The gamekeepers who vanished from the story after RSPB campaigning
- C4PMC
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
When an injured buzzard was found in the Bransdale area of the North York Moors at the start of May, the bird was picked up, assessed and taken to a vet. Its injuries proved too severe and it was sadly euthanised. North Yorkshire Police issued an appeal for information, a later medical update followed, and the story was reported across the regional and national press.
There was one detail that ran through all of it and yet somehow never made it into print. The person who found that bird, who recognised it was in trouble and made sure it got to a vet, was a gamekeeper.
We know this from people on the ground. It is not in dispute. And it is precisely the part of the story that disappeared. The police appeal did not mention it. The later coverage did not mention it. A bird was found, an animal was helped, a professional acted exactly as you would hope anyone who spends their working life on the moor would act, and the public was left with the impression that the bird simply turned up.
It would be easy to dismiss this as a small thing. It is not. The identity of the person who found and helped the bird is not incidental colour. In a story about the welfare of a bird of prey, the fact that the individual who came to its aid was a gamekeeper goes to the heart of how the countryside actually works, and how badly that reality is served by the way these stories are told.
Gamekeepers are out on the ground in all weather, at first light and last, in places the public rarely goes. That is exactly why they are so often the ones who find injured wildlife, report it, and get it the help it needs. The eyes and the local knowledge that make someone good at their job are the same eyes and knowledge that spot a buzzard in difficulty on open moorland. None of that is convenient for the prevailing narrative, so it was left out.
This is not new. Cast your mind back to the shot peregrine found at Dove Stone in 2024. That case was, rightly, treated as a serious wildlife crime, and a substantial reward was offered for information. But look at how the story was framed by the campaigning organisations attached to it. The release moved quickly from the bird itself to a familiar set of national statistics linking raptor persecution to land managed for shooting, building the individual incident into a much larger campaigning argument.
The contrast is instructive. When a bird of prey is harmed, the conservation lobby has a ready-made framework, a set of figures, and a clear villain. When a gamekeeper saves one, there is silence. The machinery that exists to amplify one kind of story has no setting for the other.
That is the pattern worth naming. It is not that any single article is dishonest. It is that the wider campaigning apparatus, and the RSPB's messaging in particular, is built to recognise only one role for the people who manage these landscapes. They appear in the script as suspects, never as the people who found the bird and drove it to the vet. A movement that genuinely cared about the welfare of every raptor on the moor would have wanted that gamekeeper's actions told. Instead the actions were quietly written out, because they do not fit.
The reality on the ground is more complicated than the campaign literature allows. The same people who are routinely cast as the problem are, day in and day out, among the first to find injured wildlife, to report wildlife crime, and to act when an animal needs help. The Bransdale buzzard is one small, clear example of that. There will be many others that never reach the press at all, precisely because the person involved did not think it worth mentioning. They simply did the right thing and got on with their day.
We are not asking for gamekeepers to be lauded every time they do their job. We are asking for the truth to be told. When a bird is found and helped, the public deserves the full story, including who found it and what they did. Leaving that out is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it is a choice that consistently runs in one direction.
The buzzard in Bransdale could not be saved. But a gamekeeper tried, and that effort should not have been erased. Until conservation campaigning can bring itself to acknowledge the role that the people on the ground actually play, its claim to speak for the welfare of our birds of prey will remain a partial one.
