as foxes and crows than other European countries. Ecologists believe one reason is because larger predators such as lynx have been driven to extinction but many also point to huge quantities of released gamebirds providing food for foxes, badgers and red kites.

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Buzzards back in hunters’ crosshairs over threat to UK pheasant shoots

Licences for gamekeepers to kill the protected bird of prey will open the floodgates to illegal hunting, warn conservationists

Dan Glaister

Sunday 18 September 2016 00.04 BST
 
Tim Boxall points at a shape in the field bordering the seven-acre wooded pen where he keeps 1,500 pheasants. “Here you are,” he says. “Look! There’s one over here.” He bends down and prises the remains of a pheasant from the long grass. “That’s a buzzard kill, you can tell by the way it’s been eaten.”

Boxall is a gamekeeper, raising 10,000 pheasants a year to be killed in commercial shoots on the land he rents in Gloucestershire. This year, however, the pheasants have something other than Boxall’s clients to fear: the buzzard.

“There’s an old saying: where there’s livestock, there’s going to be deadstock,” Boxall says. “You accept the buzzards are always going to have some, but this year was horrendous. I lost 500 pheasants at £3.75 each. It cost me £75 a day to pay someone to sit there all day to watch over them, basically sunbathing for two weeks, but it did keep them away.”

The buzzard’s robust health – and its appetite for pheasants – has brought the protected bird of prey into the sights of the shooting industry. At the end of July, Natural England, the government agency tasked with protecting England’s wildlife, issued a licence allowing a gamekeeper to shoot up to 10 buzzards to stop them killing pheasants. Last week it announced that four more licences were under consideration. While the announcement couldn’t come soon enough for Boxall, it has left many conservationists up in arms.

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RSPB backs pheasant shoots and says they’re good for the countryside

Wildlife benefits from management of copses and hedgerows, argues conservation director

Dan Glaister

Sunday 29 March 2015 00.05 GMTLast modified on Sunday 29 March 201500.09 GMT

The UK’s managed shoot industry, which sees millions of pheasants raised and shot every year, has received support from an unexpected quarter.

In a blog published on the website of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, its conservation director Martin Harper has praised the role of managed shoots in protecting wildlife.

“The contribution progressive shoots can make to supporting threatened wildlife is significant, and we are delighted to help them further,” Harper wrote. “This isn’t a contradiction. We simply do whatever nature needs and will work with anyone that wants to help wildlife.”

His views might come as a surprise to some of the RSPB’s 1.1 million members, who would have been persuaded by its original pledge “to discourage the wanton destruction of birds”; they would equally have been a surprise to the RSPB’s detractors in the shooting world.

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