Opinion: The case for legal raptor control
© Erni/Adobe Stock This year’s Big Farmland Bird Count (BFBC) has just ended and I’m sure everyone was out there ticking off the blackbirds and robins, and with a bit of luck the skylarks and lapwings.
Though if last year’s results are anything to go by, the chances are that crows and magpies will have been among the top 10 birds seen around our fields.
The only raptors to make the top 25 in last year’s BFBC were kestrel and red kite.
Once nearly hunted to extinction, the red kite has expanded its range from Wales across most of the country and, like buzzards, I’ll soon be seeing them not rarely but frequently in Kent.
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Buzzard and red kite have featured in a lively correspondence in the letters pages of this magazine in recent weeks – not as feathered friends, but as bringers of death to the young of some of those species such as lapwing we’d all like to see in the bird count.
An internet search brings up headline-grabbing statements about the decline of farmland birds and the illegal killing of raptors.
Their potential effect on the population of other species is little discussed, and glib statements that high numbers prove there’s a good food supply don’t help.
It’s an ecological truism that the population of the prey determines the population of the predator and not the other way round.
Apex predators need resources at the bottom of the food pyramid, of course; but what if this is being bolstered by other available food such as roadkill, game birds and farm animals?
Raptors are opportunistic; they’ll forget their textbook food source and go for something easier. They learn new behaviours – to go into somewhere unfamiliar, for instance.
None of this excuses laying poison bait for hen harriers, but it does explain the frustration of anyone watching the brood of skylark they have seen hatch being wiped out by buzzards.
In our farmed and densely populated landscape, many species struggle to breed successfully.
The main reason farmland birds have declined may be loss of habitat, but without predator control we struggle to protect and increase the numbers of those that remain.
Studies show the benefits of a robust, legal approach to predator control. But what about raptors enjoying protected status?
Reducing the predation pressure of raptors on wildlife using the most satisfactorily humane methods available, as the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) terms it, is grasping a nettle.
These methods include removing eggs and/or chicks to be hand-reared in captivity before being reintroduced elsewhere, diversionary feeding, and limited, licensed culls on a case-by-case basis. Intervention to restore the balance of nature.
Nowhere is this debate more impassioned than on the grouse moors of north England, when it comes to the hen harrier.
Yet work by the GWCT and others shows when harrier numbers are high and shooting becomes uneconomic, then keepering is removed and their numbers, and those of other species such as curlew, plummet.
Rounding up some harriers and shipping them off to Kent might be one answer, though I can see future letters in Farmers Weekly about it.
But culling raptors such as buzzards whose numbers have burgeoned? A nettle to grasp, perhaps, but not likely to get Chris Packham’s approval.