The RSPB Just Bought Another Welsh Hillside for Hen Harriers, Yet Refuses to Give a Target for Success

The RSPB has bought Gallt-y-bere, a stretch of upland in North Carmarthenshire, and it wants a pat on the back for it. The purchase is being trailed as a chance to reconnect a fragmented reserve, restore Celtic rainforest, and — in the words of RSPB site manager Jonathan Cryer — "create the conditions needed for rare wildlife such as hen harrier to flourish in the future."

Flourish. Lovely word. Now answer the question the RSPB has dodged for the best part of a decade: how many? How many hen harriers does the RSPB expect this land to hold? What is the target? Because "flourish in the future" is not a conservation objective. It's a fundraising slogan.

Here's what gives the game away. Ask the RSPB how many hen harriers a grouse moor is suppressing and the numbers pour out — carrying capacities, models, hundreds of "missing" pairs, all of it laid squarely at the door of gamekeepers and grouse shooting.

The charity can conjure a precise national figure for birds that aren't there. But ask it to state how many pairs a well-managed moor should hold, or how many its own reserves will produce, and the modelling machine falls silent. It has never given that number. Not once. It is remarkable how exact the RSPB becomes when there's someone else to blame, and how vague when the land is its own.

Forty minutes up the road sits Lake Vyrnwy — the reserve the RSPB's fundraising department would rather you never visited.

When the RSPB took Vyrnwy on in the early 1980s, it wrote down what it had been handed: a healthy population of red grouse, large numbers of breeding curlew, and hen harrier and merlin breeding besides. That was the state of the land after generations of the grouse-moor management the RSPB spends its members' money campaigning against — heather burning, predator control, the lot. It was thriving. Then the RSPB got hold of it.

What followed is not a matter of opinion. Curlew, which had averaged around two dozen pairs a year before the charity took charge, crashed to an average of two by the mid-2000s. The RSPB set itself a feeble target of a five-year mean of five pairs — and missed it, year after year after year. By 2024 exactly one pair tried to nest, and not even on RSPB ground.

A birdwatcher who toured the reserve that summer called it an "avian desert." Red and black grouse went the same way; black grouse blew through the target in the RSPB's own 2007 management plan. Across the wider Berwyn, curlew vanished from more than half the plots they'd occupied, red grouse roughly halved, and carrion crows multiplied several times over.

Burning stopped in 2003. Grazing was slashed from thousands of ewes to a token flock. Bracken marched across the hill, the ticks came with it, and predator control was treated as beneath them. The RSPB will offer you a dozen reasons. It will not offer you the birds. Land that arrived stuffed with the exact red-listed species the charity exists to save was, on its watch, wrung dry. A working grouse keeper can stand at his kitchen sink and count more curlew than survive across the whole of Vyrnwy's thousands of acres. That is not a slur. That is the RSPB's own data, and it is a disgrace.

This is why Gallt-y-bere deserves a straight question and not a round of applause. The RSPB owns it outright. It picks the management. It has the money, the staff, and — by its own account — habitat of international importance. There is no gamekeeper to blame here, no grouse moor to point at, no tenant, no shooting tenant, nobody. If it fails, it fails alone. The conditions, in the RSPB's own words, are ideal.

So: how many breeding pairs of hen harrier will Gallt-y-bere hold in five years? In ten? What number counts as "flourishing" — and, crucially, what number counts as failure? Put it in writing, date it, and let your donors hold you to it.

The reason this matters is that the RSPB's entire upland argument rests on a claim it won't test on itself. For years we've been told hen harriers are missing because of grouse moors. Yet the recovery of hen harriers in England to record highs has happened on and around managed grouse moors, propped up by brood management and the very land use the RSPB fights — while on the one Welsh moor the RSPB has run with a completely free hand, the harriers it inherited are long gone. The birds thrive where the RSPB says they can't, and vanish where the RSPB is in sole charge. At some point that stops being bad luck and starts being a pattern.

A conservation project with no target isn't conservation. It's a marketing campaign with a bird on the poster. And a charity that demands a number from every grouse moor in Britain has no business refusing to name one for land it owns free and clear.

Restoring Celtic rainforest is a fine thing and reconnecting the reserve is worth doing. But the RSPB has chosen to sell this purchase on the back of the hen harrier, so the hen harrier is the yardstick it has invited. Vyrnwy is what happens when nobody writes the target down and nobody is ever held to it.