Bowland Beth: The Life of an English Hen Harrier

It is time now to examine the fully adult bird in more detail. The female hen harrier and the immature male are rather dull compared with the adult male. The female’s head and nape are light brown with dark streaks and the back is dark brown. The secondaries are barred and the primaries are dark. The rump is white and the tail feathers have three narrow transverse dark bars and a much broader bar at the tip. The underside is pale brown with longitudinal dark brown streaking. The female is considerably larger than the male.

By comparison the male is a spectacularly handsome bird. The beak is black and the cere yellow, bristles cover the area between the cere and the eyes, which are a clear yellow, and there is a distinct owl-like, facial ruff edged with short, very distinct feathers. The head, nape, upper back and upper wing coverts of a fully adult, five-year-old bird are silver-grey. The rump is white, contrasting with the tail feathers, which are light grey with dark transverse bars and have white tips, apart from the two central tail feathers, which are plain grey and unmarked. The first five outer primaries are black, the underside is grey, becoming lighter towards the vent, and the legs are yellow and long.

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The male hen harrier, on his way back to Bowland, had overnighted in that part of the Peak District known as the Dark Peat. As he took off from his roost where he’d been safe under cover, hidden from sight by a few stunted trees and warm in the comfort of the sphagnum bog, he noticed the almost complete absence of other birds of prey – no harriers, peregrines or goshawks, just the occasional merlin or kestrel. It was not a good place to be a bird of prey. Like all hen harriers he had a distrust of man. The sight of a line of men managing a heather burn made him jink to one side to avoid the billowing flames and smoke.

Much of the heather moorland is managed for the benefit of those who shoot red grouse. The birds are driven towards the ‘guns’ waiting in a line of butts set up across the moor during the grouse-shooting season, which starts on 12 August and ends on 10 December. There are four main grouse moors in Bowland – United Utilities (formerly North West Water Authority), Abbeystead, Bleasdale and Clapham estates. There are other smaller moors, all of which are important players in their own way.

The United Utilities estate is not a true moor, nor is it managed to the extent of the others. There is some driven grouse shooting but the majority of the grouse killed are shot by a single gun walking the moor with setter and pointer dogs ranging ahead. If they find grouse, the pointer holds its point on the crouching birds. The gun moves up and the setter flushes the grouse, allowing the gun two shots at the grouse as they fly off. It is good exercise, and was the method used when grouse shooting started in the north of England and Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In 1831 the Game Act was passed to protect the interests of all those preserving game for shooting, setting dates in the calendar between which it was permitted to shoot different species of bird. It also gave gamekeepers the power to carry weapons and to arrest poachers. This set in motion a chain of events that ensured that the goshawk had disappeared by 1889, the marsh harrier by 1898, the osprey by 1908, the honey buzzard by 1911 and the white-tailed eagle by 1916.

It was a prosperous time in England and rich sportsmen lusted after shooting increasing numbers of grouse, just as they shot driven pheasants flying out of a covert. This passion for driven grouse was aided midway through the nineteenth century by two factors: Queen Victoria’s love affair with Scotland – and Balmoral in particular – and the expansion of the railways.

So how does driven grouse shooting work? The moor is divided up into a number of beats, and towards the end of each beat a line of six to eight butts – breast-high embrasures, behind which stand the guns – are positioned. A line of beaters, starting from the far end of the beat, walks slowly forward through the heather towards the butts. The red grouse, which tend to congregate in packs at the end of the breeding season, are flushed and fly very fast at shoulder height towards the guns. Good shots kill two birds in front, take their second gun from their loader, who is standing behind them to their right, and shoot another two birds as they fly away. It is the kind of shooting that sorts the veterans out from the rookies.

Over time the grouse shooters demanded grouse in ever-increasing numbers. This led to overstocking, with more grouse left in the winter than the moor could sustain. Two diseases – strongylosis (caused by a worm in the gut) and looping-ill (a tick-borne disease of sheep) – found ready purchase in the weak birds and were to bedevil grouse-moor management for many years to come. Grouse disease was such a problem that the government stepped in and commissioned a two-volume monograph, The Grouse in Health and Disease, published in 1910. Dr Edward Wilson, one of the heroes of Scott’s ill-fated attempt on the South Pole, was among the team that compiled the report.

They concentrated on strongylosis and succeeded in plotting out the disease’s life cycle. Sometimes the disease can develop very rapidly, completing its cycle in fifteen days. The larvae hatch out in the droppings of the grouse and then climb up to the green shoots on the heather. The grouse eat the green shoots and larvae, then the larvae grow to their adult stage in the grouse’s gut and reproduce, laying eggs. They pass out in the grouse’s droppings for the cycle to be repeated. All red grouse carry strongylosis and late spring – April to May – is when the disease peaks. Allowing too large a stock of birds for the moor will lead to a periodic epidemic.

It is an interesting sidenote that in 1908 a protozoan parasite was discovered, Cryptosporidium baileyi, that affects poultry. A hundred years later it would cause what is known as ‘bulgy eye syndrome’ in grouse, and had a devastating effect on driven grouse shooting when the moor was left overstocked at the end of the season.

Not long after the discovery of Cryptosporidium baileyi, driven grouse shooting and the number of grouse shot were reaching their apogee. I consulted Record Bags and Shooting Records by Hugh S. Gladstone for information on numbers of grouse shot, and discovered that on 12 August 1915 at the Little Abbeystead beat in the Forest of Bowland eight guns shot 2,929 red grouse in six drives, a record that stands to this day.

For several days the female hen harrier, number 22, tried to return to her birth place but was put off by the heather burning on the moorland below the ridge. Now, as she wheeled high above, she could see that the men had gone and all that was left was a mosaic pattern of blackened, burnt areas. Cautiously she drifted lower and then made several passes along the ridge until she was satisfied that it was safe. She dropped down and landed by the bilberry patch she remembered so well. The sky darkened as a ragged shower of rain swept across the moor, dousing those newly burnt heather patches, which were still smouldering.

Heather burning is part of the history of driven grouse shooting, a sport that started in about the middle of the nineteenth century. Beforehand moor owners had derived income from farmers wishing to graze their sheep, and the farmers burnt the heather to improve the grazing. Moor owners realised that they could receive a better income from driven grouse shooting than from sheep grazing, so heather burning was banned. All went well for a few years until grouse numbers suddenly collapsed. What the moor owners hadn’t realised was that red grouse eat heather shoots virtually throughout the year. Burning was quickly reinstated, with the aim of burning patches of heather on the moor when it was about ten years old. Burning at this age stimulates regeneration of growth from the roots to provide the green shoots that grouse feed on. If the heather is not burnt until it is fifteen or twenty years old there will be a very hot ‘burn’, caused by the long, woody heather stems – and there will be no regeneration.

The burning, which starts in October and continues until April, should produce a mosaic of burnt areas (an area burnt this year, last year and so on), the areas becoming greener and greener as the heather regenerates, with the edge of each burn ragged rather than straight. During the first fortnight after they leave the nest, grouse chicks feed on insects and wander into the open, and ragged edges gives them a chance of escaping a hunting hen harrier while a straight edge leaves them totally exposed.

The sun was low over the horizon as the male hen harrier crossed the River Ribble and flew up into the Forest of Bowland. Smoke from heather burning was still drifting across the moors and fells, with men in lines tending the edge of the fire. He turned sharply to avoid them, as last year he’d lost three primary feathers to a shotgun blast. He flew straight to one of his favourite hunting areas, an open area of fell well covered with grass. He saw the occasional sheep grazing contentedly, but they took no notice of him. Eventually he found what he was looking for, a marshy area from which sprang a rill that eventually fed into the Ribble. He dropped down until he was about ten to fifteen feet off the ground and began a methodical search for prey into the wind. Flap, flap, flap, glide.

At the end of the marshy area he turned and drifted down with the wind, a V-shaped silhouette that hovered now and then to investigate a movement or a sound. By the rill were several stands of rushes. He heard a squeak and hovered over it, his ears hidden behind the owl-like mask of his face picking up the rustle of movement through the rushes. He extended his long yellow legs, closed his wings and dropped down. His eight black, needle-sharp talons unerringly grabbed the prey, a short-tailed field vole.

Short-tailed field voles thrive in any patch of land or field where there is rough, tussocky grass. Mainly nocturnal, their presence is indicated by holes in grass tussocks where they nest, runs in the grass with holes where they pop up from time to time and remains of grass clippings that they have chewed. Both male and female field voles mark their territory and defend it with splashes of urine. It is estimated that there are 75 million field voles in the British Isles, and their breeding season starts in April or May, continuing through to September or October. A succession of litters is produced, with an average litter size of five, and young born at the start of the breeding season will themselves breed later in the same year. Their breeding success follows a cyclical pattern, a poor year followed by a better one. Then, either in the third or fourth year, there is a peak breeding season. This cyclical pattern is exploited by predators in the good years and has a depressing effect on their productivity during lean periods. Research has shown that peak vole years influence hen harrier numbers, with bigger clutch sizes and number of chicks fledged. Small mammals make up a modest but important part of the hen harrier’s diet throughout the year, and two voles would meet the daily prey requirement of a harrier.

Volume 3 of The Handbook of British Birds, 2nd edition, which I bought as a young boy in 1944, gives a concise list of birds’ prey items. The handbook states that the hen harrier:

preys chiefly on birds and mammals taken by surprise on the ground. Mammals include young rabbits, leveret, mice, field- and water voles, rats, etc. Birds: frequently Meadow-Pipits, Sky-Larks, or young Lapwings; occasionally chicken or duck, Teal, Red Grouse, Partridge, Golden Plover, Snipe, Dunlin: also finches (Linnet, Chaffinch, Snow-Bunting), Song-Thrush, Blackbird, Ring-Ouzel and Stonechat. Snakes (Adder), lizards, slow-worm, frogs, etc., also taken, and eggs or young of ground-nesting birds (Meadow-Pipit, Dunlin, etc.): small fish also once recorded: also Coleoptera.

Eagles, Hawks and Falcons of the World by Leslie Brown and Dean Amadon, published in 1968, tackles the subject from a different perspective. The authors cite one analysis that gives the hen harrier diet as 25 per cent birds, 55 per cent mammals and 29 per cent snakes, frogs and insects. Another nesting analysis gives 31 per cent birds and 69 per cent mammals, with meadow mice predominating. Brown and Amadon state that the hen harrier can occasionally take mammals up to the size of a rabbit, and birds up to the size of a young bittern, but large birds such as ducks are usually wounded or moribund when taken. Food is usually taken on the ground, as the hen harrier can rarely capture birds in the air. Food requirements vary from 100 grams daily for a female (19 per cent of body weight) in cold weather to 42 grams (12 per cent of body weight) for a male in warm weather, the maximum daily intake by a female being 142 grams in cold weather.

Some of the more unlikely species that hen harriers have tackled include hedgehogs and adders, and apart from red grouse hen harriers have been known to take ptarmigan, black grouse, partridge and pheasant. Intra-guild predation has accounted for merlin and kestrel . . . and lastly, an unlucky short-eared owl.

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There was no sun and the moor was white with frost when, two days later, the male hen harrier drifted down to Mallowdale Pike ridge in search of a mate. He passed up and down a couple of times, and on the last flypast noticed a female hen harrier in the tall heather tearing at the tussocks of dead grasses below, throwing them in the air. Cautiously he planed down and landed close by. She was larger than him, and in the first glimmer of sunshine he admired her glossy chocolate-brown plumage, noticing the white wing tag with the number 22 in black. He walked over to her. She looked at him and he could feel her sizing him up. Was he good enough? He’d show her.

He rocketed up into the sky. The female watched as his blue-grey outline melded into the now blue sky above. At three hundred feet he turned and plunged into a vertical dive towards her. In freefall he corkscrewed and screamed to attract her attention. Faster and faster he fell. Then, just when it seemed that he would crash right into her, he pulled out and soared up in the air again. He was reckless in his efforts to impress her. Three times he repeated the death-defying plunge earthwards before finally landing by her side. He was panting, plumes of breath hanging in the frosty air. She was impressed and sidled over to crouch submissively by his side. He had found a mate.

‘My routine when I’m checking for the harriers’ arrival,’ says Stephen Murphy, ‘is to drive round to the north side of the central mass of the Forest of Bowland. Here it is split by a valley, and where the harriers nest is way back beyond the horizon. I’ll park my car and watch. This is a muster point for hen harriers looking for a mate. In March and April I have seen eight birds there, all “skydancing”. It’s like a big aerial dance floor, a real sight to behold. When they’ve found a mate, they’ll fly up the valley and up out of sight to where they’ll find a nest site.

‘A week or so later I’ll walk up onto the fell and find myself a spot in the heather where I can scan the distant hillside through my binoculars. At the moment I’m checking one of the traditional harrier nesting sites way across the valley. It’s a favourite site – they’ve always produced young from there. We’re in the last couple of weeks of March and any pairs of hen harriers should be arriving any day now.’

It is the female that makes the choice of where the nest will be, and shortly afterwards she can be spotted flying in carrying grasses or large sprigs of heather or bilberry in her beak, a sure sign that nest-building has started. Starting from scratch, the female chooses a bare area for the nest in tall heather but with easy access to it from one direction. Generally, all the nesting material – from quite bulky twigs to smaller sprays – is picked up within two hundred metres of the nest.

Flying out from her chosen site she pitched on an old heather burn and meticulously pulled up lengths of dead heather with her talons, then flew to the nest site. Here she started intertwining them. Off she went again, and each time she returned she methodically knitted the heather strands together, gradually building up the finished nest. She stamped around in it to perfect its saucer shape, then lined it with grasses and, as a final touch, added some bilberry leaves. As she did so her white wing tag with the number 22 in black came into view. She noticed that she was losing feathers on either side of her breast-bone and that the bare areas were becoming suffused with blood – these were her brood patches.

Three other pairs of hen harriers had arrived on Mallowdale Pike, and were busy skydancing and searching for nest sites, making it a communal nest site.

Stephen Murphy lowers his binoculars. ‘I remember helping my friend David Souter wing-tag that bird last year,’ he said. ‘This was the area from which she fledged. She’s obviously decided it’s where she’s going to nest.

‘I always keep well back from a potential nest site, at least 500 metres. With a good pair of binoculars you can be pretty sure of what’s happening, and it all goes in my diary – weather, behaviour and so on.’

Their nest complete, the pair were ready for the next stage of their courtship, the magic of copulation. Seizing the moment, the cock bird flew in with a vole he had just caught. The female rose up from her nest and caught it as her mate passed it to her, and then they both landed. The female called to the cock bird, which approached her in a frenzy of excitement and mounted her. She moved her tail to one side, and he manoeuvred so that their engorged sexual organs came into contact. He flapped his wings to keep in position, there was a brief shudder and it was all over.

For the next week or so the pair of harriers copulated several times a day, before his mate became moody and disinterested and took to the nest she had built, these last acts of copulation having stimulated a daily release of eggs from the ovary. It was now the middle of April. Nearby a hen stonechat had built her nest of moss and grasses at the bottom of a thick stand of heather that was just starting to sprout some green shoots; she was incubating five speckled brown eggs. Her mate was perched on the top of a branch of heather, asserting his right to the patch by constantly spreading his tail and flicking his wings.

On the fifth night the female hen harrier became restless, shifting uneasily in the nest. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning she stood up, legs well apart, arched her back and laid an egg. It was pale blue. She peered at it, touched it with her beak and then settled down over it. At first light the cock bird dropped into the nest and offered her a meadow pipit. She shuffled off the nest to eat it. Her talons grasped the pipit, her beak tore it apart and she gulped it down, allowing her mate a moment to proudly inspect the newly laid egg.

Roughly every forty-eight hours she laid another egg, until she had a full clutch of six. A day or two after laying, the pale blue colour of the eggs changed to a chalky white. The inflamed bare areas on her breast were now hot to the touch and, with the arrival of the second egg, she started incubating. When she left the nest it was only to fly around for ten minutes or so before her hormones pulled her back to her treasured clutch of eggs. The cock bird was very attentive, bringing her food to the nest and roosting nearby at night. Incubation was a long process, and it would be another three and a half weeks before the first egg would hatch.

Suddenly, the female heard the cock bird calling. She took off and flew up to meet her mate, who was flying towards her. He was carrying a meadow pipit, and he slowed down to enable the female to turn and trail below him. He dropped his prey and the female flipped over in the air and caught it.

Stephen Murphy crouches in the heather, watching. ‘After the food pass the female flew to a boulder to eat the prey item before returning to her nest, a definite confirmation of where the nest is. I don’t want you to think that I’m working alone all the time. I’m fortunate to have the back-up of RSPB watchers who are employed on a summer season-only basis and I’m also able to call on local keen bird watchers whom I trust. We share any information we gather.

‘In 1975, when there was only one pair of hen harriers nesting at Bowland, the two Bills – Bill Hesketh and Bill Murphy – mounted a twenty-four hour watch on the nest site to ensure that the young were reared successfully. In fact, in 2011 it was the two Bills who found the nest that produced Bowland Beth.’

‘It was 6 April,’ says Bill Hesketh, ‘a glorious morning on my watch as we settled down among the heather in the shadow of a peat bank. The whole of wild Bowland proper laid out in front of us – just heather, bilberry, rush and sky. At 10.45 am, quite a distance away, a female hen harrier came floating down from Mallowdale Pike. Her right wing had a tag on it, white except for a narrow pink band at the base – no tag could be seen on the other wing. Over the next fifteen minutes she began criss-crossing last year’s nest location at a low height, at intervals setting herself down on the same spot.’

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Predator control of hen harriers by gamekeepers up until the Second World War was indiscriminate. The shotgun, the pole trap and poison were their weapons. It eased as gamekeepers joined up to fight in the war, and the hen harrier population recovered. The Protection of Birds Act 1954 gave full protection to the hen harrier and all other birds of prey – apart from the sparrowhawk. In 1962 the original Act was modified to include the sparrowhawk.

But the regime of heather burning revived the red grouse population and with it the popularity of driven grouse shooting. Persecution of all birds of prey, particularly the hen harrier, increased dramatically.

In 1981 the young at six hen harrier nests were wilfully destroyed, leading to a huge outcry. As a result the North West Water Authority and United Utilities joined forces to support an RSPB presence in Bowland, led by John Armitage.

‘The evidence was just left there,’ says Armitage. ‘It was quite blatant. Nowadays it would have been retrieved, covered up. Running alongside this persecution there was egg collecting. There were about forty breeding pairs of hen harriers in Bowland, which was very convenient for egg collectors based in England. I started a dialogue with the four main estates to gently remind them that we were looking over their shoulders and would take action if we had the necessary evidence. I found that several of the keepers hated hen harriers – they couldn’t even say the name and wouldn’t speak openly about them at all.’

During the period between 1981 and 2005 John Armitage correlated the successful nesting attempts on four of the Bowland grouse moors. It makes for very interesting reading: NWWA/United Utilities 153, Bleasdale 37, Abbeystead 34 and Clapham 15.

‘I was disappointed that the RSPB didn’t put its foot down and persuade United Utilities to give up grouse shooting on their land,’ he says. ‘As it stood then – and still does – it makes it easier for people to come in from elsewhere and clear hen harriers out.’

‘The traditional way of dealing with hen harriers was to have a coordinated strike on all the roosts throughout the Pennine chain of grouse moors,’ says Bill Hesketh. ‘Mist nets would be set up beforehand, concealed on the roost. At dusk they would watch the harriers settling in for the night. At a prearranged time the nets would be pulled upright, a shot fired, and the keepers would rush in. Any harriers caught would have their necks promptly wrung.’