Just two weeks ago I wrote a post looking at the paltry fine a smirking gamekeeper on a shooting estate near Avebury received for dumping a dead Buzzard in a well which was subsequently found to be the final resting place of eleven Buzzards and four Red Kites (see Scrotes like Archie Watson...mustn't be deciding which birds you and I can see). I said (as the title of the post clearly points out) that Watson (who is just twenty-one years old now - the case took well over a year to get to court) mustn’t be the arbiter of whether you and I get to see Buzzards and Red Kites flying over our houses.
That case was of particular relevance to me because this illegal, deliberate targeting of birds of prey by a gamekeeper took place less than thirty miles from where I live in Wiltshire. It’s conceivable, given how Red Kites are still re-establishing territories in parts of the county so are often seen wandering around looking for suitable areas, that the birds this young scrote killed might have actually headed my way at some point.
Hot on the heels of this killing comes a Police Appeal for yet another shooting of a Red Kit not far from me, this time near Marlborough.
According to a Wiltshire Police press release:
“A dead kite was recovered from a public footpath close to Hens wood, Axford, Wiltshire on the 20/04/2022 following a report from the public. Further forensic work into the cause of death has found that the bird had been shot.
We are appealing for any information around the shooting of the Red kite or any person who may have been in the area on the 16/04/2022 who saw anything suspicious to contact the Wiltshire Rural crime team via 101 – quote crime report 54220038890”
A short article in the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald by Beth Gavaghan on 15th June didn’t add much extra in the way of details, but repeated the police statement that “forensic work into the cause of death has found that the bird had been shot.”
Leaving aside the fact that the police appeal came almost two months after the bird was found, the timing of the shooting and the location leads to some rather obvious conclusions…and while what I’m going to speculate below is in no way an accusation or proof of anything, I don’t think that activists like me can be blamed at all for drawing them…
Firstly, April is when Red Kites are nesting. They will have paired earlier but this is when they are egg laying and rearing young. Birds nesting shows that they have established (or are attempting to) a territory. Young Kites do wander looking for unused sites, but once established the species tends to be sedentary - in other words, once they’ve found a suitable location they tend to stay there. Red Kites nest in trees, and Hens Wood, which is on the edge of Savernake Forest (close to Marlborough) has long been known as wintering roost for Red Kites…
April is also when shooting estates are raising Pheasants, which they plan to sell off to gun-toting clients who enjoy a day out blowing holes in birds. Just coincidentally (let’s keep this libel-free, eh) close to Hens Wood lies Ramsbury Estate, which is described on GloriousGame.com (which I won’t be linking to) as having a shoot which “runs over 4,500 acres covering North East Wiltshire, West Berkshire and North Hampshire. The shoot is set in the heart of the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” (yeah, no better conservation than filling an AONB with large non-native birds so that shooters can spray large quantities of lead shot at them).
Now (m’lud) I’m not suggesting for an instance that someone at Ramsbury Estate tried to dissuade this particular Red Kite from nesting anywhere near a pheasant pen because there is no evidence at all that’s the case. It’s surely not debatable to infer, though, that predators will be being killed on Ramsbury, just as they were back in 2016 when then estate ground manager Alastair Ewing was quoted in the Gazette & Herald saying “I cannot say that we don’t kill foxes and squirrels but I cannot believe what is being said about us. The only things in the pit are maybe half a dozen dead foxes which were shot not that long ago.” The ‘pit’ is of course a stink pit designed to lure foxes to snares by smell: if you’ve ever stumbled across one (they’re usually hidden away on ‘private’ land) you’ll know why they’re called ‘stink pits’…
Again, let me stress that there is no evidence at all to link any shooting estate with the shooting of this Red Kite, but I have a feeling that were I to suggest that the shooting industry was involved (rather than an individual estate) a court would find it very difficult to convict me of libel. I’m not a lawyer (and the following sentence is a bit mangled in an attempt not to have to hire one), but let’s face it - other than the shooting industry what else has a past history of raptor persecution, has a motive to kill a Red Kite, and what else has the opportunity?
Shooting’s past history of massacring birds of prey is undeniable. It was once legal for gamekeepers to simply eradicate raptors and estates used to keep very detailed records of the eagles, hawks, and owls killed every year. The old Victorian belief that anything with ‘hooked beak or claw’ must die is still clearly locked in to the shooting mindset in far too many areas (Hen Harriers are ten times more likely to die or disappear in an area managed for grouse than any other, and scientists concluded that illegal killing was the most likely explanation.). And as the applications for licences to kill Buzzards on estates prove were it not now illegal our birds of prey wouldn’t stand a chance in large areas of the countryside managed for shooting.
Illegal or not, shooting is still implicated in most of the raptor persecution cases listed in the RSPB’s BirdCrime Report (which is not as shooting lobbyists might claim a cherry-picked list of cases, but a compilation of all cases recorded). In fact, 2020’s report was trailed as “report reveals worst year on record” with the headline bullet points including the wearily consistent statistic that “Almost two-thirds [of incidents] were in connection with land managed for or connected to gamebird shooting”.
Shooting estates kill birds of prey because they might have an impact on their profits. Which is where motive comes in. Even the notoriously slippery shooting industry will find it difficult to provide a reason why anyone else would want to kill a Red Kite. Retailers? Can’t see why. Hikers, cyclists, DIYers, or tanker drivers? Nope. Journos, artists, cake-sellers, shelf-pickers, designers working-from-home, mums, dads, the retired or sick? Just not seeing it. Farmers perhaps, but that’s not what the convictions for raptor persecution suggest.
Besides, who else but employees of the shooting industry are wandering around the countryside with specific orders to blow animals apart? This isn’t America, most of us don’t have access to a gun let alone fired one at a bird or a fox and certainly not near a shooting estate crawling with armed gamekeepers. And how impossible is it that these instructions might (how can I put this, m’lud) be ‘misinterpreted’ to include a bird of prey setting up a nesting territory in a parcel of land that shooting has fenced off as its own?
The industry and lobbyists will be rolling their eyes at all of the above and perhaps lining up to dismiss it as the biased speculation of an anti. Sure, I’m biased, and yes, I’m pro-wildlife and anti law breaking and cruelty. Nevertheless, nothing I’ve written here is disputable. It’s really not. And as I asked in the title at the top of this page, if I’m ‘jumping to conclusions’ whose fault is that?
I’m not interested in telling the shooting industry how to sort itself out - I’d rather see it shut down - but you don’t need a brains trust to work out that the industry needs to admit that given its history it is unsurprising that we the public almost automatically now link raptor persecution and cases like this with local shooting estates. It needs to stop its blather about ‘rotten apples’ and its protection of the criminals in its midst and work with law enforcement to dig them out. It needs to be honest and admit that it has lied to the public about its attitude towards native wildlife over and over again and that its pathetic ‘conservation’ claims are laughable. And it needs to admit that if it’s not profitable to run shooting without the killing of native biodiversity then the industry is not fit to exist either in the midst of a biodiversity crisis or in a country where so much biodiversity has already been lost.
As I said and will repeat again, there is no evidence whatsoever that the shooting industry was involved with the killing of a Red Kite near a shooting estate at Hens Wood in Wiltshire sometime last April, but even they must understand why people like me will be thinking that it is.