The Hen Harrier Read online

  It is extremely difficult to say how far its numbers were kept down by the rather haphazard attempts to reduce predators in the 16th–17th centuries. An act of the English Parliament of 1566, ‘for the preservation of Grayne’, included the ‘Ryngtale’ among birds and mammals for whose destruction a payment of two pence was made. ‘Busardes, Shagges and Cormorants’ were given the same rating, but Ospreys and Herons, at four pence a head, rated higher on the vermin scale, so it looks as if the Act was more concerned with the preservation of fish than grain. Doubtless harriers and buzzards were outlawed, principally as dangerous to poultry, the Bullfinch as a destroyer of fruit buds and the Green Woodpecker (Woodwall) for damage to trees, perhaps especially orchard trees. Heads of these last two and ‘Kinges Fysshers’ (these were sometimes Dippers) made only one penny each.

  Details of predator destruction and payments made are recorded, to a varying extent, in the Churchwardens’ Accounts of English parishes. N. F. Ticehurst (1920) examined these for Tenterden, Kent, for a long period, 1626–1712. All the harrier entries were entered as ringtails in these and others I have seen - only 20 individuals in the whole period at Tenterden, all between 1679–89. Obviously ‘vermin’ control was spasmodic, but Ticehurst concluded that Hen Harriers were not common in the Kentish Weald, probably because it was still heavily wooded. The taking of four birds in May 1681, however, probably indicates nesting. At the other end of England, in Lakeland, H. A. Macpherson only mentions two entries, for ringtails, in 1645, while he lists numerous Ravens and Eagles. Probably at this period there was no very concerted attempt to destroy harriers, and there was, of course, no shortage of man- or boy-power to spend all day merely scaring raiders away, as the young poet Clare was later set to do.

  In J. C. Cox’s assorted lists from Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1566–1734, there is only one reference to ‘ringteals’ along with ‘Kiets and a Heron’, in 1657, at Prestwich, Cheshire. It is clear, too, that buzzards, kites and harriers were often lumped together in the lists, so the comparative status of the large hawks cannot be deduced from them. Tubbs, in his book, The Buzzard, concluded that from 1720 onwards the Churchwardens concentrated on the control of House Sparrows. The golden age for birds of prey perhaps continued almost to the end of the 18th century, though large scale destruction sometimes occurred earlier, as on Deeside, where 2520 hawks and kites were killed in the parishes of Braemar, Glenmuick, Tulloch and Glengarden in 1776–86. Doubtless Hen Harriers featured among these. More specifically, it is recorded of the Border country, that around 1797 the Duke of Buccleuch’s gamekeeper had destroyed some hundreds of Hen Harriers.

  More serious for the species, at that time, was the growing impetus of land improvement. W. G. Hoskins wrote of Norfolk, where Turner had watched Hen Harriers: ‘the greatest transformation of heathland into cornfields was to be found on the estates of Coke of Holkham, in the north of Norfolk. In the course of a long lifetime (1752–1842) he changed the entire face of this part of the country, through his own efforts and those of his imitators’. True, as Gilbert White and John Clare observed, Hen Harriers hunt over fields of corn, and Turnbull (1867) described them ‘hovering over the reapers’ at harvest time in East Lothian, but there is no evidence that the Continental habit of nesting in cornfields was ever common in Britain. Undoubtedly, agricultural improvement drove back the frontiers of their breeding range well before the full fury of persecution took effect. W. G. Hoskins, again, has described how the landscape of the English Midlands was redrawn by the Parliamentary enclosures of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The small, heavily grazed fields which replaced so much open arable ground and heathland would have little attraction for harriers.

  The eloquent voice of John Clare was nostalgic for the open heath in the East Midlands:

  Ye commons left free in the rude rags of nature,

  Ye brown heaths beclothed in furze as ye be,

  My wild eye in rapture adores every feature,

  Ye are as dear as this heart in my bosom to me.

  Clare often observed harriers hunting in his homeland near Peterborough. In prose written in praise of hawks he wrote this description of a male harrier: ‘There is a large blue [hawk] almost as big as a goose they fly in a swopping manner not much unlike the flye of a heron you may see an odd one often in the spring swimming close to the green corn and ranging over an whole field for hours together—it hunts leverets, partridges and pheasants’. A male harrier also features in his long poem, The Shepherd’s Calendar, (1823):

  A hugh (huge) blue bird will often swim

  Along the wheat when skys grow dim

  Wi clouds—slow as the gales of spring

  In motion wi dark shadowed wing

  Beneath the coming storm it sails.

  Clearly he had been struck by the wonderful spectacle of the light blue bird against a dark sky. It is only fair to agree with James Fisher, that Clare’s harriers hunting over the spring corn were perhaps Montagu’s, although with Peterborough Great Fen so near, they could almost as likely have been Hen Harriers.

  The wilderness was retreating even in northern England and southern Scotland. In Northumberland, in the late 18th century, improving farmers were clearing great stretches of broom, thorn and bramble ‘in which cattle could be lost for days’, while in Galloway the 18 miles of country between Castle Douglas and Dumfries were no longer as described by the Provost of Glasgow in 1688, ‘a wide expanse of bleak moss, extending for miles on either side, overgrown with whins and broom and destitute of enclosures of trees’ (Donnachie and Macleod, 1974).

  Between 1783 and 1796, Dr John Heysham of Carlisle made a remarkable study of the Hen Harriers nesting within a mile and a half of that city (Macpherson, 1892). In those years he made accurate observations on over 20 nests on Newton Common (long since absorbed by the growth of Carlisle city). Heysham’s evidence that the bird nested, more or less colonially, so close to a town might have been duplicated, at that time, in many places where large tracts of moor or bog still remained. Newcastle Town Moor was another old nesting site which seems to have been occupied into the 19th century (Bolam, 1912), while, in the south, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson (1933) referred to nesting ‘within the memory of those living in what are now the tram-lined streets of Bournemouth’. All this suggests that harriers were often left unmolested. Perhaps the old ethic that gave protection to Kites and Ravens, as useful scavengers in the stinking streets of mediaeval towns, was not quite dead, but more probably Hen Harriers simply attracted no attention unless they were seen to kill poultry. They were no bother to sheep, cattle or crops.

  Dr John Heysham was a pioneer, preceeding Montagu, in establishing beyond doubt that the ringtail was the female of the Hen Harrier, both by shooting pairs of adults at the nest and by keeping young birds alive and noting their plumage changes. Two chicks taken in 1783 lived nearly 21 months in captivity and Heysham also noted the changes of iris colour in the young male. Three nests were within 500 yards of each other, a likely situation for polygyny perhaps, but this cannot be deduced from Heysham’s notes. The Doctor and his companion shot two of the ringtails, wounded a male and caught another in a rat trap, ‘taking’ the young as well. All this was, of course, typical of the methods of ornithologists then and much later, but Heysham’s curiosity and discoveries mark him out as much more than a mere collector of skins. (He was in the habit of collecting specimens for Dr John Latham, one of the leading ornithologists of the day). The Newton Common harriers must have been part of a flourishing population as nests continued to be found over the next ten years, in spite of ‘almost all’ the adults being shot, again by Heysham in 1785, ‘as they flew about us at the nests’.

  John Heysham was a man of his times in more than ornithology. According to the author of Fauna of Lakeland, H. A. Macpherson, he did much as a medical man to advance the health and happiness of his fellow townsmen, but spent his declining years as a magistrate ‘adjudicating upon conjugal amenities and hushing the altercations of rival washe
rwomen’. In such cases he and his colleagues invariably mulcted one side, and frequently both sides, in costs, while fines inflicted were appropriated by the magistrates themselves.

  George Montagu began his Ornithological Dictionary in 1802. He was the discoverer of Montagu’s Harrier and researched on Hen Harriers. Like Heysham, he took young from the nest and kept them alive until he was able to demonstrate the plumage change of a yearling male, from brown to predominantly grey, carefully noting the progress of moult between August and October, when the bird was killed and put in his museum. He even went so far as to ‘pluck some wing and tail feathers’ from the living bird to force premature change, in June. Only a decade before, Gilbert White still referred to the ‘Ring-tail Hawk’ as though it were a distinct species. Montagu’s field work on Hen Harriers was done in Devon, where the local names of Furze Kite and Blue Furze Hawk indicated its association, particularly in summer, with gorse-covered ‘wasteland’. Montagu was puzzled that he saw grey males more often than ringtails in the breeding season, perhaps because he did not realise how much time the females spent concealed on the nest. The brood which he studied was taken from a nest on Dartmoor in 1805. As he regularly saw three or four males on the wing at one time, it is clear that Hen Harriers bred plentifully in Devonshire at this date. Of particular interest is his note that the irides of a male became orange in August when it was a little over a year old, a statement which seems to have been overlooked in a recent discussion* about the age at which iris colour of harriers changes.

  Muirhead, author of The Birds of Berwickshire (1889), considered that it had already left many old breeding places in that county in the 18th century, as a result of drainage of bogland. The inaccessibility and dangerous nature of bogs had provided it with particularly safe breeding places. The most famous bog in the south of Scotland was Billie Mire, in Berwickshire, fascinatingly documented by Muirhead. It extended for five miles from Chirnside to near Ayton. Clumps of willows and alders grew on the drier parts, with deep black pools between, regarded with awe by the local people as the haunt of ‘Jock o’ the Mire’. Here the Bittern boomed in spring and wildfowl bred in abundance. Muirhead was able to talk to old men who knew it before it was totally drained in 1830–35 after many unsuccessful attempts. ‘Mr White used to find Hen Harrier nests every season among sedges and rushes in the swamps. Thomas Hewit found a nest with young and took one of the fledgelings home and kept it till it was full-grown when it attacked some of Mr Logan’s chickens and had to be destroyed. He said that boys used to visit the Mire on Sundays to search for the Gled’s (Harrier’s) nest, providing themselves with long leading-in ropes . . . giving the loose end to some of their companions who remained on firm ground ready to pull them out if necessary’. Muirhead said that ‘in the mornings and evenings the Hen Harrier could be seen passing slowly over the rushes and quartering the wet meadow . . .’. He might have been describing the flight of birds arriving at, or leaving, a communal roost—there could have been no better site for one.

  In so far as it is possible to judge the status of the Hen Harrier in the early 19th century, it can be said that it bred in all regions where moor, marsh, heathland and bog occupied sizeable tracts of the country. It certainly bred plentifully over much of Scotland, Ireland and northern England and there is evidence, as I have said, that it was not scarce in Devonshire. It also bred in west and north Wales and in parts of central, eastern and southern England. In many parts of these regions it may have been quite scarce and may not have bred in every county, but it evidently did so in some numbers in the Fen districts of eastern England whence five clutches are listed, 1840–56, in Ootheca Wolleyana (Newton, 1864). Forrest’s Fauna of North Wales (1907), tells little more than that it bred regularly in the Montgomery–Merioneth border country, on the Berwyn moors, as late as the 1860s, and that Eyton saw birds frequently near Corwen about 1835.

  Thompson’s account (1849) of the Hen Harrier in Ireland begins picturesquely: ‘In snipe-shooting it is often met with’. Evidently, then as now, Ireland was a notable wintering haunt but he shows, too, that nesting was fairly widespread. According to Thompson, breeding strongholds at this time were in Wicklow, Kerry, on the borders of Waterford and Tipperary, and in counties Antrim and Londonderry in the north. Ruttledge (1950) said that it bred in Co. Galway fairly plentifully up to 1872 but that it seems to have been scarce in Co. Mayo. Shawe-Taylor (Moffat, 1889) said that it was ‘common on all the hills in Connemara’ in August 1851, but Thompson gave its breeding status there as rare. He added that the nesting haunts in Connemara were in swamps, generally on the margins of lakes, but reports from other localities in Ireland referred to nests ‘on the heath’.

  The clearest evidence for some decline in the numbers breeding in Ireland by the mid 19th century comes from Thompson’s statement that, near Clonmel (Waterford), it was very scarce in 1849 whereas in 1838 he had been told that eggs and young were easily obtained there. Persecution by ‘vermin killers’, sportsmen and collectors was probably causing a more general decrease in Ireland at this time, but at least in the more remote breeding haunts a good many pairs continued to breed. Thompson quotes an emotive article on Highland Sport and the enemies of grouse, in the Quarterly Review for December 1845: ‘Hawks of all sorts, from Eagles to Merlins destroy numbers. The worst of the family, and the most difficult to be destroyed, is the Hen Harrier. Living wholly on birds of its own killing, he will come to no laid bait and hunting in open country he is rarely approached near enough to be shot, skimming low and quartering his ground like a well-trained pointer he finds almost every bird and with sure aim strikes down all he finds’. No sporting writer at that time, of course, would have paused to reflect that such deadly efficiency in a predator would long since have caused its own extinction from the exhaustion of its food supply.

  It is to writers in the north of England and Scotland that we are indebted for the most informative, and sometimes vivid, accounts of Hen Harriers in the first half of the 19th century. The Celt, Macgillivray, and the Lowlander, Sir William Jardine, were both able to draw on personal experience, as did the Northumbrian Selby. Through Macgillivray’s eyes we are introduced for the first time to the sheer delight of a field naturalist enjoying the sight of a pair of harriers in the sky. In 1836, Macgillivray wrote in his Descriptions of Rapacious Birds of Great Britain: ‘Should we, on a fine summer’s day, betake us to the outfields bordering on extensive moor, on the sides of the Pentland, Ochil or the Peebles hills, we might chance to see the harrier, although hawks have been so much persecuted that one may sometimes travel a whole day without meeting so much as a Kestrel. But we are now wandering amid thickets of furze and broom . . .’. He goes on to write of the moorland plants and birds, like Golden Plover, Lapwing, Whinchat, Snipe and Red Grouse and continues: ‘but see a pair of searchers not less observant than ourselves have appeared over the slope of the bare hill’, so introducing his description of the behaviour of a pair of Hen Harriers above their intended nesting ground.

  Later, in his History of British Birds (1837–52), he again shows a birdwatcher’s delight in passages such as this: ‘Kneel down here, then, among the long broom and let us watch the pair that have just made their appearance on the shoulder of the hill. . . . How beautifully they glide along, in their circling flight, with gentle flaps of their expanded wings, floating, as it were, in the air, their half-spread tails inclined from side to side, as they balance themselves, or alter their course’. Yet it was to Jardine that Macgillivray was in debt for an account of the Hen Harrier’s habit of communal roosting in winter, and the rather curious description of behaviour at the nest which shows that Jardine mistook the food pass for the hen ‘not suffering’ the cock to come to the nest—no doubt a mistake easily made when visual aids hardly existed. Selby (1831) also described communal roosting but as he was in close touch with Jardine it is not clear whether he discovered the habit independently. According to Jardine, Macgillivray had never seen a nest, which may seem surpris
ing for one who had walked virtually the length and breadth of Scotland—and on one occasion all the way from Aberdeen to London via the Cairngorms and the Solway coast. Macgillivray’s summing up of the Hen Harrier’s status in 1840 (in Scotland), was ‘although nowhere very common is generally dispersed and in some districts pretty numerous in the breeding season, (frequenting) hilly tracts from the middle of spring to autumn (and) in winter lower cultivated districts. (It is) frequently killed by gamekeepers and easily obtained’. As Baxter and Rintoul (1953) pointed out, a comparison between the references to Hen Harriers in the Old and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland (1797, 1834–45) indicates a marked diminution in many districts, but around 1840 it was the commonest large raptor in many parts of the Highlands, the Outer Hebrides and Orkney.

  After reading a large number of 19th century accounts of the Hen Harrier, I am in no doubt that the great decrease took place in southern Scotland and northern England between 1820–50; in the Highlands it was later, occurring mainly in the second half of the century. Compare, for instance, the statement by Dr Charlton of Hesleyside (Bolam, 1912) in Northumberland, in 1861: ‘30 years ago we could have pointed out half a dozen nests of the Blue Hawk or Hen Harrier, but it is now seen once or twice in a season’, with that of Osborne (Harvie-Brown and Buckley, 1887), writing of Caithness about 1855, that it was the commonest bird of prey except the Kestrel and possibly the Merlin. Clearly, in the north of England and Scotland as a whole, loss of breeding places due to land improvement was quite insufficient to cause a catastrophic decline and there is abundant evidence that the main cause was intensive gamekeepering, especially on grouse moors. It was probably true in some districts—as in Berwickshire—that as some of the old breeding haunts in bogs disappeared and, at the same time, grouse stocks were boosted by moor management, there was a tendency for Hen Harriers to resort increasingly to the best grouse moors, thus ensuring their own demise.