I see Red Kites almost every day – in fact, I think I’ll actually make a note of when I see them next year to see how true that is. They are certainly back in the skies of east Northants after the reintroductions which started in the 1980s.
However, in a scientific paper published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research it is shown that post-mortem tests on wild Red Kites found many had been poisoned by lead shot, rat poison or pesticides. This clearly isn’t stopping their numbers increasing but it may be slowing the rate of increase and it may also be limiting the range of the species.
Dr Jenny Jaffe of the Zoological Society of London told the BBC that birds of prey, and especially scavengers, would eat animals that contained lead shot, leading to lead poisoning but ‘That can be changed by changing the shot gun cartridges to non lead, which a lot of countries do and, there is some legislation already in the UK, but it is very limited.‘.
She went on to say that deliberate poisoning was also an issue where post-mortems showed that otherwise healthy scavengers, including Red Kites, had died from pesticide poisoning and that this deliberate poisoning (illegal of course) ‘… might not per se be focussed on Red Kites specifically, but the people who put out these poisons are focussed on killing predators of their, for example, game birds or livestock.‘.
Here, from Raptor Persecution UK, is the case study of the Red Kite poisoning hotspot in the Nidderdale AONB on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. And here is a Guest Blog from April 2016 by Mick Render about the tough times for Red Kites in the northeast of England.
Raptor persecution, wildlife crime, is not news to readers of this blog, it’s not news to the shooting community either, but the more often it is mentioned in the media the more it will sink into the consciousness of the public.
Deliberate poisoning is done to protect gamebirds which are shot for fun.
Accidental poisoning of wildlife happens because the shooting community do not stick to the legislation that bans the use of lead shot under some circumstances and vehemently oppose the switch from toxic lead shot to non-toxic safe alternatives despite this having happened in many places elsewhere in the world and it being called for by scientists.
The shooting industry is under considerable pressure to clean up its act from everyone except Defra, a government department that acts blatantly as an apologist for shooting and which consistently sends the signal to the industry that Defra has their back.
This work was part funded by Natural England so credit where it is due. The interesting thing will be to see whether having funded the work it acts on the conclusions and recommendations. I’m thinking especially about lead ammunition for game/deer shooting on SSSIs and NNRs, and, more generally, the shooting of ‘pest’ species which is carried out under Natural England’s general licences. We know that kites frequently scavenge on corvids and pigeons – many of which will have been killed under licence by lead ammunition. Many other predatory and scavenging species must also be suffering losses due to unnecessary lead poisoning through feeding on the same species, but as no-one is looking we don’t have the information to prove it.
A nice letter to Natural England reveled that they to use poison on their reserves as do the RSPB!! Their excuse was that the job is done by professionals!! Try telling the rats and mice then not to die in the open! The new regulations [which costs each person £100 to do the test] are useless as far as helping to prevent secondary poisoning. Ok some poisons will not be able to be bought in garden centers but the main problem again is the removal of the predator of rats and mice.
Why is a country like Israel can reduce the use of poison by 80% and we still live in the ‘dark ages’ In fact far more countries are now taking up the Israeli scheme and using predators and getting rid of the poisons so again we are far behind. May be it is because we live in a fascist country run by ‘masons’ who hate to think a lagit business like poison can be removed from the table loosing jobs and filling the countryside with predators.
Remember when this new law was being created on the use of poison it wanted it only to be used a certain distance from a building. Now we see poison way out in the countryside where the predator should rule!
Forgot to add – Foxes in London are estimated to remove 1 million rats a year!!!
An example of accidental poisoning.
A few months ago, a neighbour called to say that she had found two dead Buzzards in a hedge alongside a field where she keeps horses. They were under an electricity pole and (at first) I thought they might have been electrocuted. Hiowever, there was no sign of scorching/burning, so I contacted RSPB Investigations. To cut a long story short, the bodies went to London Zoo where autopsies revealed both had been poisoned with a commercial rodenticide: one contained a half-digested rat. The most likely scenario is that these unfortunate birds (make and female – fat and healthy) had scavenged dead or moribund rats from a domestic pest-control event.
We have chickens and, from time to time, rats take up home close by. I put out rodenticide and dispose of any bodies that I find. However, I am sure that I do not find all the dead rats. Our friendly neighbourhood Natural England agent reminded me that it is illegal to dispose of contaminated rats in a way that could enter the local wildlife food chain (to say nothing of my wife’s dogs!). I now incinerate any corpses.
While the Buzzards involved were over a mile away from our house (and we didn’t have any rodenticide out at the time), this was a salutary lesson.
The NE agent went to those properties adjacent to the field and advised them that it would be unwise to dispose of any dead rats by throwing them into the hedge bottom. I am sure that this was not deliberate poisoning: it just shows how accidents can happen. As far as I am aware, there have been no further incidents.
David – many thanks
Use of a rat-proof feeder can go a long way to reducing rat problems around chickens. Saves a lot of money on food as well.
Round here in North Yorkshire a number of Red Kites have been found poisoned with banned pesticides and shot, as well as some found with secondary rodenticide poisoning. All of these birds have been found on or adjacent to areas managed for game birds. Grouse moors allegedly don’t like them because they put the grouse off flying and make drives on shoot days hard ( my heart bleeds for them its not sport if it is all guaranteed) and there is no doubt they are killed deliberately ( how do you shoot a bird this big by accident?) I also feel sure much of the rodenticide poisoning is due to use of rodenticides around pheasant feeders where there are lots of rats with no attempt to recover poisoned rats, hence use becomes misuse in DERFA jargon. I’ve yet to meet a farmer or game keeper that searches for poisoned rats and disposes of them properly. It is time the use of rodenticides was much more tightly controlled. indeed it is time the whole game industry was much more tightly controlled.
I think there was a Yorkshire kite found dead with no fewer than 5 different pesticides in its system which gives a snapshot of the scale of the problem. You are right about the rodenticide use. If keepers are not making an effort to search for and dispose of dead rodents they are not following the legally binding label instructions of the products they are using. Essentially they are using the products illegally.
I think I found that Kite Ian, poisoned deliberately with a rabbit bait laced with Carbofuran, isofenphos and Bendiocarb plus actually residues of 3 rodenticides, one licenced for indoor use only. The bird was on a grouse moor area where 3 estates join. But interestingly a buzzard has been found locally with the same carbamate mixture and a white tailed eagle was also previously found on a scottish estate with the same mixture. So which keeper moved from Scotland to Nidderdale between 2008 and 2012? A job for the NWCU I think.
There was a red kite reintroduction carried out less than twenty miles away from where I live way back in 1996. I occasionally hear of a kite that has been seen in the local area, but after the explosive growth of the Chiltern population I can’t help feeling they should be pretty regular by now and in fact should be breeding in my district – otter, raven and now I’m delighted to say pine marten have moved back as full time residents, but the red kite (and probably goshawk) are still absent as full time occupants and breeders. Thankfully the population at Argaty is in nowhere near as bad a state as the one on the Black Isle, which let’s face it wouldn’t be difficult, but there’s been persecution associated with kites from it too and you can’t help thinking that the reported incidents are the tip of the iceberg otherwise where are all the red kites? Isn’t there still a need even now for further red kite reintroductions in areas as far as possible away from ANY game shooting? It would thwart those who are desperately trying to suppress the population (notice how with tedious predictability the red kite is being labelled more and more as a threat to other wildlife?) and really let the red kite expand as it seems to be hitting brick walls in quite a few areas. Further reintroductions/translocations would help send out the message the red kite is not the real problem re songbirds, waders or anything else, and with more people seeing them increase the public disgust at what’s happening to all our raptors. Re rodenticides maybe if we had a healthier predator population then we’d have less of a problem there too. One of my earliest ‘wildlife experiences’ was seeing a bit of a rat infestation on our housing estate – after a while a stoat appeared and they magically disappeared and never came back.
While people can poison – sorry, ‘control’ – animals perceived to be in our way, other creatures will be affected.
We can’t stop upsetting the balance of nature – as Les points out above.
Thinking a bit more about the true scale of poisoning in England based on the results of this paper I’ve done the following rough calculation. It is all very ‘back of the envelope’ and it would be great if someone who knows their stats could do it properly. But it does give a rough idea of the true, and largely hidden, scale of poisoning.
The paper gives a figure of 3,000 pairs of red kites in the Chilterns – so let’s say 6000 breeding adults and 3,000 juvs.
32 out of 110 birds were killed by poisoning based on the sample of birds looked at by ZSL – ie 29%.
Using figures of 95% annual survival for adults and 65% for first year birds (reasonable estimates based on tagging data) you would expect to lose 300 adults and 1,050 juvs in a year. If 29% of those were poisoned that comes out as 391 birds.
That’s just the Chilterns, it’s just one year and it’s just one species.
Doubt any figures worked out on Chilterns means very little as deliberate persecution is probably really rare there so some areas where there is certainly deliberate persecution would be much much worse figures.
There is an approved multi kill trap which would be suitable for use in poultry / game rearing / release situations – developed in New Zealand the Goodnature A24 has been used extensively in rodent eradication programmes intended to prevent the extinction of indigenous flightless bird species. The dead rodents [which have not been deliberately exposed to poisons] can, in this context, be safely scavenged or regularly collected for disposal.
Terry Pickford has an excellent post, currently on” Raptor Politics”, concerning a recent visit to a part of the Peak District, away from the intensive Grouse moors.
Amongst many raptor sightings, he describes a Red Kite over his holiday cottage. Sightings of this bird are becoming more frequent in that area, hopefully the first nest is not long coming, and numbers will then increase, in what I feel is an environment crying out for them.
I do not foresee any great problem with the use of poisons, but one case is too many.
This will be a great boost for the tourist / casual birdwatcher, who sometimes struggles with harder to see species, or think the reputation of the “Dark- Peak” extends to the whole area.
Trapit – yes I agree
Sorry,numbers will never increase however many nest in the Peak District unless illegal killing is controlled.
Hen Harriers and Goshawks have both tried to colonise in the Peak and sadly failed completely.
I believe one of the top moorland managers has a agricultural shop in the peak?.
I’ve seen a grouse moor gamekeeper shoot at a Kite. Unlike Paul I believe they kill them because they see them as a direct threat to their grouse
So did you report this criminal to the police? I do really hope so!
Yes there are some who think Red kites are a threat to red grouse, partridges and wader chicks. They completely fail to understand natural predation note the word NATURAL here. I see Kites everyday without leaving the house but they get scarcer and scarcer as you get to the moorland fringes.
The game lobby keep telling us they are cleaning up their act. Time they stopped telling us and got on with it otherwise we might take it that they are liars!
Shame everyone including the author of this report forgot about this poisoning that certainly wasn’t accidental/secondary poisoning and definitely a targeted attack on Red Kites
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/dead-birds-prey-found-estate-11853785
I hope [probably in vain] that the shooting lobby will not use this research to confuse the public over the extent of deliberate illegal poisoning using pesticides [abuse is the term used in official reports] and the misuse/careless application of legally obtainable rodenticides.
A reminder – in 1989 the first 6 [swedish] red kites were released on the Black Isle. Within a few months the first kite was found poisoned nearby, by alphachloralose [illegal to use in the open but not illegal to possess, back then]; during an RSPB/Police search of the local gamekeeper we found full strength alpha – reported to the Fiscal but no proceedings, as we couldn’t show he had killed that bird. Helped change the law over possession of poisons. That was 28 years and many, many deliberately poisoned kites, ago. Do not let anyone sweep this large scale criminality under the carpet.
Whether they understand natural predation or not isn’t the point, they want maximum grouse numbers come the start of the shooting season so they wouldn’t except it anyway.
Regarding cleaning up their act, why should they. They do what they do because they believe that produces maximum grouse bags and they know they will get away with it.
Dennis, I am more optimistic (have you read Terry ‘s post ?), some birds are bound to end up on the grouse moors of the Dark Peak, but there is an abundance of habitat elsewhere.
If you are in the area, call in the store, you will get a good deal on waterproof clothing, traps, shotgun cartridges, fencing requisites etc:,
The image of those two Red Kites lying locked together in that field was taken by me.
Subsequent to that incident I asked of the Environment Agency for information on the presence of such poisons in the soil I was told “we do not have any records because we do not routinely test for this” and as for longevity in the soil I was advised by another dept, that they had no idea.
I see a pair of Red Kites every day from my living room window (Wolvercote, north Oxford). When I was doing an OOS Rookery survey a few years ago, a gamekeeper (so he told me) in Stadhampton, noticing my WWF sweat shirt, informed me challengingly that he shot every Red Kite he could, because he claimed they took Pheasant chicks. He also told me he shot out Rooks’ nests, too… There followed an argument…