Hen Harrier English reintroduction project closes after eight years of failure – Mark Avery
Natural England has admitted (click here) that its badly-judged (click here) Hen Harrier reintroduction project isn’t going anywhere and has pulled the plug. In a blog that tries to make the best of publicly-funded activity through 2018-25, cuts to NE’s budget were given more of the blame than the difficulties that NE had to persuade any domestic stakeholders and any international partners to support the project. And the captive Hen Harriers didn’t cooperate either – they failed to lay fertile eggs.
From the beginning, NE struggled to find a release area where there was any enthusiasm for the project. Lack of enthusiasm from landowners might be taken to mean threats and expectations that the birds, if released, would be illegally killed as they are in their rather few upland nesting sites. But the project never got to the dangerous stage of releasing birds into the wild so we’ll never know. The planned release site was Salisbury Plain, which was chosen, I think, because it was easier to persuade the Ministry of Defence to go along with the scheme than private landowners on Exmoor or Dartmoor, or anywhere else.
Wild Justice’s advice to Natural England, back in 2021, was to call the whole thing off (click here) and that’s why I am quoted in The Times as saying;
Mark Avery, a veteran campaigner and former conservation director at the RSPB, said: “The phrase that comes to mind, which isn’t the most generous, is ‘we told you so’.” Avery, who recently stepped down from Chris Packham’s campaign group Wild Justice, said the project had always been a distraction from tackling persecution of the bird elsewhere in Britain.
“Nobody has really put their minds to doing anything major to stop persecution on grouse moors,” he said. “So the reason it continues is that the state hasn’t invested enough effort or money in stopping a load of influential grouse shooters from breaking the law on a landscape scale.”
Avery said the money spent on the reintroduction scheme should have been spent on tackling wildlife crime. “I think that the best way to increase the chances of hen-harriers living in the lowlands of southern Britain is to have a much bigger, more successful population on the uplands of northern Britain, which will export more birds that are potential colonisers.”
Maybe this flawed project might eventually have succeeded, but it was never a good enough investment for your and my taxes to be poured into it. It is important that public agencies judge their own pet projects with the same degree of scrutiny as they judge others eg see here.
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