The
Spring 2015 Magazine No.180
Harrier Suffolk Ornithologists’ Group
John Grant and Steve Piotrowski
Editorial Acting as guest editors for this issue of The Harrier has rolled back the years for us old-timers. We last worked together in this capacity way back in the 1980s when we would slave over a rather primitive word processor operated by our glamorous assistant Reg Clarke to fill the publication with the ornithological events of the day. The material was often irreverent but never, we thought, irrelevant. It was great fun and teaming up again as co-editors for this issue has also given us a few laughs. But - and it is a pretty big but - just as there were some troubling conservation issues bubbling away in the 1980s, so there are today. One in particular must be uppermost in many SOG members’ minds - the illegal persecution of British birds of prey. Horror stories continue to emerge from the grouse moors of upland Britain and the shooting estates of the lowlands. We have all no doubt celebrated the high-profile convictions of the perpetrators of some truly indefensible wildlife crimes - Britain’s first custodial sentence for the persecution of raptors being meted out to gamekeeper
George Mutch being a case in point. Mutch was jailed for four months at Aberdeen Sheriff Court for bludgeoning to death a goshawk he’d caught in a cage-style trap on the Kildrummy Estate in Aberdeenshire. A second goshawk and a common buzzard were also caught - as was Mutch who was caught on RSPB video footage killing the doomed creature and carrying off the others in a sack, probably to suffer a similar fate. Thankfully, Mutch got the sack too. Hot on the heels of Mutch’s sentence came the first prosecution under Scotland’s new vicarious liability legislation. At Stranraer Sheriff Court, landowner Ninian Robert Hathorn Johnston Stewart pleaded guilty to being vicariously liable for the criminal actions of Glasserton and Physgill Estates’ gamekeeper Peter Bell, who was convicted in 2013 of laying poisoned bait which killed a common buzzard and for the possession of three banned pesticides. Bell was fined £4,450 and expelled from his gamekeepers’ association and the estates were similarly kicked out of their landowners’ association. Despite his conviction, Stewart was fined only a paltry £675, but at least it appears some progress is being made north of the border.
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