The Wait Goes On to See if Natural England will Issue a Licence to Continue the Work of the Brood Management Trial

This article first appeared in Shooting Times

By Andrew Gilruth, Chief Executive, Moorland Association

With the hen harrier breeding season starting in April, Natural England may have issued a licence to conserve harriers by the time this edition of ST goes to press. But it may not. When it comes to raptor politics, little is straightforward. Six months after applying for a licence, the Moorland Association is still waiting to hear if Natural England is interested in continuing the stunning success of the brood management trial.

The seven-year trial led to the English hen harrier population hitting a 200-year high. The British Trust for Ornithology has concluded that this could only have been achieved through the brood management scheme changing attitudes - a brilliant example of wildlife conflict resolution and co-existence. You might have thought the Government’s environmental adviser, Natural England, would welcome those wishing to continue this work with open arms. Well, you would be wrong.

Contradiction

Keen to follow the international guidelines on wildlife conflict resolution, which say everything should be done to continue projects and so avoid further division, the Moorland Association applied for a licence to continue this work last year.

Natural England explained that if it was before the trial results were published, we would have to make a decision based on the evidence available at the time, which we felt was sufficient. Imagine our surprise when Natural England then contradicted itself by stating that it could not make a decision until all the trial results were published.

Natural England has since published its conclusions on the trial but still no licence. That may be because our application is based on the trial model but we removed the licence conditions which had no legal basis and just added cost and complexity. We also took out conditions which undermined our aim of returning the hen harrier population to favourable conservation status. Surely that would not be a problem? Well, I am afraid it is.

Those that have worked with Natural England will know that it does not like agreeing to removing unnecessary cost and complexity. As with the HS2 bat tunnel, since Natural England is not paying the bill, why should it not add all the cost it likes? What’s more, since Natural England is not responsible for failure, why does it matter if the licence conditions undermine plans to recover the hen harrier population?

If by the time you read this, Natural England has issued a harrier conservation licence, free of unnecessary complexity and cost, please make an effort to congratulate it. However, if it has not, I fear it will be down to the Moorland Association to ask a judge to decide if Defra’s plan to recover the hen harrier population in England should remain on track.

Natural England does not appear overly interested right now. Perhaps it will only want to act when hen harrier numbers to go back down again. It would be nice to think that conservation is about more than waiting for populations to crash.

It’s over 25 years since the late Dick Potts first suggested that hen harrier populations could be managed so that they could thrive alongside economic land use, including grouse moors. It would be fair to say that the idea was not universally popular then, but it initiated two significant trials on Langholm Moor. These demonstrated that this is a case of wildlife conflict and that the RSPB’s silver bullet, diversionary feeding, does not resolve it.

This is precisely why in 2016 Defra stepped in with its ambitious plan to test a technique successfully used in France and Spain to unlock the conflict these birds can create on arable farms. Defra wanted to know if, once a local density is hit, some of the harrier chicks could be taken from subsequent nests in the immediate vicinity and released a few weeks later into the wild.

Since the trial worked, perhaps we should make good use of it? Then again, perhaps it's only other nations that see the sense in keeping the politics out of raptor conservation.

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