Eyes Closed, Not on the Skies: How a Serving Detective and Yorkshire Dales Campaign Group completely Lost Touch with the Countryside

A webinar hosted by the Friends of the Dales' 'Eyes on the Skies' initiative featured Detective Inspector Mark Harrison making extraordinary claims about the moorland shooting community — claims that reveal more about the disconnect between urban-facing campaign policing and rural reality than they do about wildlife crime.

When the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority quietly disbanded its Bird of Prey Partnership last summer — a cross-sector group that included Natural England, the National Gamekeepers' Organisation, and the Moorland Association — it claimed the initiative had "not delivered sufficient results." This was a curious verdict on a partnership that oversaw hen harrier numbers reaching a 200-year high, with 15 nests in the Yorkshire Dales and Nidderdale alone in 2023, alongside visible increases in buzzard, red kite, barn owl, and marsh harrier populations. Raptor persecution convictions, meanwhile, had fallen to a record low of just four nationally, none connected to grouse shooting.

What replaced this successful, collaborative model was not another partnership, but a campaign. The Friends of the Dales' 'Eyes on the Skies' initiative launched in October with a talk by the RSPB's Kate Jennings, and has since hosted Detective Inspector Mark Harrison of the National Wildlife Crime Unit for a webinar that amounted to an hour-long prosecution brief against the moorland shooting community — delivered without charges, without convictions, and without any right of reply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7JbcRPTyMU

Accusation Without Conviction

Harrison's presentation was extraordinary in its scope and its certainty. He described bird of prey crime as "organised and deliberate," alleging that offenders use magnets to reset satellite tags, transport them by vehicle, and dump them miles from kill sites to mislead investigators. He identified eight "hotspot" estates for repeat hen harrier crimes and revealed that his unit is visiting landowners at "a very high level" to present crime data and demand cooperation, adding bluntly: "This isn't a passive request or a gentle request."

This is, in effect, trial by webinar. Harrison described detailed investigations on specific land holdings where birds were allegedly found shot, tags allegedly manipulated, and suspects interviewed — yet no charges were brought. The level of detail about locations, landowner visits, and "hotspot" mapping effectively identifies specific estates and individuals without the inconvenience of a conviction. His observation that when he visits land, "within an hour, someone will be coming and speaking to me" was presented as evidence of suspicious surveillance by estate staff. An alternative interpretation — that a rural community is naturally alert to strangers on their land, just as any community would be — apparently did not occur to him.

A serving police officer making such detailed public accusations without supporting them with charges raises serious questions about fairness, due process, and the purpose such a presentation is really serving. If the evidence existed to prosecute, one might reasonably ask why it hasn't been used. If it doesn't, one might equally ask why it is being aired on a campaign group's webinar.

Organised Crime — or Organised Narrative?

The language Harrison employed was carefully chosen and deeply loaded. By framing suspected wildlife offences as "organised and deliberate" with "attempts to mislead the police," he built a narrative that places moorland game management alongside drug trafficking and people smuggling in the hierarchy of criminal threat. This is not accidental. The organised crime framing is the justification for an extraordinary escalation in policing tactics: Harrison revealed plans to deploy financial investigators to seize assets under proceeds of crime legislation, to use direct covert surveillance, to recruit undercover operatives, and to develop covert human intelligence sources — informants — within rural communities.

These are powers governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act, and they exist for a reason: they are intrusive, they are exceptional, and they require high-level authorisation precisely because they represent the sharp end of state power directed against citizens. Deploying them in pursuit of wildlife offences that Harrison himself admits attract "pathetic" fines and minimal sentences exposes a startling disparity. Either these are serious crimes deserving serious punishment — in which case the justice system, not Harrison's webinar, needs to catch up — or they are not, in which case turning informant-recruitment and asset-seizure tactics on farming and moorland communities is grotesquely disproportionate.

Rural communities should find this deeply alarming. The prospect of undercover police operatives embedded in gamekeeping circles, financial investigators trawling through estate accounts, and covert surveillance deployed across moorland — all in pursuit of offences that the courts consistently treat as minor — represents an approach to policing more commonly associated with counter-terrorism than conservation. It speaks to a mindset in which an entire community and way of life is treated as inherently suspect.

The Satellite Tag Question Deserves Better Than Dismissal

Harrison's assertion that the UK is "unique in the number of tags that we've had suddenly disappear" and that "you don't get these sort of figures anywhere else in the world" is a striking claim presented as settled fact. It is nothing of the sort. Shooting and moorland organisations have commissioned independent technical analysis raising legitimate questions about tag reliability, battery life, signal interference in upland terrain, and the methodological assumptions underpinning the interpretation of "sudden disappearances."

To dismiss these challenges out of hand, as Harrison did, is not rigorous policing — it is advocacy. A detective inspector presenting contested data as incontrovertible on a campaign webinar, while sweeping aside the technical objections of the community he is investigating, does not inspire confidence in the impartiality of the investigation. It suggests a conclusion reached first and evidence marshalled afterwards.

Eyes on the Skies — or Eyes on the Estates?

The broader question is what the 'Eyes on the Skies' initiative actually is. It has been suggested, with considerable justification, that it is effectively a front for the RSPB. The RSPB was a member of the original Bird of Prey Partnership but, by all accounts, was never keen to engage with other members or work collaboratively. It left in 2023, reportedly dissatisfied with the group's leadership. Now, with the partnership conveniently dissolved, the RSPB has re-emerged at the centre of its replacement — first through Kate Jennings' launch talk, now through Harrison's webinar.

This matters because the original partnership was designed to bring together all stakeholders — conservationists, gamekeepers, land managers, regulators — in pursuit of shared goals. Its replacement appears designed to do the opposite: to exclude the shooting and moorland management community from the conversation while simultaneously making them the subject of it.

The shift from partnership to prosecution, from collaboration to confrontation, is precisely the trajectory the RSPB has pursued for years. That a national park authority has endorsed it, and a serving police officer has lent it the weight of his badge, should concern anyone who cares about fair, evidence-based approaches to conservation.

Out of Touch with the Communities That Keep the Dales Alive

What is most striking about both Harrison's webinar and the Eyes on the Skies initiative is their complete disconnection from the reality of rural life in the Yorkshire Dales. The gamekeepers, farmers, and land managers who maintain the moorland landscape — who manage the heather, control predators, maintain access, and sustain the biodiversity that makes the Dales a national park worth visiting — are treated not as partners but as suspects. Their knowledge, accumulated over generations, is dismissed. Their contribution to conservation, evidenced by the very raptor recovery that Harrison's own data should celebrate, goes unacknowledged.

Harrison criticised the shooting community for failing to report intelligence to police, saying "it's got to change." Perhaps he might reflect on why a community would be reluctant to cooperate with a police unit that has just publicly accused them of organised crime, threatened them with asset seizure, and announced plans to send undercover operatives into their workplaces — all on a webinar hosted by a campaign group they regard, with good reason, as hostile to their existence.

Trust is built through partnership, not intimidation. The Bird of Prey Partnership, for all its imperfections, understood this. Its replacement does not. If the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, the RSPB, and the National Wildlife Crime Unit genuinely want to protect birds of prey, they could start by acknowledging the extraordinary conservation gains that have been made under the stewardship of the very people they are now treating as criminals. They could engage with the technical evidence on satellite tag reliability rather than dismissing it. They could return to the table with the gamekeepers and land managers who know the Dales better than any webinar presenter ever will. Instead, they have chosen confrontation over cooperation, accusation over evidence, and campaign rhetoric over conservation reality.