Ahead of the shotguns booming out for the ‘Glorious’ Twelfth, this striking collection underlines the plight of these beautiful hawks and the campaign to save them
Between 1837 and 1840 on the Glengarry estate in Inverness-shire, gamekeepers’ tally books show them to have killed 63 hen harriers, 63 goshawks, 98 peregrines, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, six gyrfalcons, 11 hobbies, 275 kites, 285 buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlins and 35 horned owls, as well as 198 wildcats, 246 pine martens and hundreds of assorted other mustelids and corvids.
Today, you read these notorious records doubly amazed: that wildlife slaughter on this scale should have been permissible – and that it should have been possible. Sixty-three goshawks on a single estate? Sixty-three hen harriers? Eighteen ospreys? Six gyrfalcons? Such abundance now seems fabulous, for the avian predator populations of upland Britain have never really recovered from the massacres they underwent in the 19th century. The 1954 Protection of Birds Act outlawed the killing of any bird of prey except the sparrowhawk (protection for which followed in 1962), but illegal persecution has, atrociously, persisted – especially on and around grouse moors. Raptors are still regularly shot and poisoned, and their nest sites wrecked. Successful prosecutions for these crimes are rare.
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