Great News, Rosie the missing Hen Harrier found alive and well, but looking at the map of the area where this last Hen Harrier went missing does not look like a Red Grouse moor.
Rosie being fitted with a satellite tag in Yorkshire earlier this year
Whittingham is surrounded by many villages and hamlets and the map below shows an area of mixed woodland and open fields more like a perfect Pheasant shooting region. So was this bird lost while hunting on ‘game crops’. Locations like this are often a mix of various grains, kale, maize, sun flower and even a plant from Peru called Quinoa, a relative of Fat Hen also good as Pheasant food. Many small finches and buntings come to feed on this seed along with mice rats and voles encouraging birds of prey like Hen Harriers to come to these crops to hunt.
We wrote about this ‘cropping’ back in 2017 when another Hen Harrier went missing not far from here at Alnwick – https://raptorpolitics.org.uk/2017/03/22/cropping-and-hen-harriers/ So where else are these harriers going missing in the lowlands? The trouble is that many of these game crops are planted well out of view from the public so it would be hard to monitor such crops to determine exactly where harriers are hunting. Only the satellite tagged birds could be followed to such sites leaving the rest [majority of the young harriers bred in 2019] to a fate out of our view!
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