The Hen Harrier Read online

  If large tracts of more or less inaccessible bog or fen had remained, Hen Harriers would probably have survived here and there in spite of game preservation, but on the moors they were the easiest of predators to destroy because of their ground nesting habit, their large size and their often bold behaviour towards intruders in the vicinity of the nests.

  By the middle of the century the shooting of driven grouse was firmly established as the fashionable sport of landowners and their friends. True, not all moor owners were quite so explicit as the Marquess of Bute who, as far back as 1808 (Richmond, 1959), had required his keepers to take an oath including the words ‘finally I shall use my best endeavour to destroy all birds of prey with their nests, so help me God’, but hardly any would have disagreed with his sentiments. The purchase of Balmoral estate by Queen Victoria, in 1852, gave the ultimate accolade to the Highlands as a centre for field sports. At the same time the adoption of the breech loading shotgun made shooting driven birds far more practicable and attractive to sportsmen, while the new railway provided them, for the first time, with swift transport from London to the Highland grouse moors. So a number of factors combined to reduce the survival chances of Hen Harriers, as predators on game birds, even in the most remote districts.

  Ritchie (1920) and others have quoted the numbers of predatory birds and mammals claimed as ‘trapped’ on the Glen Garry estate in Inverness-shire, 1837–40. These include 68 ‘harriers’ and nine ‘ash-coloured hawks’, thought by some to be Montagu’s Harriers but more probably, in my view, male Hen Harriers in their second year. Specific identification in such lists must be treated with reserve; 317 Rough-legged Buzzards to 285 Buzzards and 63 Goshawks, without mention of Sparrowhawks, is puzzling to say the least, but the impression remains of the extraordinary wealth of predators and, implicitly, the abundance of prey for them in these early days of intensive game preservation. Of course, there had been campaigns against hawks in the Highlands long before the 1830s, but the main effort had been inspired by sheep farmers against Eagles and Ravens. The great spread of hill sheep farming in Scotland in the early 19th century undoubtedly contributed to the decline of the Hen Harrier, as heavy grazing by sheep and widespread moor burning by shepherds reduced ground cover for safe nesting. I believe that the importance of these factors has generally been overlooked.

  The most startling evidence for mass killing by gamekeepers is the oft quoted figure of 351 Hen Harriers said to have been killed, on two south Ayrshire estates, between 25 June 1850 and 25 November 1854. Even if these figures are exaggerated, it is fair to assume that the Hen Harrier was numerous on the extensive moors of south Ayrshire, at a time when its numbers had already been much reduced in most parts of southern Scotland and the border counties of England. Only a few years later (1869), Gray and Anderson regarded it as virtually extinct in the counties of Ayrshire and Wigtownshire, clear evidence of the speed with which a flourishing population could be eliminated by teams of gamekeepers. Gray and Anderson describe the technique of destruction at the nest: ‘Keepers, on finding the nest, usually wait until the eggs are hatched, and are in the habit of killing all the young birds except one, which they fasten by the leg to a stake and thus oblige to remain there, even after being fully fledged, until an opportunity occurs for shooting the old birds. This is sometimes but too easily accomplished as they continue to bring prey to the tethered captive long after it should have been hunting the moors on its own account’. South-west Scotland is an important wintering area for Hen Harriers today, and it is tempting to speculate that the same held in the 1850s; if so, the keepers were probably busy throughout the year.

  The growing body of ‘sporting and natural history’ writers helped to spread the word that the only good harrier was a dead one. William Robertson was typical of the day. There is a macabre interest in his account (Harvie-Brown and Buckley, 1895) of a nest with five young, found on the moors near Carrbridge, Inverness-shire, in 1857: ‘as far as I remember there were 23 young Grouse and 2 Ring Ouzels beside (the young). I killed all but 2 which I took home and put in a cage with the 25 birds on a Saturday night and on Monday the whole were devoured, which proved to me they were the very worst vermin we could have’. Such an accumulation of uneaten prey at a harrier’s nest is outwith my own experience. Possibly the female had been killed and the young were not old enough to tear up the prey for themselves, but this seems to be confounded by the speed with which only two of them finished the whole offering in less than two days. I feel bound to conclude that Mr Robertson’s imagination was better than his memory. Another contemporary, Henry Davenport Graham, showed in his Birds of Iona and Mull (1852–70) that there was still dislike of the Hen Harrier as a chicken stealer. Acting on his experience that a hunting harrier took the same route at about the same hour for several days (most of the old writers made the same comment), he often ‘waylaid the depredator of the chicken yard’. Refreshingly, he acknowledged that the male was a very pretty bird. One windy day he let one pass him on the seashore, mistaking it for a seagull. ‘Only the different mode of flight suddenly awakened me to the fact that I had allowed a “white hawk” to escape’. And only the oaths escaped getting into print.

  Among the rare spokesmen in defence of hawks, J. C. Langlands (Bolam, 1912) in Berwickshire, was perhaps a keen gardener or fruit grower. He wrote: ‘We still fortunately possess a few choice specimens of the little blue hawk, (?Merlin), the Kestrel and the Harrier. How long these active little police may be allowed to keep in check the small bird depredators may be doubted’. One of the most articulate opponents of the prevailing persecution of birds of prey was Robert Gray, the Glasgow banker, whose evocative description of the Hen Harriers in North Uist (1871) is still as fresh as the day it was written. ‘From where I sat I could see the Clamhan Luch (Hen Harrier in Gaelic) like a light blue sea-gull skimming the purpled sides of Ben Eval and gradually nearing the summit. Twenty yards behind came another of a darker hue, not so readily perceived as her mate but as quick at perceiving; then the two came abreast and passed within 10 yards, beating the ground like a well-trained couple and making alternate stoops at the poor mountain mice as they sat at their thresholds’. It is interesting that in the Uists, where crofters might have been expected to fear for the safety of their chickens, the Hen Harrier’s reputation was never very bad. The Gaelic name Clamhan Luch means mouse-hawk and reflects the importance of voles as harrier food in those islands.

  By the turn of the century, the continuity of breeding in those islands, along with that in Orkney, was to prove vital to the survival of the species in Britain. Gray and Anderson appended to their Birds of Ayrshire and Wigtownshire (1869) a plea for a more tolerant attitude to predators, which has a distinctly modern ring. One passage is particularly relevant: ‘We have only to consider the vast diminution of species that has taken place during the past 30 years in order to learn the mischief that has resulted from one cause alone—viz. the over-zealous destruction of creatures that are supposed to be enemies of game. . . . Birds of prey have suffered to an almost inconceivable extent—eagles, falcons, buzzards, hawks and owls having been subjected to such continual persecution as to be now [1869] in some places on the verge of extinction as native species’. Yet many of the naturalists who lamented this destruction, themselves helped to write the final chapters in the story of near extermination, by their activities as collectors of specimens and eggs.

  The best known example of this ambivalent attitude was Charles St John, in the 1840s. He writes as if shooting Ospreys and Eagles was a duty, to be borne stoically at the time, ‘for their skins were wanted’. Nevertheless, he did have a genuine delight in watching the living bird. He kept tame Peregrines and Merlins in his garden in Sutherland and was sentimental about owls, even taking down the pole traps which were set for hawks all round his house, because ‘the poor fellows [owls] looked so pitiable as they sat upright, held by the legs’. St John was not especially interested in the Hen Harrier—he commented that it was plentiful
enough (in Sutherland) in the hilly districts and ‘though very destructive to game it compensates for this in some degree by occasional preying upon rats, vipers etc.’ He particularly noted that it resorted to the lowlands in the autumn, hunting stubble fields where he observed it after Partridges and catching rats in the twilight.

  St John’s Tour of Sutherlandshire was published in 1849, and in the following passage he shows how the men of the hills had already welcomed the chance of supplementing their meagre livelihoods by supplying the wants of wealthy collectors. ‘I found that all the shepherds, gamekeepers and others in this remote part of the kingdom had already ascertained the value of the eggs of this [the Red-throated Diver] and other birds and were as eager to search for them and as loth to part with them, except at a very high price, as love of gain could make them. Nor had they the least scruple in endeavouring to impose eggs under fictitious names on any person wishing to purchase such things’. Other long forgotten Victorian collectors were journeying north; in 1860, for instance, A. W. Crichton was shooting Hen Harriers and sea birds in Orkney and recounted his exploits in A Naturalist’s ramble to the Orcades (1869). Bruce Campbell has kindly drawn my attention to an article (1970) in which he referred to this little book, showing how Crichton echoed St John’s habit of moralising about other peoples’ destructiveness while enjoying his own. After failing to collect a male Hen Harrier which he had fired at and wounded, he wrote: ‘so, swallowing my disappointment as best I could, I then as humanely as possible consigned the youthful members of the family to a premature decease’. In his book this incident follows hard upon the following comment: ‘sad, indeed, is it to hear such melancholy comment . . . of the influence which thoughtless man is continuously and culpably exerting to thin the number of, if not to exterminate from among us, the charming companions which the Creator has formed for our mutual enjoyment’.

  I am indebted to Desmond Nethersole-Thompson for some colourful notes on some of the ‘Trophy Hunters’ in the Scottish Highlands. After mentioning P. J. Selby (1834) and Sir William Milner MP (1847), both of whom shot Hen Harriers in Sutherland, he writes of his favourite villain, E. T. Booth of Brighton: ‘an obsessive collector and alcoholic whose glass cases of stuffed birds are still on show in his museum in Dyke Road, Brighton. For many years on the move in the Highlands, Booth was a most unusual man, paranoiac, exceptionally devious and bitterly jealous of rivals whom he loved to deceive by publishing false scents and locations. Some of his manuscript diaries are fascinating human and natural history documents. On 15 June 1868 Booth was in Sutherland where he invited two keepers, Matheson of Achfary and Andrew Mackay of the Mound, to dinner at the Inn of Lairg. There, over bottles of whisky, he planned his next forays. Among many subsequent successes were the rape of a couple of Hen Harriers’ nests, the first of which a shepherd had found on a hill near ‘Beannach’. Doubtless wearing his familiar bowler or a rather grotesque cloth cap, Booth tramped out to the nest where he impatiently watched the female attacking a gull. ‘At last she had settled on the heather and came right on the nest where I killed her as she flew off. There were five eggs in the nest. I watched the nest until midnight to see if the cock came in, but he was by no means a dutiful parent and never appeared. We thereupon set two traps, making a new nest and also five nest eggs’. The ungracious cock, however, dismally failed to accept the honour of being stuffed and mounted in a showcase.

  ‘On 25 June Booth also shot a hen, at a nest near Loch Meadie. This contained a single young. There with the hen safely in his game bag, he set two traps at the nest. This time the cock harrier was more accommodating. “The keeper brought in the cock harrier” which had been trapped less than an hour after Booth had returned to his horse and trap’.

  In his gargantuan book, euphemistically titled Rough Notes on the Birds observed during 25 years shooting and collecting in the British Islands (1881–87), Booth is indeed much less explicit about his exploits, but he records a bizarre moment beside a harrier’s nest when he discovered, as he reached for his gun, that he had laid it down on the back of an old Greyhen with three fresh eggs, only six or seven paces from the Hen Harrier’s nest with five eggs and one young. Perhaps the most remarkable case on record of neighbourliness between a grouse and a harrier! The colour plate in Booth’s book, by Edward Neale, is of interest as showing a very fine grey old male, white at the carpal regions, no doubt selected as the finest model from Booth’s extensive range of specimens.

  Nevertheless the gamekeeper, not the collector, was the principal cause of the growing rarity of the Hen Harrier in the second half of the 19th century. Very many of the stuffed harriers that found their way into glass cases in country houses had been shot or trapped by keepers as vermin. Many more rotted on the keepers’ gibbets; before they had become rare in the Lammermuirs for instance, in 1837, ‘4 or 5 might be seen in a row, one nail through the head and one each at the tip of the outstretched wings’, (Muirhead). Did anyone pause, I wonder, to admire the wonderful chequered pattern on the underwing of the ringtail?

  In 1865 The Ibis published A. G. More’s much quoted paper, ‘On the Distribution of Birds in Great Britain during the nesting season’. This was an unusual piece of work for its time, the format looking forward to modern enquiries by the BTO. A large number of correspondents supplied answers to a questionnaire but sadly there is no means of telling how reliable these were and, for the Hen Harrier, the results suggest that the estimates of status were not abreast of the rapidly declining situation. More’s summary states ‘still common in Scotland’ (as a breeding bird) but the regional books of the period show that by the 1860s it was extremely rare in Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde valley except, probably, in south Argyll and Arran. Further north in Stirlingshire and Perthshire, keepers had driven it a long way towards extermination; a nest destroyed by a keeper in Stirlingshire in 1868 was considered rare enough for comment, while Booth said that not more than six specimens had come under his observation in Perthshire. Nor was it plentiful, at this time, in Inverness-shire. It was still fairly common, however, in much of the north and north-west, especially Caithness, West Sutherland, Mull, Jura, Islay and Skye and in much of the Outer Hebrides and Orkney. More, erroneously, said it was absent from the Inner Hebrides. There is no evidence that it ever bred commonly in the Shetlands, where Saxby found a single nest on Yell prior to 1874. Unfortunately, the least well documented areas of Scotland at this period are the south-west Highlands—Argyll and Arran—a region where Hen Harriers were to hold out into the 20th century.

  More’s paper suggests that, in England, breeding still occurred sporadically in the south-east and Midlands but some of the reports refer to earlier years. Harrison (1953) said that Hen Harriers bred in Kent until the latter half of the nineteenth century when, ‘no doubt, industrial expansion along riversides and marsh drainage accounted for its disappearance’. A brood of young were taken in Norfolk in 1870. It was certainly a rarity in England by this time, except in the south-west peninsula and from west Yorkshire northwards. Even in these areas it probably held on precariously. Writers like Macpherson for Lakeland and Bolam for Northumberland, nevertheless suggest that a few pairs were still breeding just south of the border: On the Solway Flow in Cumberland nesting was reported into the 1880s and one or two pairs bred in north Northumberland in the 1890s, and it still bred occasionally in Higher Wyresdale, Lancashire, about 1885 (Oakes, 1953).

  The last recorded breeding of Hen Harriers in Devon was in 1893, near Ilfracombe, but there were evidently still later records of breeding on Exmoor, Somerset (Palmer and Ballance, 1968). More reported that it still bred in north and west Wales and this is confirmed by Forrest’s statement that it bred regularly on the Montgomery–Merioneth border in the 1860s. His comment that for some years previous to 1861 a grouse moor in that district had no keeper and ‘the place was given over to hawks and other depredators’, after which it was keepered, may be taken to infer that persecution there was only then beginning to reduce what ma
y have been a flourishing harrier population. There was occasional nesting in north Wales later—a pair bred in Caernarvon in 1902—but there is no firm evidence that Welsh Hen Harriers survived in any strength after about 1860, except perhaps for a few years in the extreme south-west (More, 1865). In Wales and south-west England the old status is particularly difficult to judge as there was some confusion with Montagu’s Harriers where the range of the two species overlapped.

  In Ireland, the population had been greatly reduced by the end of the century compared with the situation described by Thompson in 1849. ‘Notwithstanding the suitability of the country’, said Ussher at the turn of the century, ‘it only nests, and that sparingly, in Kerry and Galway, possibly in Antrim, Queen’s County, Waterford and Tipperary’.

  Returning to Scotland the tale of destruction in some of the remaining strongholds in the north-west can be told in greater detail, as gamekeepers became more active in outlying districts in the 1870s and 1880s. In Skye (Harvie-Brown and Macpherson, 1904), for instance, Macdonald, a keeper at Ullinish, killed 32 harriers old and young in 1870, but only three between 1876–86. Angus Nicholson, head keeper at Dunvegan, knew five nests in 1873 and accounted for 25 old and young in that year. He saw no more until a female was trapped in 1883, but nesting birds were still occasionally being trapped on Skye up to 1889. On the neighbouring island of Raasay the campaign against harriers was equally swift and sudden. George Temperley (1951), described the changing regimes on this island. In 1846, 94 families of crofters were evicted, as sheep farming took over. Then, in the 1890s game became the landowner’s priority, pheasant rearing began and harriers, Merlins, Peregrines, Rooks and Herons were all destroyed ruthlessly. Collier (1904), who lived there from 1896–1902, states that previous to 1896 there had been six pairs of Hen Harriers nesting regularly on the moors, very much the size of population that might have been expected in undisturbed conditions on a predominantly moorland habitat of about 6,000 hectares. Charles Dixon (1898), one of the few voices speaking out against the persecution, visited Skye about this time and saw a Hen Harrier’s nest ‘in an almost impenetrable heather thicket’. He was told by a keeper that sheep trampled on many harrier nests—this could have been true where sheep stocks were heavy but it may have been a convenient explanation by the keeper to a protectionist. What is very clear is that in Skye, as earlier in Ayrshire and elsewhere further south, the keepers wrought a fairly sudden and devastating change in the status of this bird whose habits marked it down for easy destruction on the open moorland.