RSPB spends an "estimated £375,000 a year" in its efforts to safeguard Britain's much persecuted Hen Harriers

                                               

                                                                  

A pair of Hen Harriers as depicted in Gould's Birds of Europe

THE RSPB spends "an estimated £375,000 a year" in striving to safeguard a breeding future for  Hen Harriers in Britain.

Frontline American birder-author Scott Weidensaul says this figure was given to him by the charity while he was researching raptor persecution for a new book

Most of the money goes on the costs of investigations, court expenses and satellite tracking tags to monitor the whereabouts of the birds.

Is it money effectively spent? Not necessarily so.

"Law enforcement has failed," says Weidensaul."Even when the RSPB and its allies obtain what  they would consider to be incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing, up to and including videos and eyewitnesses, the official police response is often seen to be sluggish or non-existent.

"Even when prosecution is pursued, the penalties are often laughably slight."

On the subject of Britain's Hen Harriers, the author notes the strange case of two male birds that hatched from the same nest in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire.

While one never flew more than 50 miles from Bowland, the other made two winter trips to Extremadura in south-western Spain (roughly 1,000 miles each way) - something only one in 10 British harriers do.

"Why?" he asks. "No one really knows." 

Since childhood, Weidensaul has had a particular love of raptors - despite once having been being knocked 15ft to the ground by an "unusually aggressive"  parent bird while shinnying up an oak tree to inspect the nest and chicks of a Great Horned Owl.

"I felt as though I'd been smacked on the back of the head with a piece of firewood," he recalls in his  book, The Return of The Oystercatcher, which is published today, April 23, by Picador.

"I fell in such a way that my head and neck lay cushioned in leaves between a couple of large rocks that might have ended my birding career before it had really started.

"I was wise enough not to tell my parents."

In the book, which will be reviewed in a forthcoming edition of The Wryneck, Weidensaul pays tribute to his friend, Ruth Tingay, of Raptor Persecution UK whom he describes as "easily one of the most tireless and ferocious advocates for raptor protection in Great Britain".

There is also a name-check for Mya Bambrick who showed him Ospreys in Dorset and mischievously - but falsely - claimed that it was criminal offence in Britain to encroach within 200 metres of one of their nests.