Leading landowners commit to oppose poisoning of birds of prey but is there a payoff?

Is this a pre-arranged gesture-followed-by-concession deal?

Regardless of suspicions on this front. an apparently promising initiative protecting raptors is by no means the end of this particular battle against wildlife crime. There are rogue landowners. The practice of using poison against raptors persists.

But a hugely encouraging development by Scotland’s major landowners, including the Duke of Argyll with the Argyll Estates, has shifted the contours of this particular map.

More than 200 of them have signed a letter to Environment Minister, Roseanna Cunningham, condemning poisoning and calling for exemplary sentencing to be used in cases of guilty verdicts.

According to the RSPB, 27 birds of prey have been killed in the past year, in 27 recorded incidents of poisoning. Most recently, three golden eagles were poisoned killed at the celebrity haunt of Skibo Castle in Sutherland,

Sporting estates, some run by what the Cayman islanders call ‘hurry come ups’, with commercial interests and no embedded rural values, are fingered as key perpetrators of this crime.

The poison is put on carcases left on open land and on lumps of meat on raised target areas like fence posts to attract the raptors whose numbers the sporting estates wish to reduce. The raptors prey on the likes of grouse chicks, destined to be killed later for money. Life for the grouse is little more than a matter of who gets you first.

The letter to the Environment Minister makes clear the unequivocal opposition to such practice by its signatories. It underscores their own long standing commitment to the countryside and expresses their ‘utter dismay’ at the evidently deliberate poisoning of protected species.

Interestingly, the letter has also issued a challenge to all landowners to stand up and be counted on the matter, saying that the eradication of this illegal activity would be helped by each individual landowner making  their own position public.

Other landowners are expected to add their names to the campaign shortly.

This concerted effort by leading landowners and estates sets an example to their peers (pun irresistible) and throws their incontrovertible social weight into the balance in a world where this counts.

The RSPB has welcomed the initiative, noting its value in the context of recent wildlife crimes that have been reported and are under investigation.

So far so good.

But the timing of an announcement this morning raises the question of a quid pro quo.

Scottish landowners are to be issued with licences to cull buzzards on their estates if the raptors have destroyed 10% of their gamebirds.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 provides for the provision of such licences to gamekeepers – but none have ever been issued.

Now the Scottish Government has said that it is to issue licences to kill buzzards but only to kill (the euphemism is ‘control’) small numbers and only in response to (specific local problems). The RSPB’s attitude is that legally Ministers may only act in this way as an absolute last resort.

So is the timing of this concession coincidentally reciprocal?