Why Scottish grouse moors will have to stop slaughtering golden eagles

They don’t fear prosecution because there are few people around those remote, privately owned glens to witness the ruthless and systematic poisoning, trapping and shooting of these iconic birds. If the police do come looking, more often than not they’re met with an Omertá-esque wall of silence from those who, with an archaic Victorian mindset, still perceive birds of prey to be a threat to their lucrative red grouse shooting interests.

For a successful prosecution, Police Scotland and the Crown Office must be able to demonstrate “beyond reasonable doubt” that a named individual committed the crime. As an example of how difficult this is, in 2010 a jar full of golden eagle leg rings was found on a mantelpiece during a police raid of a gamekeeper’s house in the Highlands. Each of those unique leg ring numbers could be traced back to an individual eagle.

Poisoned bait

The gamekeeper couldn’t account for how he came to be in possession of those rings, but the police couldn’t prove that he had killed those eagles and cut off their legs to remove the rings as trophies.

Despite the remains of two red kites, six illegal traps, an illegally trapped hen harrier and poisoned bait also being found on the estate, the gamekeeper was fined a mere £1,500 for being in possession of one dead red kite, that was found mutilated in the back of his estate vehicle.

In another case in 2010, three golden eagles were found poisoned on a grouse-shooting estate in the Highlands over just a few weeks. Even though the police found an enormous cache of the lethal poison – carbofuran – locked in a shed to which the head gamekeeper held a key, they couldn’t demonstrate that he was the person who had laid the poisoned baits that had killed the eagles. This meant he was fined £3,300 for the possession of the banned poison, but wasn’t prosecuted for killing the eagles.

Third of tagged eagles disappear

In recent years, researchers have been fitting small satellite tags to young golden eagles which allows us to track their movements across Scotland, minute by minute. Analysis has shown that between 2004 and 2016, almost one third of tagged eagles (41 of 131 birds) ‘disappeared’ in suspicious circumstances, mostly on or next to grouse moors. 

The lengths the criminals will go to avoid detection were exposed in 2020 when a walker found a satellite tag that had been cut off an eagle, wrapped in heavy lead sheeting – presumably to block the signal – and dumped in the River Braan. The tag’s unique identification number told us it belonged to a young eagle tagged in the Trossachs in 2014. This eagle had disappeared without trace from a Perthshire grouse moor in 2016, in an area where eight other tagged eagles had vanished in similar suspicious circumstances. Nobody has been prosecuted.

The most recent disappearance of a tagged eagle happened just before Christmas 2023, close to the boundary of a grouse moor in the Moorfoot Hills. ‘Merrick’ was translocated to the area in 2022 as part of the South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project. Her tag data told us she was asleep in a tree immediately before she disappeared. Police found her blood and a few feathers at the scene and concluded she’d been shot. Who shoots a sleeping eagle? Again, no one has been prosecuted.

This situation has persisted for decades because although golden eagles have been afforded legal protection for the last 70 years, to date there hasn’t been a single successful prosecution for killing one. The chances of getting caught and prosecuted have been so low that the risk of committing the crime has been worth taking, over and over again. Until now. 

A real game-changer

Earlier this year, the Scottish Parliament passed new legislation, the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024, which introduces a licensing scheme for grouse shooting. For the first time in 170 years, red grouse shooting can now only take place on estates that have been granted a licence to shoot. 

How will this stop the slaughtering of golden eagles and other birds of prey on Scotland’s grouse moors? Well, the licence can be revoked for up to five years if there is evidence of wildlife crime on the estate. Significantly, this will be based on the civil burden of proof which has a lower evidential threshold than the criminal burden of proof. 

This means that instead of the police having to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that a named individual was responsible, they now have to prove that it’s based only on the ‘balance of probability’. This is a real game-changer because instead of being perpetually ‘untouchable’, now there are real, tangible consequences for the grouse shooting industry if these crimes continue. Estates will no longer be able to rely on the implausible protestation that ‘a big boy did it and ran away’.

As with any legislation, it will only be effective if it is strongly enforced. The jury’s out on that and we’ll be keeping a close eye on performance, but as the licensing scheme is based on a policy of mistrust, the Scottish Government has sent an unequivocal message to the grouse shooting industry. We all know what’s been going on and the public will no longer tolerate it.

Dr Ruth Tingay writes the Raptor Persecution UK blog and is a founder member of Revive, the coalition for grouse moor reform