On a late winter’s afternoon I was watching a sparrowhawk as it soared high above the RSPB’s Ham Wall reserve near Glastonbury, when a larger raptor came into view. For one brief and frantic moment, I thought it was a goshawk; but then I caught sight of the mid-brown plumage and narrow white rump, which marked it out as a female or immature hen harrier – known in birding parlance as a “ringtail”.
We don’t see many of these beautiful birds on the Somerset Levels; indeed nowadays, you don’t see many of them anywhere. That’s because hen harriers are still being illegally trapped and shot by gamekeepers on Scottish and English moorlands, to stop them killing red grouse.
We may disagree about some of the laws on the statute book, but we can’t just choose to ignore them. That’s why I sometimes struggle with the phrase “wildlife crime”; this is, quite simply, a crime. These mindless vandals try to justify their actions, even though the issue really is very straightforward: the clue is in the word “illegal”. Yet society continues to turn a blind eye to the routine killing of this magnificent bird of prey.
Because hen harrier numbers are so low, seeing them is always a treat – every encounter is enhanced by their rarity. But I for one would not mind if they became so common that we hardly gave them a second glance.
