The Hen Harrier Read online

  ‘I first met Douglas in May 1932. I remember a spare, tallish, well-built man, with bright eyes set in a brown and weather-beaten face. He was dressed in rough tweeds and he had his cap peaked backwards to save it blowing off in the high wind. He had a remarkably puckish sense of humour and a most beautiful lilting Orkney accent. He was already a legend among egg men, who sometimes called him the Iron Man of Orkney, for he could keep going on the hill from the first glimmer of light, which is pretty early in an Orkney May, until very late at night. . . . I used to meet him on the hill at 4 o’clock in the morning and then after we had spent some hours together he tramped back over the tops and mosses to his farm and got on with his work. He knew his country like the back of his hand and could watch as well as search and interpret what he saw. In a few days we saw 7 Hen Harriers’ nests and could have found more as we watched several other cocks hunting. When I was with him he showed me a cock breeding in brown plumage and told me about the polygamous cocks which he had sometimes found. Indeed one cock in a long valley almost certainly had 2 hens that year. . . . Unfortunately Douglas, like so many of his contemporaries, kept few notes and his knowledge died with him.’

  Desmond Nethersole-Thompson ends his account by paying tribute to those who set out to conserve a stock of breeding Hen Harriers in Orkney. Foremost of all among these, in the inter-war years, was George Arthur. I well remember the day, in 1946, when George Waterston introduced me to him and his wife, Jean. He was an impassioned protectionist and it was fortunate for the Hen Harrier in Orkney—and for its survival as a British bird—that it found a protagonist in this influential and popular Orcadian. It has been argued whether the activities of egg collectors or the guns of local poultry keepers and others did most to bring it so near extermination. No doubt the absence of visiting egg collectors during the First World War helped it to climb back from the brink on which it stood in 1914.

  John Douglas told Desmond Nethersole-Thompson, in 1932, that the harrier’s chicken stealing habit threatened its existence and reckoned that ‘the migration of rabbits to the hills’ was coincident with an increase of harriers at this time. Yet, it cannot be doubted that so many determined collectors in search of clutches were a threat, especially when the harrier’s general rarity was common talk. George Arthur, Duncan J. Robertson and Eddie Balfour argued and acted for Hen Harrier protection, creating above all a climate of opinion in the islands that was increasingly tolerant and sometimes proud of the bird as an adornment of the Orkney landscape. Protection was George Arthur’s role—he recorded almost nothing about harriers—and it was left to the quiet dedication of Eddie Balfour, whom Desmond Nethersole-Thompson so rightly acknowledges as ‘the king of Hen Harriers’, to embrace a monumental field study. When I last spoke to Eddie Balfour, a fortnight before he died in August 1974, he told me that he was sure there were fewer pairs in the 1930s than in the 1940s. Nonetheless, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson, from his own experience and contact with John Douglas, estimated the breeding population as ‘high’ in the 1930s. In any event, by then, there had already been a considerable increase since the desperate state just before the First World War.

  In later Chapters of this book, the habitat and food of the Hen Harrier in Orkney and the southern Outer Hebrides are compared. The Hen Harrier’s survival in both areas owed much to the fact that its feeding habits did not bring it into serious conflict with game preservers. In neither were Red Grouse generally abundant enough to attract great attention, either from keepers or harriers. In both, voles, rabbits, passerine birds and young waders were in plenty and offered a wide range of prey and, in both, hunting grounds, rich in such prey, were sufficiently close to moorland haunts. It is often forgotten that active protection measures contributed to harrier survival in the southern Outer Hebrides as well as Orkney. The two groups of islands thus had several common features favourable to the Hen Harrier.

  In Ireland, continuity of breeding into the present century has been more difficult to trace owing to the scarcity of ornithologists until recent times.

  Humphreys (1937) said that it was still probably resident in a few of its original haunts in the wilder mountain districts, but had greatly decreased, and Ruttledge (1966) stated that it never became extinct though its survival was precarious early in the 20th century. I am greatly indebted to David Scott for further enlightenment on the history of the Hen Harrier in Ireland. As far as the problem of survival in the lean years is concerned, he has evidence that it never died out as a breeding bird on the Tipperary–Waterford border and that it may well have survived in the Slieve Bloom mountains on the Leix–Offaly border. He sums up the situation in the first half of the 20th century by saying that Hen Harriers continued to breed regularly in a few areas and sporadically in others, all in the southern half of the country. Frank King is further able to confirm that at least one pair was still present and probably breeding in the Iveragh peninsular, Co. Kerry, in 1945. He writes that they were seen in July of that year by the then District Court Clerk of Caherciveen who was keenly interested in birdlife. King adds that they do not now breed in that far western part of Kerry, in spite of much suitable habitat, but he does not know whether they disappeared from there (probably shot out), before or after re-colonisation of eastern Kerry began in about 1966 from Co. Cork.

  In Southern Ireland, as in Orkney and the Outer Hebrides, the Hen Harrier did not come into conflict with the most rigorous grouse preservation. According to David Scott, grouse are ‘almost rare birds’ in Ireland and he has only once found grouse remains at a harrier’s nest. So, although farmers and sportsmen certainly killed many harriers because they regarded birds of prey as harmful to game and poultry in general, persecution was not tightly organised and harriers must often have escaped unscathed on their remote and widely dispersed breeding grounds on the moors and mountains. Ewart Jones comments pertinently that the harriers’ present day breeding moors in Co. Limerick are not so extensive as to preclude most pairs from having valley farmland in their territories. As I have already pointed out this is true and important both in Orkney and the southern Outer Hebrides and may be an important factor in Ireland too, especially in the absence of voles or large populations of grouse, by providing access to an abundance of small birds and mammals such as rabbits.

  The recovery and present status

  One day in 1947, the late John Murray Thomson R.S.A. told me, with some excitement, that he knew of Hen Harriers breeding in Sutherland. In February 1948, he gave some details in a Nature Note to The Scotsman. This was later quoted by Ian Pennie as the first definite evidence of recolonisation in Sutherland. Two nests had been found in 1946 but both were destroyed by a keeper, the females being killed at each. The nests were only 200 metres apart and only one male, which escaped the keeper, was seen. Next year a brood survived to fledge.

  J. W. Campbell (1957) considered that nesting occurred intermittently in the ‘northern Highlands’ before 1939, but there can be little doubt that the absence of keepers and the consequent neglect of grouse moors during the 1939–45 war opened the way to regular nesting. As Campbell pointed out, it was not only the lack of persecution that helped the harriers; the cessation of routine heather burning provided an abundance of good nesting sites. There is not, in fact, much indisputable evidence of widespread recolonisation during the war years. All that can be said of that period is that Hen Harriers bred in Moray in 1944 and 1945, according to Desmond Nethersole-Thompson, and that, in addition to the Sutherland nests, two were found in Perthshire in 1946 by J. W. Campbell not half a mile apart.

  Campbell said that these Perthshire nests were not isolated cases of breeding, while Blake (1961) went so far as to say that the Hen Harrier was already common in the Highlands by 1945, but gave no details of localities. Most ornithologists, indeed, were wisely reticent about breeding localities and as late as 1953 Baxter and Rintoul said no more than that it was ‘attempting to recolonise the country’ and they greatly hoped it would succeed. However, the firm evide
nce that a few pairs were breeding in such widely scattered districts as Sutherland, Moray and Perthshire, suggests that recolonisation of the mainland had advanced considerably by 1946. This colonisation may have begun from Orkney but this is no more than speculation.

  Before 1950, the only suggestion from ringing that Orkney birds might be colonising the mainland, rests on a single recovery in Banff on 17 June 1950. The bird had been ringed in Orkney on 15 July 1948, as a chick, but recovery details, ‘loose ring dug up in garden’, show that the date of finding is worthless as evidence that the bird was in Banff in the breeding season. In later years, however, there is evidence from ringing that some Orkney bred birds were summering in the Highlands, recoveries in the nesting season being reported between 1952 and 1970 from Sutherland, Caithness, Kincardine and Angus.

  It is tempting to speculate on the origins of the few Hen Harriers which nested during the inter-war years in such surprisingly scattered localities in England, Wales and Scotland. Were some of them visitors from Scandinavia, pairing on their wintering grounds and remaining to breed? Could the same be true of some of the colonists of the 1940s and later? There is no proof of this but it is perhaps worth recalling the comment by the Editors of British Birds in 1957 that the start of the spread back into Scotland coincided with a peak in the Norwegian breeding population, though this was always small. The discovery in recent years that at least two Orkney ringed birds were in the Netherlands in the breeding season—one of them a six year old—suggests that some Hen Harriers may settle to breed at great distances from their birthplace.

  By 1950, Eddie Balfour had noted a further increase in the Orkney population. In fact he recorded a peak in numbers in that year, after which they fluctuated at a slightly lower level during the 1950s and 1960s. The colonisation of new areas on the mainland was proceeding apace. Most significantly nests were being found increasingly in recently planted conifer forests of the Forestry Commission. John McKeand, now the Head Forester at Carradale in Kintyre, recalls that the first nest in Minard Forest, by Loch Fyne, was in 1949. The keeper who found it did not know what the bird was at the time. A pair nested there again in 1950, two pairs in 1951, three in 1952, four in 1953 and about five pairs by 1955.

  In the early 1950s, large tracts of the Highland foothills, in the Aberfoyle district of south-west Perthshire and Argyll, were changing from heather moor to young conifer forest where the Forestry Commission, supported by the RSPB’s payment of rewards for successful nests, looked kindly on the spread of the Hen Harrier. The Ornithological Reports for the Clyde area made no mention of breeding in 1951, but recorded a nest from which young fledged in 1952 and seven pairs in 1953. At this time small colonies were establishing themselves in the forests from Aberfoyle to Kintyre, and prospecting birds were seen in summer as far south as Renfrewshire. A male in partly grey plumage had been seen further west, in Mull, in July 1948. The first post-war nesting record for Arran was in 1953, according to Dr J. A. Gibson (1955), and there was soon a small increase there, in spite of persecution on grouse moors. At Carradale Forest, well down the Kintyre peninsula, a pair or two began to nest, perhaps in 1950, certainly in 1951, increasing to a remarkably concentrated colony of 18 pairs by 1958–59, nine of these being on one partly planted heathery hill of about 500 hectares in extent (P. Strang, pers. comm.).

  Meanwhile, further north and east, on the grouse moors of Perthshire and north of the Caledonian canal, nesting continued, but by the mid 1950s gamekeepers were on the look-out for harriers, their old unpopularity on large grouse moors had thoroughly revived and many nests and adults were being destroyed. J. W. Campbell noted a decrease on the Perthshire moors after 1954. The extent of the increase on these and other moors before that may never be accurately known, but it must be remembered that the six almost unrecorded seasons of wartime could have given the opportunity for great advances by the Hen Harrier. Blake (1961), said that by then it had lost much ground on grouse moors. Even so, the continuing general trend was strongly towards increase, the forest nesting colonies providing a reservoir which probably spilled over on to the heather moors. Nick Picozzi was told of a nest in Drumtochty forest, Kincardineshire, in 1953 and has traced nesting on the moors of Lower Deeside back to 1957, with an increase thereafter in spite of heavy persecution.

  Much of the Cairngorms area has never been widely occupied by nesting Hen Harriers. Adam Watson commented interestingly in 1966: ‘A pair occasionally nests in Rothiemurchus and Lower Glen Feshie. . . By contrast grouse moors not far away to the east of Braemar and north of the Cairngorms are visited every autumn by many juveniles and sometimes adults which stay till March, if not shot or trapped, living mainly on grouse and small rodents. General absence and complete absence of breeding on the Mar side cannot be due to persecution. On the Mar side birds of prey have been left alone at least since 1945, yet harriers continually try to colonise grouse moors not far to the east where they are persecuted worse than eagles or Peregrines. Their absence from the Cairngorms must be due to something else, possibly a deficient food supply or inhospitable climate’. Picozzi, in Desmond Nethersole-Thompson’s and Adam Watson’s The Cairngorms (1974), said that the main breeding area around these mountains was on Lower Deeside, Lower Speyside, Donside, Angus and Perthshire, numbers having increased greatly since the 1940s in spite of persecution. Of Sutherland Ian Pennie wrote, in 1962: ‘a few pairs nest annually in different parts of central and east Sutherland—they are easily shot and very easily caught in pole-traps so do not increase much’. Had it not been for the comparative safety of the young forests, Hen Harriers, in many parts of the Highlands, would have been faced with not much better prospects than in the heyday of 19th century persecution.

  The Protection of Birds Acts of 1954 and 1967 placed the Hen Harrier in the List of First Schedule species, given special protection. It thus became an offence, punishable by a £25 fine or imprisonment, to kill or take a Hen Harrier, its eggs or young, or knowingly to disturb this species at the nest without a special licence. The continued destruction of Hen Harriers by various illegal methods, particularly on many grouse moors, bears testimony to the toothlessness of the Protection Acts.

  By the late 1950s, there were signs of a southward expansion in both forest and moorland, and, at first, there was a readiness to accept the return of a rare and little known bird on the part of some gamekeepers and moor owners in the south of Scotland. I learned something of the delicate balance between the forces of protection and persecution when I found the first nest in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright in 1959, on a moor where grouse preservation had some influence. (A pair probably nested in 1958, perhaps earlier). The late Alan Mills and I spent many hours with the 1959 nest under our surveillance. Gamekeepers were extremely curious about what the young were being fed on and one assured me that he would shoot any harrier he found with a grouse kill. In the following years, as the number of pairs slightly increased in the Stewartry, I believe that some moorland nests were destroyed but, by 1965, the great expansion of young forest near by had provided safer nesting sites, and a small population of four to six pairs established itself there.

  In 1960 I found a moorland nest in south Ayrshire—a repeat laying after a clutch had been robbed. At the time both the landowner and the keeper were happy to see the young harriers fledge, but over the next few years, as a few more pairs appeared, a less tolerant attitude developed; but in a different part of the county two or three pairs have probably nested, more recently, in young forests.

  On the Dumfriesshire moors a pair nested unsuccessfully in 1961, a few miles from the 1960 nest in Ayrshire, and there may have been earlier nests. More recently there have been a few pairs nesting in young forests in the same area. In Wigtownshire, particularly, they were greeted with a policy of extreme repression on the grouse moors. In 1965, when I saw my first pair of harriers in the west of that county, I found two pole traps set within sight of a public road. In more recent years there have been continued attempts by two or three
pairs to nest on the moors there, but the young usually disappear from the nests.

  The southward expansion of the late 1950s and 1960s did not include recolonisation of the old haunts in south-east Scotland. In the Lammermuirs, birds have lately been seen in summer. If nesting has occurred it has not been proved, although there is much suitable-looking ground, with the possibility of safe nesting sites in some recently afforested parts of Berwickshire, not far from where Billie Mire once gave them security. Across the border into Northumberland, Kielder Forest was reached about the same time as Galloway, in the late 1950s, and a small colony of at least six pairs flourished in the young plantations there during the 1960s, but had mysteriously declined to only one pair by 1971. There was no real expansion south of the border until three nests were found in North Wales in 1962; in one locality, a pair was present in 1961 and breeding may have occurred then and possibly in earlier years (Williams, 1976). After 1962, Hen Harriers began to spread fairly quickly on the extensive moorlands of North Wales.

  R. F. Ruttledge and David Scott agree that the recovery in Ireland began about 1950. In 1956 Ruttledge and Peter Roche found breeding pairs in Wexford, Waterford, south Tipperary and Cork. In certain areas the birds were back in some strength, but there was no sign of nesting in western Cork or Wicklow. Scott, however, says that nesting in Wicklow began very soon after this. Already, in 1958, the Irish Bird Report mentioned that Hen Harriers were breeding in five counties and there was a gradual further extension of range during the following years, to seven counties in 1967, and eleven in 1970. Scott and Frank King (1976) point out that the main spread in Ireland has been westward and northward from a nucleus in the south, but Scott also comments that there has been some expansion from a central area—the Slieve Bloom—where a small population may never have died out. Although Ruttledge (1966) stressed that Hen Harriers in Ireland showed a marked preference for afforested areas, Scott, King, Ken Preston and Ewart Jones have all found that nesting sites on moorland, near forest plantations, are commonest in some districts.