Bowland Beth: The Life of an English Hen Harrier

Now, on 24 May 2012, I was going to see Bowland myself. I was researching for a book I was writing on the state of our birds of prey in Britain today and my companion was Eddie Anderson, whom I had known for nearly fifty years. When I first met him he was a gamekeeper. Eventually, after seven years, he gave up gamekeeping and forged a fine career making programmes for Anglia TV and BBC East.

We travelled by train from Norfolk. At Clitheroe, our destination, we were met by the late Mick Carroll, one of Stephen Murphy’s most dependable hen harrier watchers. He was going to drive us around Bowland, so we got into his car and he whisked us off to The Hark to Bounty pub in Slaidburn, where we were booked in for two nights.

We had a brief meeting with Stephen Murphy after breakfast. He promised to show us around the following day and then handed us over to Bill Hesketh and Bill Murphy, Stephen’s local, highly regarded harrier watchers. The rain had cleared, and the fells and moorland sparkled like a newly minted coin.

The rolling hills were dominated by a patchwork of green sprouting heather set against lower areas of grass split up into tiny fields by fences and stone walls, and I could quite understand why the place had been named an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a European designation that recognises the importance of its heather moorland and blanket bog as a special habitat for upland birds.

The wild, desolate landscape is an excellent location for bird watching. Curlew, golden plover, oystercatchers and snipe are all found here, and migrating dotterel pass through in spring and autumn. The summer population of breeding curlew is one of the most buoyant in England, and short-eared owls can regularly be seen hunting in daylight for their favourite prey, short-tailed field voles.

Three important birds of prey breed in the Forest of Bowland: the merlin, our smallest bird of prey and not much bigger than a mistle thrush, the much larger peregrine falcon, which, with its 200 mph scything stoop, has been described as the most successful bird in the world, and the hen harrier. The hen harrier is the symbol of the Forest of Bowland and used to be seen regularly as it floated low over moorland hunting for small birds and field voles.

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March 2011. Late in the afternoon at the beginning of March, a dark chocolate-brown female hen harrier wheeled over the Forest of Bowland. The low sun enhanced her brilliant orange eyes, deep set in her owl-like face. She was looking down on the moors, still in the grip of last night’s frost. Lines of grouse butts, positioned at the end of each drive, threw long shadows across the heather. A quick flick of a tail feather and a stronger down-beat on one wing brought her facing north. Below, she could pick out Ward’s Stone, the highest point in the Forest. Beyond, in the far distance, her eyes, eight times sharper than ours, picked out the Wig Stones thirty miles to the north. She was hungry. Her only kill had been a meadow pipit, not much of a meal. Where were the other harriers hunting?

She turned, flying across the Roman road towards the source of the Whitendale River. At once she spotted two harriers hunting the boggy ground draining into the river, so she spread her tail to check her speed, half closed her wings and in a series of zig-zags, the air whispering through her primaries, dropped down to join them.

Selecting an area to hunt over, she flew downwind, letting the wind do all the work, her wings held in a ‘V’ above her back. She scanned the hoarfrost-rimed rushes and Molinia grasses passing slowly beneath her for any sign of movement, then turned at a dry stone wall and flew upwind. Flap, flap, flap, glide. She quartered up and down the marshy area like a person searching for something they had lost, but she was hungry and needed to make a kill.

She saw little piles of cut grasses piled on the banks of a rivulet – signs of water voles, snug and warm in their burrows. She flapped her wings, spread her tail and slowed down. Ahead was a muddy patch that was untouched by the overnight frost. The cryptic plumage of a common snipe blended with the zig-zag pattern of the short grasses in the background, and it was only the sudden movement as the snipe plunged its sensitive bill into the mud that gave it away. The harrier suddenly flapped her wings once, stretched her legs down in line with her targeting eye and plunged down, her needle-sharp talons crushing the life out of the snipe.

She carried her kill away to a dense clump of rushes where she could pluck it and feed undisturbed. Ten minutes later, hunger satisfied, she joined the other harriers that were making their way back to the communal roost site at Brackenholes Clough.

The story of Bowland Beth is indelibly linked to Stephen Murphy, who leads the Natural England mission to safeguard the few remaining hen harriers in Bowland. I have known Stephen since 2006, when he radio-tagged a pair of marsh harrier chicks at the Hawk and Owl Trust reserve at Sculthorpe Moor in Norfolk. With the help of my original interviews with him in 2012 – and many recorded over the years 2014 to 2016 – I have been able to piece together the events that ushered Bowland Beth into the world.

I am looking at a photograph of him as I write. He has close-cropped hair, fine-chiselled features and is grinning at the camera because he is holding a month-old hen harrier chick on his knee. He radiates a natural enthusiasm for hen harriers, infecting everyone he meets with his love for these birds.

‘My dream job at Bowland, which I started in 2002, was seen, by some, as a poisoned chalice,’ he says. ‘Bowland is a place I love dearly. It had once been the stronghold of breeding pairs of hen harriers in England – twenty-plus pairs in the 1980s. From then on, the productivity of the birds yo-yo’d up and down every two or three years. Now, in 2012, we’re down to one breeding pair.’

A survey of hen harriers in the British Isles was carried out in 2010. There were then 630 pairs, with the great majority – five hundred-plus pairs – in Scotland, small populations in Wales and Northern Ireland of just under sixty pairs, and a diminishing population of thirty pairs on the Isle of Man. In England the breeding population was a mere twelve pairs, although conservationists tell us that there is suitable moorland habitat for three hundred-plus pairs.

March 2011, Norfolk. The cold darkness before sunrise after a sharp overnight frost. The three-year-old male hen harrier stood up from his roosting place, a soft couch in an area of sphagnum bog surrounded by rushes, heather and dwarf silver birch. Deep within his body chemical changes were taking place, urging him to fly north and seek a mate, forces that would shape everything that would happen in the future. He scanned the roost and counted the dark shapes – four other harriers nearby. It was common land and had been used by harriers as a safe roosting place for centuries.

The harrier stepped forward and cast up a pellet, an oblong mass of fur, feather and bones. He had arrived two days earlier, having overwintered in France, and was now in peak condition. The first light of the rising sun showed a very handsome bird: bright orange eyes, the cere above his sharply curved beak bright yellow, his body – apart from his scapulars and mantle, which were a dusky brown – covered in a silver-grey plumage, black primaries, grey tail and long yellow legs with sharp black talons. He took off, and as he circled higher and higher he saw beneath him the sugar beet fields, where yesterday he had hunted for finches, pipits and migrant thrushes. A few pink-footed geese, stragglers, were flighting in to feed on the sugar beet tops. Further on he skirted the Wash, a vast mud flat separating Norfolk from Lincolnshire. He saw huge flocks of wading birds taking to the air and flying inland as the rising tide covered the glistening mud.

Deep within his brain, information stored from his first view of the nest in which he was hatched directed the sturdy pectoral muscles in his chest, forcing his spread wings down, driving him forward. At the end of each stroke other muscles retracted the wing, ready for the next driving forward stroke. He was heading two hundred miles north-west to the Forest of Bowland, where he had been born three years ago.

Halfway through the Mesolithic Age, ten thousand years ago, the hen harrier would have been a common sight in England. Then, there were millions of acres of heaths, moors, mountains and barren lands. These, together with undrained bogs and marshes, would have provided huge areas of suitable hunting and nesting habitat for harriers to enjoy. The late Derek Yalden and Umberto Albarella found just such a landscape in the Bialowieza National Park on the Polish–Byelorussian border, and in their historical reconstruction they described what bird life would have been like in Britain at that time. Taking the average densities in areas studied by experts in Britain and combining them with the fact that there would have been no persecution or interference, Yalden and Albarella were able to calculate a Mesolithic hen harrier population of 2,803 pairs.

Mesolithic man, a hunter-gatherer, made little impact on the landscape. It was Neolithic man, who arrived in Britain five thousand years ago, who began clearing forest and scrub to make fields. He planted grain crops and his livestock grazed the grasslands on the chalk areas. The sophistication of farming increased during the Bronze Age, when the importance of soils and a good supply of water became understood. The village, in its simplest form, was a cluster of dwellings surrounded by three common fields, fertile and easy to farm, with ox-drawn ploughs being used to strip-plough the land. One of the fields would be planted with wheat or rye for bread, another with grains for beverages and the third would lie fallow. After the Norman Conquest churches were built in each village, the population quadrupled, and farming and clearance of the scrub and forest accelerated. But the yields of grain were poor, barely sufficient to feed the population.

The Black Death ravaged the country in the fourteenth century, halving the population. Cultivated land was abandoned and farmers turned to raising sheep. Wool made some farmers a fortune and sheep, a walking dung cart, improved the fertility of the fields.

The Tudor Vermin Acts, initiated in 1532 and strengthened in 1566, listed the birds and mammals considered to be vermin. The list was extensive, ranging from stoats and weasels through bullfinches and kingfishers to ospreys and so-called ringtails, as the hen harrier was known. Not surprisingly, it was on the list; it has always been a controversial bird, as its name implies, and must have been a familiar sight as it hunted around farmers’ smallholdings, snatching up chicks and ducklings. Churchwardens were responsible for payments to those who destroyed vermin, although it appears that few payments were made on this account.

The Enclosures Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that the days of the hen harrier were numbered, even though they remained common enough for the poet John Clare to watch them float languidly over the fens near his home in Northamptonshire. ‘There is a large blue (hawk) almost as big as a goose,’ he wrote, ‘[that] fly in a swopping manner not much unlike the flye of a heron you may see an odd one often in the spring swimming close to the green corn and ranging over an whole field for hours together – it hunts leverets, partridges and pheasants.’

In his poem ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, John Clare paints a vivid picture of a hunting hen harrier.

A hugh [huge] blue bird will often swim

Along the wheat when skys grow dim

Wi clouds – slow as the gales of spring

In motion wi dark shadowed wing

Beneath the coming storm it sails.

One of the hen harrier’s main habitats was heathland, created when woodland was cut down. This was treated as common land, and among its uses was grazing for sheep, furze for heating – and also for burning heretics – and ling for fuel and low-quality thatch. But heathlands became increasingly threatened. In The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, published in 1789, the naturalist Gilbert White raged at the senseless, illegal burning of heathland:

To burn on any waste, between Candlemass and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath and furze, goss or fern, is punishable with whipping and confinement in the house of correction.

He takes a deep breath.

The plea for these burnings is, that, when the old coat of heath, etc, is consumed, young will sprout up, and afford much tender brouze for cattle; but, where there is large old furze, the fire, following the roots, consumes the very ground; so that for hundreds of acres nothing is to be seen but smother and desolation, the whole circuit around looking like the cinders of a volcano; and, the soil being quite exhausted, no traces of vegetation are to be found for years.

In some heathlands there was no grass to bind the sand, and the land often resembled the Sahel in Africa. When there was a big ‘blow’, as in the seventeenth century in the Norfolk village of Downham, settlements could be almost buried in sand and rivers blocked. A farmer, asked where he lived, replied, ‘Sometimes in Norfolk and sometimes in Suffolk; it depends which way the wind blows.’

Gradually, much of the hen harrier’s favourite habitats – the heaths and fens – vanished as the Enclosures Acts took hold. But the face of Britain was completely altered by the Agricultural Revolution, particularly the four-course system promoted by Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend. This meant that cattle, fed on turnips and kept during the winter, didn’t have to be slaughtered in the autumn. As a direct result of this innovation, more hedges were planted to contain the cattle.

A great swathe of land from north Yorkshire to Southampton was enclosed to become highly productive farmland. The landscape as we know it today became established and hen harriers ceased to be a commonplace sight; their numbers greatly reduced, they retreated to the heather moorlands of Lancashire and north Yorkshire.

Here they found a diverse habitat. There were swathes of heather up to four feet tall – excellent cover in which to nest – whose dark understorey was rich in insects, attracting small birds like stonechats, a good, staple prey item for hen harriers. Other areas on the moorland were grassy. Hunting over these areas, the harriers caught meadow pipits and skylarks, as well as short-tailed field voles that made their burrows in these rough meadows. For more substantial fare, young rabbits and leverets could be pounced on before they were aware of the danger.

Here too were wet areas, with spongy sphagnum bogs dominating the lower reaches of the heather moorland. Along the rivulets draining into these bogs – and in the bogs themselves – harriers could catch water voles, common snipe and curlew.

And lastly, as we shall shortly find out, there were red grouse.

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The sun was blood red as it broke the horizon and lit the communal roost where the female hen harrier had spent the night. She watched the other harriers as they left to go foraging for food out on the moor. She didn’t join them, for she had felt a quickening in her body, an urge to move to Mallowdale Pike, a rocky crag from where she had fledged nine months ago. After preening – getting her feathers into flying order – she lifted off from the roost and soared up over the fell.

Soon she was able to see the familiar mosaic pattern, the result of annual heather burning. She twitched her tail feathers on one side and completed her refamiliarisation with the grouse moor beneath her. But then she suddenly sheered away. There was something wrong. Smoke was billowing up and she could see men beating at the flames beneath her. Why were they destroying her birth place?

The first mention of the hen harrier was in 1544 by Dr William Turner in his Avium praecipuarum, the first bird book to be printed, during a comparison of his field observations with those made by Aristotle and Pliny.

The Rubetarius I think to be that Hawk which English people name Hen Harroer. Further it gets its name among our countryman, from butchering their fowls. It exceeds the Palumbarius in size and is in colour ashen. It suddenly strikes birds when sitting in the fields upon the ground, as well as fowls in towns and villages. Baulked of its prey it steals off silently, nor does it ever make a second swoop. It flies along the ground the most of all. The Subbuteo I think to be that hawk which Englishmen call Ringtail from the ring of white that reaches round the tail. In colour it is midway from fulvous to black; it is a little smaller than the Buteo, but much more active. It catches prey in the same manner as the bird above.

Turner treated both birds as if they were different species. All ashen-coloured harriers, the male birds, were known as hen harriers, while the brown ‘subbuteos’, with white around the tail, were called ringtails.

This dimorphism of the harrier was a riddle that was not solved for another three hundred years. Thomas Bewick in his History of British Birds, published in 1797, added a cautionary footnote to his description of the hen harrier: ‘It has been supposed that this and the following are male and female; but the repeated instances of hen harriers of both sexes having been seen leave it beyond all doubt that they constitute two distinct species.’ At around this time John Latham made an extremely sensible suggestion that would cut through all the hot air that had been generated – take some chicks from the nest and keep them in captivity for three or four years to confirm the change in plumage.

George Montagu now applied himself to solving the ‘harrier problem’. In 1807 he wrote a paper that stated two vital facts. The bird familiarly called a ringtail and given the scientific name pygargus was in fact the female hen harrier, cyaneus. In his meticulous way he described how he had taken a nest of three hen harrier chicks and reared them in captivity – exactly what John Latham had suggested. One died, but eventually the remaining two moulted into adult plumage, a grey male and a female – a ringtail. Having done this, George Montagu was able to properly describe them as two different species, the silver-grey male hen harrier and the smaller, more graceful, silver-grey Montagu’s harrier. The hen harrier was given the Latin name Circus cyaneus, while the Montagu’s harrier was now known as Circus pygargus. Their females, sombre brown with a conspicuous white rump, were known as ringtails.

Later that century, J. H. Gurney, not to be outdone, reared three hen harrier nestlings taken from a marsh near Ranworth decoy in Norfolk. When fully fledged, they all displayed the rich chocolate colour of their immature plumage. On moulting, two out of the three proved to be males. They survived for five years and one is now preserved in the Castle Museum in Norwich.

I was recently allowed to study four skins of female and male hen harriers and Montagu’s harriers on loan from the Castle Museum. The female hen harrier was enormous, measuring 28 inches from beak to tip of tail. Maybe it was a Scandinavian bird, which are bigger. The skin of the male Montagu’s harrier demonstrated perfectly one of the key identifying features – the primaries projected beyond the tip of the tail.