The RSPB’s Hen Harrier Numbers Don’t Add Up, and Its Members Deserve to Know Why
The RSPB never tires of telling the public it is a science-led organisation. Its latest members’ magazine shows how hollow that claim has become. A four-page feature on Hen Harriers, written by one of the charity’s own investigations officers, ends with a demand: write to your MP and insist on licensing of all gamebird shooting across the UK. What precedes it is not an evidence review. It is a fundraising brochure with a political payload.
Smart photography, emotive storytelling, a thank-you to the donors who paid for the tags, and a set of carefully blended statistics, all marching readers towards a conclusion the charity reached long before the first tag went silent.
This is not harmless. Every time the RSPB tells its members that grouse moors are crime scenes, there are real people on the other end of that message: gamekeepers, their wives, husbands and children, living in remote upland communities, who are cast as villains to keep the donations flowing. They deserve the truth. So do RSPB members. So, for that matter, do Hen Harriers.
The article’s one and only policy ask is UK-wide licensing of gamebird shooting. In four pages, it offers not a single piece of evidence that licensing would put one more Hen Harrier in the sky.
Worse, it admits it does not know. In the charity’s own words, satellite tracking is still being used to find out whether Scotland’s grouse moor licensing legislation will make a measurable difference to Hen Harrier survival. The jury is out. The experiment is running. The results are not in.
And yet, a few paragraphs later, members are told to lobby their MPs to impose the same untested regime on the rest of the UK. That is not science leading policy. That is policy leading science, with the evidence to be found later, if at all.
Licensing is not a free gesture. It is a new layer of regulation, with the threat of a licence being withdrawn hanging over rural businesses, the livelihoods of gamekeepers and the communities built around them. To demand it without proving it works is reckless. To demand it from people who trust you to tell them the truth is worse.
“Vanished or confirmed persecuted”: the oldest trick in the book
The article’s headline figure, blown up into a giant pull quote, is that in 2023 alone 32 tagged Hen Harriers “vanished or were confirmed persecuted” in England.
How many were actually confirmed? Ten? Three? None? The RSPB will not say. It welds a confirmed crime and a silent tag into one number and lets readers fill in the rest. Every reader walks away believing 32 birds were killed. The RSPB knows that is what they will believe. That is why the sentence is written the way it is.
A confirmed persecution case means a body, a post-mortem, evidence. A tag that stops transmitting means only that a tag stopped transmitting. Treating them as the same thing is not an accident of drafting. The RSPB has been doing it for years, and it has been called out for it for years. It keeps doing it because it works.
The same sleight of hand runs through the article’s other key figure: 72 tagged birds that “vanished in suspicious circumstances” between 2016 and 2025. Suspicious to whom? On whose criteria? Reviewed by whom? Members are simply told to trust the people who stand to gain from the answer.
“On or near”: a net wide enough to catch everything
The RSPB says 85% of disappearances happened “on or near land managed for grouse shooting”. It never says what “near” means.
One kilometre? Five? Ten? Hen Harriers are upland birds. They nest, hunt and roost across exactly the open hill country where grouse moors are found. In much of northern England, you cannot stand anywhere on the hill and not be “near” a grouse moor. Draw the net that wide and of course it catches almost everything. That is the point.
No stated distance. No method. No comparison with how much of the surrounding upland is grouse moor in the first place. The 85% figure is not a finding. It is a slogan with a percentage sign.
Tags fail and birds die, except, apparently, near a grouse moor
The article concedes that Hen Harriers “can die naturally and tags can fail on occasion”. Then, in the very next breath, it waves that away and declares the clustering near grouse moors something that “cannot be explained by chance”.
So where are the natural deaths? Where are the failed tags? If tags fail at a known rate, how many of the 72 losses does that alone account for? The RSPB’s own 2023 paper says young harriers have a very poor chance of surviving from one year to the next. How many of them starve, sicken, collide with something, are taken by a fox or a goshawk, or die in a winter storm? Not one of those deaths appears in the RSPB’s story. In its telling, natural mortality happens everywhere except where it would be inconvenient.
There is a far simpler explanation the article never even considers. Grouse moors are where many of these birds are tagged, where they breed, and where predator control and heather management give ground-nesting birds their best chance. If that is where tagged Hen Harriers live, that is where they will die, whatever kills them. Presenting that as proof of crime is not science. It is a verdict in search of evidence.
The analysis the RSPB pretends does not exist
The Moorland Association has published its own analysis of Hen Harrier tag records. It found a very different story that cannot be squared with the RSPB’s 85%. Either the two are measuring different things, using different definitions, or counting different birds. Any organisation confident in its science would confront that head on and explain the gap.
The RSPB’s magazine does not mention it. Not a line. Members are handed one set of numbers and kept in the dark about the existence of another. That is not an oversight. It is editorial choice, and it tells you everything about whose interests this article serves.
Paid for by the public, hidden from the public
The article calls the tagging dataset “a record of the past decade” and a benchmark for future recovery. More than 250 birds have been tagged since 2014. The article itself thanks the members, partners and donors who paid for the tags and the data costs.
So why can they not see it? Where was each missing bird last recorded? How long had each tag been fitted? What did its battery and transmission history look like before it went silent? How was the land beneath it classified, and by whom?
Landowners who let the RSPB tag birds on their moors, and are praised in this very article as “supportive” partners, have every right to see the evidence being used to brand them. So do the MPs being asked to change the law on the strength of it. Data that cannot be checked is not evidence. It is a press release.
It is the gamekeepers who pay the price
There is a cost to all of this that never appears in the RSPB’s glossy pages, and it is paid by real people.
The article does not stop at birds. It names grouse moors, and by extension the people who work on them, as the cause of the Hen Harrier’s troubles, again and again, and asks members to act on it. Those members are not told that behind every “grouse moor” is a gamekeeper, often living in a tied cottage on the estate, with a partner and children at the local school. When a charity repeatedly tells them that these people are wildlife criminals, that message does not stay on the page.
Every gamekeeper can recount examples they they have faced of harrassment or hostility due to beliefs members of the public have picked up from RSPB propaganda.
These are men and women who spend their lives on the hill, managing the heather, controlling predators and creating the very conditions in which curlew, lapwing, golden plover and, yes, Hen Harriers can breed. Their reward is to be held up as the enemy in a fundraising appeal. A child does not need to read the RSPB’s magazine to feel what it does to their parent’s reputation in their own community.
Every appeal for tags, every campaign mailing, every call to lobby an MP adds to that weight. The RSPB raises money on the back of it. Gamekeeping families carry the cost. A charity that claims to care about the countryside should care about the people who live and work in it too.
If the RSPB has evidence against an individual, it should hand it to the police. What it should not do is smear an entire profession to fill its coffers.
What members were not told
Read closely, the RSPB’s own article is riddled with facts that undercut its message, tucked away where few readers will stop to think.
The Forest of Bowland, a landscape of working grouse moors, is held up as a triumph: 36 young fledged from 10 nests this year, from no breeding birds at all nine years ago. The RSPB tags birds “on private moorlands” with “supportive landowners”. Around one in ten tagged birds leaves the country altogether for France, Spain or Portugal. English breeding attempts fell from 54 in 2023 to 34 in 2024, and the article does not even attempt to explain why.
There is not a word about predation by foxes, crows or other raptors. Nothing on wildfire, disturbance or weather. Every loss is pinned on one cause and one culprit, because one culprit is easier to campaign against and easier to raise money against.
This is not information. It is indoctrination. Members open their magazine expecting to learn about the natural world, and are instead fed a campaign script in glossy colour, designed to march them towards a political ask decided long in advance.
A membership charity that trades on public trust has no business conditioning its own supporters like this.
The questions the RSPB must answer
What evidence shows that licensing has increased Hen Harrier numbers anywhere, including Scotland?
Of the 32 birds lost in 2023, how many were confirmed persecuted and how many simply stopped transmitting?
What distance does “on or near” a grouse moor mean, and what share of the surrounding upland is grouse moor?
What is the known failure rate of the tags used, and how many disappearances would that alone explain?
How many tagged birds are expected to die of natural causes each year, and where are they in the figures?
Why do the RSPB’s figures differ from the published analysis of 198 tags, and why does the magazine not mention it?
Will the RSPB publish its full tag dataset for independent review?
What does the RSPB say to the gamekeepers and families on the receiving end of the hostility its campaigns help fuel?
Until it answers, the RSPB has no right to call itself science-led. It is a campaigning machine, asking its members to take its word for it, and leaving rural families to pay the price.
