The Hen Harrier Read online

  THE HEN HARRIER

  For Joan

  THE HEN HARRIER

  Donald Watson

  Contents

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1Harriers of the World

  2Identification and Plumages

  Part 1THE HEN HARRIER

  3The History of the Hen

  Harrier in Britain

  and Ireland

  4What Kind of Predator?

  5The Breeding Cycle: Courtship to Incubation

  6The Breeding Cycle: Hatching to Fledging

  7Migration and Winter Distribution

  8The Hen Harrier as an Artist’s Bird

  Part 2A STUDY OF THE HEN HARRIER

  IN SOUTH-WEST SCOTLAND

  Introductory note to Part 2

  9The Beginning: The 1950s

  10Watch in The Heather:

  The First Nest

  11Moorland Nesting: 1960–68

  12Forest Nesting: 1965–75

  13Watch From a Hide

  14Nest Sites

  15Breeding Data

  16Food and Hunting Grounds in

  the Breeding Area

  17Food and Hunting Grounds: September–April

  18Communal Roosting in Winter

  19The Hen Harrier: A Controversial Bird

  Appendix 1: Local names of the Hen Harrier

  Appendix 2: Avian Species Mentioned in the Text

  Appendix 3: Non-avian species mentioned

  in the text

  Appendix 4: Protection Under the Acts of

  1954 and 1967

  Bibliography

  Tables

  Acknowledgements

  Plates

  Index

  Foreword

  Forty years ago, when I was a university student, I was given this book as a Christmas present, and it has been close to me ever since. As I write, the spine of my copy of Donald Watson’s Poyser monograph, with its perched grey male Hen Harrier, faces me on the shelf above my desk.

  In those forty years much has changed, but some things remain eternal. Nowadays I spend much of my time at a computer, something that my 19-year old self could not have imagined would be possible. I can search the internet for information and images, and spend my whole time finding out about Hen Harriers if I wish, reaching information that the libraries available to my student self would not have been able to access. But still I often reach out for this book, because it contains much more than mere facts – it contains the love of a naturalist and an artist for a special element of our natural environment.

  Hen Harriers have not changed in 40 years – they are just as beautiful and graceful as ever, and Watson’s descriptions haven’t aged and haven’t dimmed in that time. One of the attractions of the natural world is that it is constant in its essence. A Hen Harrier seen today is the same as one seen 40 years ago or 400 years ago. Nature spans the gaps in human history with a reassuring constancy.

  Donald Watson’s studies added greatly to our knowledge of this bird. For example, he collected valuable information about prey brought to nests, including those nesting in or near young conifer plantations, which were spreading across the uplands. He documented the proportion of Red Grouse in a range of nests, knowing full well that this bird’s depredations on a prized gamebird were the main reason for its illegal but routine persecution by humans. His research helped push back the boundaries of ignorance a little bit further, and, unlike some raptor enthusiasts, he took the trouble to make sure that what he learned was made available to others so that it became part of the common resource. It is in the nature of natural history, and of all scientific study, that one person’s discoveries, once confirmed by others, become part of the corpus of knowledge and as time passes they become established and unremarkable. But they still have to be discovered in the first place, and Watson’s accounts of watches in the heather remain both an excellent guide to fieldwork technique and an insight into the hopes and fears of a field worker. Am I doing this right? Am I disturbing the birds? Am I too close? Too far away? Am I recording the right things? Am I seeing all I could see?

  And as Watson tells us of his observations he draws us into his thoughts and his relationship with this bird. He paints as true and affectionate a portrait of the bird with his words as he did, as an artist, with his pen, pencil and paintbrush. My favourite Watson images of Hen Harriers are those that show the bird in its landscape; among the hills, over a conifer forest or quartering a valley floor for voles among the rushes. The chapter in this book on the Hen Harrier as an artist’s bird is short but couldn’t have been written by anyone other than Donald Watson.

  The final chapter deals with the Hen Harrier as a controversial bird, and this book helped to stir that controversy at the time. Watson described illegality as a part of the normal scene in the hills where he lived. He was clear about the level of illegal persecution of Hen Harriers, and about the source of that persecution – gamekeepers. It was a shock to many when this book brought wildlife crime in the remote hills of Scotland into the purview of the RSPB and BTO memberships. That controversy has intensified as time has passed, because a brighter light has been shone on both the fact that Hen Harriers eat enough Red Grouse to be a real problem for commercial intensive grouse shoots (which was far from clear in Watson’s day) and that the population level of Hen Harriers is dramatically depressed because of criminal persecution.

  These days there are annual gatherings in support of the Hen Harrier every year across the UK, the fate of the bird is discussed in both the Scottish and Westminster parliaments, and petitions are signed calling for reform of upland land use. I can’t tell you what Donald Watson would have thought of all this, but it is certain that he wanted a better future for the bird that he knew so well and loved so much.

  This book is a classic. It remains an impressive source of knowledge even after four decades, but it also stands as one of the finest accounts of the study of any raptor. The Hen Harrier lit a spark for many of us that still burns brightly.

  Mark Avery

  February 2017

  Introduction

  Before 1939, the disappearance of the Hen Harrier Circus cyaneus from most of the British Isles had the same apparent finality as that of the Osprey and the Sea Eagle. There was little chance of seeing a pair of Hen Harriers in the breeding season outside the Orkney islands and some of the Outer Hebrides or, possibly, in Ireland. When my family left the South of England and settled in Edinburgh in 1932, the horizon of my boyhood interest in birds was greatly broadened but did not extend to the haunts of harriers of any kind. I only once saw a Hen Harrier and this was a brown ‘ringtail’ in autumn. The colour plates of beautiful grey males by Thorburn and Lodge, which I had known since childhood, still represented an almost unattainable rarity. As a group, birds of prey attracted me no more than many others, but no young ornithologist could have failed to note that most of the larger predators, which figured prominently in the bird books, were sadly scarce. It did not require much reading to discover that this had not always been so and to learn that deliberate destruction by man and, in some instances, man’s diminution of suitable habitat, were the principal explanations. In the first part of this book I have traced the history of the decline of the Hen Harrier and the recovery which has occurred since the 1939–45 war.

  Male Montagu’s Harrier

  My first real encounter with any kind of harrier was with the Montagu’s Harrier. In the first chapter, ‘Harriers of the World’, this and all other species of the group are briefly discussed. In the summer of 1937 I went on a walking holiday in Western France with my friend Bernard Richardson. I found room in my large pack for a copy of Wardlaw Ramsay’s Birds of Europe and North Africa, hardly an ideal field guide with i
ts lack of illustrations, and with descriptions intended for collectors of specimens. Contrary to the prevailing view at home, that French birds were mainly to be found in cages, this expedition proved to be an ornithological revelation. There were Hoopoes, Woodchat Shrikes and Cirl Buntings in the public park of La Rochelle and, along the sun-baked coast, blue-grey cock Montagu’s Harriers, elegant and graceful as big butterflies, were almost continually on view as they hunted low over the cut hayfields and marshy borders of creeks and ditches. As we climbed from the placid meadows and rich hardwoods of the Vienne valley to a wilderness of heath and birch in the foothills of the Auvergne, we were amazed at the abundance and variety of birds, including birds of prey. Once there were five kinds of raptor in view at the same time—a Sparrowhawk chasing a Goldfinch, several Kestrels and Buzzards, my first Red Kite, and two Hen Harriers which flew within thirty yards of us. Not far away we saw Goshawks and Hobbies too. At that time neither the landscape nor its birds could have changed much in the previous hundred years or more. The scene might almost have been in Perthshire before the era of game preservation had begun.

  In those pre-war days nearly all the writers of books on British birds deplored the shooting, trapping and collecting which occurred, but until the 1954 Protection of Birds Act there was very little concerted opposition to any of these activities. Not much was known about the feeding habits of birds such as Hen Harriers. Ornithologists and game preservers were each apt to make categorical statements based on small amounts of local evidence. When the Hen Harrier started to recolonise the Scottish mainland, partly as a result of the lapse of gamekeepering on grouse moors during the 1939–45 war, there was no escaping the fact that it preyed partly on grouse, and keepers were understandably scornful of ornithologists who stuck by the statement in the Handbook of British Birds that it only occasionally did so. As any reader of this book will soon realise, I am an enthusaist for Hen Harriers and I hope I shall succeed in persuading some sceptics to share my views, but they can rest assured that I shall give an honest account of all I have learned about their habits as predators. No hawk continues to arouse more anger among grouse shooters and their keepers, so many of whom still destroy Hen Harriers ruthlessly in defiance of their legal status as a specially protected bird. Sometimes, its greatest crime is considered to be an ability to scatter driven grouse, as Golden Eagles, or even Herons, can do. In the words of the recently published booklet on predatory birds in Britain, ‘whether [its] predation on game is significant is a matter of much debate but certainly the number taken varies from area to area and individual to individual’. The same booklet, however, makes it quite clear that game species in the wild (such as grouse) are not regarded in law as property and it is therefore against the law to destroy harriers of any kind for taking or disturbing grouse. Later in the book I return to this controversial subject and discuss the harrier as a hunter in Chapter 4, ‘What kind of Predator?’. The postscript, Chapter 19, is my ‘case for the defence’ of the Hen Harrier.

  La Rochelle and that wonderful plateau in the Auvergne were already a distant memory when, in 1944, I discovered the unimaginable richness of bird life in the Arakan district of coastal Burma. Here, from October onwards, amid the devastation of war, the Pied Harrier, most beautiful of the tribe, sailed silently past our gun positions on many days; and Marsh and Pallid Harriers were frequently on view as well.

  In all the brilliant diversity of resident birds and Siberian migrants, few were more satisfying to see than an old male Pied Harrier, in black, silver and white plumage, quartering the green, yellow and gold strips of the ripening paddy fields. I also liked to watch the delicate grey and white male Pallid Harriers but, without adequate reference books, it was difficult to identify females and the many young of the year. Back in the Indian Deccan, in 1945–46, vast expanses of wilderness, interspersed with cultivation and vivid blue lakes, were the winter hunting grounds of large numbers of Pallid, Montagu’s and Marsh Harriers. They often had little fear of man and one day a companion, for devilment, shot a magnificent cock Pallid as it pounced to the ground within easy range. For him it was just ‘some kind of dicky bird’ and he thought I was being ludicrous to protest.

  There are several reasons why harriers, and particularly the Hen Harrier, have a special fascination for me. First, their rarity in my homeland, when I was young, made them something of a challenge. Then, when I first met numbers of them in France, they seemed to embody an exceptional combination of grace and power in flight, something which none of the old bird portraits had in the least conveyed. Also, there was the startling contrast in appearance between the sexes. No book illustration, even less any museum specimen, had given any idea of the conspicuousness of the light grey male when sunlit against a background of rich colour. This, no doubt, was why a cock Hen Harrier over heather moorland pleased me even more than the slightly darker Montagu’s over cornfield, meadow or marsh: the male Hen Harrier was once aptly named the Seagull Hawk.

  Male Pied Harrier

  Like other harriers, a pair on their breeding grounds performs a food pass in which prey is dropped by the incoming male and caught by the female as they come together in flight. This is always a delight to watch. Even more arresting is the extraordinary display flight in which the male, and sometimes the female, abandons all restraint, rising and falling steeply in the sky above the nesting ground with a curious loose wing action, suggesting a wader more than a bird of prey. It is now seventeen years since I found my first Hen Harriers’ nest. Each year I have learned something new. At times there is no more fearless bird in defence of its nest, yet some individuals are quite unaggressive. One of the rewards of a continuing study of one species is the realisation that the character of individuals differs widely and very little behaviour is predictable. An attacking Hen Harrier courts disaster from its human enemies but, for myself, this was yet another reason for admiration, doubtless unashamedly anthropomorphic.

  The life history of the Hen Harrier is not in itself any more remarkable than that of many less dramatic birds. Among its most puzzling features are the tendency to colonial and often polygynous nesting and the association of quite large numbers in communal winter roosts. Similar manifestations occur, for instance, in the drab and exceedingly undramatic little Corn Bunting, studied in Cornwall by Ryves (who was also an enthusiast for Montagu’s Harriers) and by my friend, Donnie Macdonald, in Sutherland. Perhaps I am a less dedicated ornithologist for choosing as my subject a bird which has been described as glamorous. When Trevor Poyser asked me to write and illustrate a bird book for publication I saw it as an opportunity to gather together what I have learned about a fine and controversial bird.

  The study of birds in a particular region seems to me generally more worthwhile than scampering in all directions after anything unusual, and so this book contains a large section on the Hen Harriers of Galloway, in south-west Scotland. The breeding population of the species has never become high in this region but it is one of the more important wintering areas in the British Isles. Over the years I have kept detailed records of nesting and, in a particular area, have followed with interest the change from moorland to conifer forest sites. Not long ago I should have been very surprised to find nests in 14 year old forest but, in 1975, the three nests in one area were all in forest of that age. Nevertheless, there is evidence that open moorland continues to be the most important summer hunting ground. These matters are discussed in the section on A study of the Hen Harrier in south-west Scotland, which also includes an account of observations made from a hide over a period of a month.

  The re-discovery of the communal winter roosting habit, hardly mentioned in British writings since Jardine described it in 1834, encouraged me to pay equal attention to the life of the Hen Harrier in winter, so this also has an important place in the book. When Eddie Balfour, the acknowledged master of Hen Harrier study in Orkney, began to find winter roosts there, he said, with his slow smile: ‘Isn’t it wonderful?—now I can watch harriers all wi
nter as well as summer’. If this sounds obsessional I can only add that some of my most unforgettable times with these birds have been in the cold and murk of winter dusks; and perhaps the most interesting problems of all are concerned with the purpose of communal gatherings and the dispersal of the birds which join them.

  There was certainly an element of laziness in my liking for harriers. They are big, easily spotted birds and often most can be learned about them by sitting (or standing, in winter) in one place for a long time. I have never been short of patience for this sort of non-activity which many people find intensely frustrating. I claim that it allows me to combine an artist’s work with an enjoyment of birds and landscape.

  I have always been attracted, as a bird painter, by birds which bring a small focus of life to spacious surroundings and well understand the feelings of Henning Weis, the brilliant Danish pioneer of harrier study and photography, when he wrote of his Montagu’s Harrier: ‘It provides the enlivening element in its melancholy surroundings and has brought life to places that were waste and desolate before’. As a painter I am stimulated by birds with a range of plumage from the cryptic to the highly conspicuous. As a gleaming drake Goosander and his grey, chestnut-maned duck were irresistible in a setting of loch or river, so a pair of Hen Harriers could be related to great sweeps of hill and sky. The charm of nearly white subjects lies in their maximum susceptibility to every change of light and shade. They are like a sensitive instrument on which every colour note can be played. Dark, cryptically marked birds, like the female Hen Harrier, are at the opposite end of the scale, often merging subtly with their surroundings but, when brightly lit or silhouetted, they can provide the strongest note in a landscape. Never a facile draughtsman of flight, I found the rapid wing action of pigeons, Peregrines or ducks very difficult to suggest, but the apparently more leisurely flight of harriers, with frequent gliding and soaring, could possibly be conveyed without losing the all-important sense of movement. This book contains many pictures of Hen Harriers and some of their neighbours, including sketches made in the field, and it seemed appropriate to write one chapter of the text from a bird artist’s point of view.