Raptor persecution — or Mother Nature?

The Countryside Alliance is quite right to challenge the RSPB’S claim that illegal killing is largely responsible for the decline in hen harrier populations (News, 5 July), though the RSPB does list other factors to help it to defend its allegation. It uses 2010 as the benchmark, but there were 12 pairs nesting in England in 2015 so the decline has been much more dramatic.

I am an amateur waderkeeper on a lowland holding of 1,000 acres in the Scottish Borders. In 2015 I had 10 pairs of buzzard nesting on or close to this ground. Readers will recall the variously named extreme rainfall in the final quarter of 2015, especially storm Desmond in December. The buzzard is a much more diverse and resilient bird than the hen harrier, yet due entirely to this extreme weather, my population was decimated, with only seven birds remaining in the spring of 2016.

Furthermore, of those remaining seven only two pairs were intact and neither nested because they were in such poor condition. Similar findings elsewhere were reported to me. This spring I have three nests, a decline of almost two-thirds from the 2015 population.

If you transpose this across to the decline in hen harriers in England, 12 pairs in 2015 becomes four pairs in 2016 — a similar trend. In other words, the cause of the decline was not persecution but Mother Nature.

The Countryside Alliance, National Gamekeepers’ Organisation and their equivalents in Scotland all have many members on the ground daily. They should be observing and recording what is occurring to ensure that they are in a much stronger position to challenge the spurious allegations of the RSPB. Otherwise, we are always on the back foot.

Better still, they should be making such statements collectively and proactively so that they are controlling the countryside agenda, not reacting to it.

A. Virtue, Scottish Borders

There are many reasons why a species might crash in some seasons