Forty years ago if you wanted to see a Red Kite, one of the world’s most beautiful birds, here in the UK you had to make the journey (as a birder, it was more of a pilgrimage) to mid-Wales and look for them around Tregaron Bog (Cors Caron). It wasn’t guaranteed but they were there if you were prepared to put the time in.
Three years ago my brother Nial came back to the UK for a short holiday after moving (permanently) to East Asia in the 1980s. We took the train from Bath to London, and - excited and looking forward to seeing his reaction - I told him that from Oxford on, and especially near Reading, we’d start seeing Red Kites - lots of them.
He knew about the hugely successful re-introduction projects of course, but hadn’t been birding here for a very long time. As we crossed west-east and reached Berkshire almost on cue we started seeing Red Kites. At one point we counted eleven circling some gardens. There are sometimes hundreds of Red Kites coming to feeding stations in Wales now, but seeing them as a normal part of the background in central England is still a joy, and for a birder who’d been living abroad for decades it was a revelation.
I now get Red Kites over my house in north Wiltshire. I’m still thrilled every time I see one. In England and Wales especially they’re slowly filling in the gaps, reclaiming old territories, and the RSPB recently said they are now so successful and in so many places it’s difficult to survey them accurately with a still limited number of recorders. Imagine that: in thirty years the species has gone from where every nest was plotted and monitored to being so numerous surveys can’t keep up.
Buzzards weren’t as scarce as Red Kites but decades ago but they were still uncommon after a century of persecution: if you were heading down to the south-west (maybe on the way to the Isles of Scilly) you’d regularly start seeing them in small numbers once you got (roughly) south of Exeter but they were by no means widespread. Now I regularly see two pairs warily floating around each other right over my house. I saw thirty together following a plough a mile down the road a few years back! Once heavily persecuted, they have rebounded spectacularly. The RSPB says that “the buzzard is our commonest raptor, having recolonised all the areas occupied in the 1800s”. Since 2000 they have nested in every county in the UK.
It’s rare that we have bird conservation success stories like this in the UK, and - I’ll be honest - I didn’t think years ago that many of the ones we do have would feature birds of prey! White-tailed Eagles are spreading out from reintroduction projects in western Scotland (and now the Isle of Wight), and just this week Ospreys successfully nested in Poole Harbour, the first time in hundreds of years the species has bred in southern Britain.
Personally speaking, I love seeing birds of prey. A Buzzard or a Kite circling silently in a huge blue sky is always a fantastic sight. They stop me in my tracks. Hopefully they always will.
I’m not alone in that. The reception to the return of these species has been almost universal approval. I don’t know of a single birder that doesn’t welcome these birds back to their former haunts. Ecotourists spend mini-breaks enjoying them. Councils are wisely investing in viewing facilities and featuring them in their advertising. The public is enthralled.
Which is why I am absolutely bloody furious that scrotes like Wiltshire gamekeeper Archie Watson, ‘worst bird pf prey poisoner’ Norfolk gamekeeper Allen Lambert, and Scottish Borders gamekeeper Alan Wilson (pictured below with his ‘kill list’) - three of a whole barrel full of wildlife criminals - seem to think they should have any say at all in what birds of prey you and I see.
Who the bloody hell do they and their goddam shooting industry employers think they are? It’s not up to shooting to decide how many birds of prey is ‘enough’ - and it should always be nature and the prey/predator balance that determines when there are ‘too many’. Certainly Watson and his ilk shouldn’t have any input whatsoever.
But not content with helping dump more than 60 million non-native pheasants and partridges into our stressed countryside every year, not content with decimating native predators like stoats, weasels and foxes to ‘protect’ those pheasants before they can be sold off to shooters, not content with jumping on the badger slaughter bandwagon, these absolute tossers continue to wage war on birds of prey too.
It’s part of an entrenched pattern of persecution on shooting estates that encompasses raptors from Hen Harriers to Goshawks to Buzzards and Kites. Young (and not so young) criminals exterminating the very birds the rest of us admire, thrill to, and travel to see.
That should infuriate every single one of us.
And what happens if someone like Watson is caught in ‘England's largest raptor persecution investigation’? Filmed dumping the corpse of a Buzzard into a covered well on a pheasant-shooting venue in Wiltshire (just 20 miles from where I live), which - after a hugely expensive multi-agency operation involving some truly dedicated investigators - was found to be where eleven Buzzards and four Red Kites had been hidden?
Not much. Watson had two BTO rings attached to his keys (from a Buzzard and a Red Kite), had left a firearm unattended in his vehicle (the site is near Avebury, a major tourist site), but as this useless waste of space discovered this week at Swindon Magistrates Court he can give a laughably implausible excuse (presumably fed to him by a lawyer provided for him?) that he ‘found the birds’ (so why not report that to the police? He’s part of a shooting operation, of course he wouldn’t do that) and end up with a trivial fine and be ordered to do 180 hours unpaid work. Not sent to prison, but given a small fine and a few months unpaid work (if he bothers to even turn up). Fortunately he hadn’t done something serious like locking-on to a building to protest climate change or he could have had the book thrown at him…
No wonder he left the court, according to reports, smirking and laughing with his mates.
That should infuriate us too.
Raptor persecution is rife in this country and the shooting industry is behind most of it. People like Watson wouldn’t be going out looking for birds of prey to kill (oh, excuse me m’lud ‘looking for dead birds of prey to dump down a well’) if they weren’t employed to do so.
Think about this for a moment: in parts of the UK the bloody shooting industry wants a say in whether there are Buzzards or Red Kites (or White-tailed Eagles) flying over your - and my - house.
They mustn’t get to do that.
Image of Watson with a dead Buzzard by Guy Shorrock/RSPB