Bowland Beth: The Life of an English Hen Harrier. David Cobham

and, as a final touch, added some bilberry leaves. As she did so her white wing tag with the number 22 in black came into view. She noticed that she was losing feathers on either side of her breast-bone and that the bare areas were becoming suffused with blood – these were her brood patches.

      Three other pairs of hen harriers had arrived on Mallowdale Pike, and were busy skydancing and searching for nest sites, making it a communal nest site.

      Stephen Murphy lowers his binoculars. ‘I remember helping my friend David Souter wing-tag that bird last year,’ he said. ‘This was the area from which she fledged. She’s obviously decided it’s where she’s going to nest.

      ‘I always keep well back from a potential nest site, at least 500 metres. With a good pair of binoculars you can be pretty sure of what’s happening, and it all goes in my diary – weather, behaviour and so on.’

      Their nest complete, the pair were ready for the next stage of their courtship, the magic of copulation. Seizing the moment, the cock bird flew in with a vole he had just caught. The female rose up from her nest and caught it as her mate passed it to her, and then they both landed. The female called to the cock bird, which approached her in a frenzy of excitement and mounted her. She moved her tail to one side, and he manoeuvred so that their engorged sexual organs came into contact. He flapped his wings to keep in position, there was a brief shudder and it was all over.

      For the next week or so the pair of harriers copulated several times a day, before his mate became moody and disinterested and took to the nest she had built, these last acts of copulation having stimulated a daily release of eggs from the ovary. It was now the middle of April. Nearby a hen stonechat had built her nest of moss and grasses at the bottom of a thick stand of heather that was just starting to sprout some green shoots; she was incubating five speckled brown eggs. Her mate was perched on the top of a branch of heather, asserting his right to the patch by constantly spreading his tail and flicking his wings.

      On the fifth night the female hen harrier became restless, shifting uneasily in the nest. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning she stood up, legs well apart, arched her back and laid an egg. It was pale blue. She peered at it, touched it with her beak and then settled down over it. At first light the cock bird dropped into the nest and offered her a meadow pipit. She shuffled off the nest to eat it. Her talons grasped the pipit, her beak tore it apart and she gulped it down, allowing her mate a moment to proudly inspect the newly laid egg.

      Roughly every forty-eight hours she laid another egg, until she had a full clutch of six. A day or two after laying, the pale blue colour of the eggs changed to a chalky white. The inflamed bare areas on her breast were now hot to the touch and, with the arrival of the second egg, she started incubating. When she left the nest it was only to fly around for ten minutes or so before her hormones pulled her back to her treasured clutch of eggs. The cock bird was very attentive, bringing her food to the nest and roosting nearby at night. Incubation was a long process, and it would be another three and a half weeks before the first egg would hatch.

      Suddenly, the female heard the cock bird calling. She took off and flew up to meet her mate, who was flying towards her. He was carrying a meadow pipit, and he slowed down to enable the female to turn and trail below him. He dropped his prey and the female flipped over in the air and caught it.

      Stephen Murphy crouches in the heather, watching. ‘After the food pass the female flew to a boulder to eat the prey item before returning to her nest, a definite confirmation of where the nest is. I don’t want you to think that I’m working alone all the time. I’m fortunate to have the back-up of RSPB watchers who are employed on a summer season-only basis and I’m also able to call on local keen bird watchers whom I trust. We share any information we gather.

      ‘In 1975, when there was only one pair of hen harriers nesting at Bowland, the two Bills – Bill Hesketh and Bill Murphy – mounted a twenty-four hour watch on the nest site to ensure that the young were reared successfully. In fact, in 2011 it was the two Bills who found the nest that produced Bowland Beth.’

      ‘It was 6 April,’ says Bill Hesketh, ‘a glorious morning on my watch as we settled down among the heather in the shadow of a peat bank. The whole of wild Bowland proper laid out in front of us – just heather, bilberry, rush and sky. At 10.45 am, quite a distance away, a female hen harrier came floating down from Mallowdale Pike. Her right wing had a tag on it, white except for a narrow pink band at the base – no tag could be seen on the other wing. Over the next fifteen minutes she began criss-crossing last year’s nest location at a low height, at intervals setting herself down on the same spot.’

      

      Predator control of hen harriers by gamekeepers up until the Second World War was indiscriminate. The shotgun, the pole trap and poison were their weapons. It eased as gamekeepers joined up to fight in the war, and the hen harrier population recovered. The Protection of Birds Act 1954 gave full protection to the hen harrier and all other birds of prey – apart from the sparrowhawk. In 1962 the original Act was modified to include the sparrowhawk.

      But the regime of heather burning revived the red grouse population and with it the popularity of driven grouse shooting. Persecution of all birds of prey, particularly the hen harrier, increased dramatically.

      In 1981 the young at six hen harrier nests were wilfully destroyed, leading to a huge outcry. As a result the North West Water Authority and United Utilities joined forces to support an RSPB presence in Bowland, led by John Armitage.

      ‘The evidence was just left there,’ says Armitage. ‘It was quite blatant. Nowadays it would have been retrieved, covered up. Running alongside this persecution there was egg collecting. There were about forty breeding pairs of hen harriers in Bowland, which was very convenient for egg collectors based in England. I started a dialogue with the four main estates to gently remind them that we were looking over their shoulders and would take action if we had the necessary evidence. I found that several of the keepers hated hen harriers – they couldn’t even say the name and wouldn’t speak openly about them at all.’

      During the period between 1981 and 2005 John Armitage correlated the successful nesting attempts on four of the Bowland grouse moors. It makes for very interesting reading: NWWA/United Utilities 153, Bleasdale 37, Abbeystead 34 and Clapham 15.

      ‘I was disappointed that the RSPB didn’t put its foot down and persuade United Utilities to give up grouse shooting on their land,’ he says. ‘As it stood then – and still does – it makes it easier for people to come in from elsewhere and clear hen harriers out.’

      ‘The traditional way of dealing with hen harriers was to have a coordinated strike on all the roosts throughout the Pennine chain of grouse moors,’ says Bill Hesketh. ‘Mist nets would be set up beforehand, concealed on the roost. At dusk they would watch the harriers settling in for the night. At a prearranged time the nets would be pulled upright, a shot fired, and the keepers would rush in. Any harriers caught would have their necks promptly wrung.’