GWCT questions RSPB’s ‘on the brink’ claim for Montagu’s harrier

Six young Montagu’s harriers fledged from two nests at a secret site in southern England this summer, all fathered by a single male, and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) has questioned the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ (RSPB) description of the bird as a “species on the brink”. Writing on the trust’s news blog, senior adviser Mike Swan said Britain sits at the very edge of the range of a widespread migratory species listed as of least concern internationally, and that its rarity here should not be mistaken for a species at risk.

What happened at the nests this year?

According to the RSPB, the two nests sat about a kilometre apart in barley, one of them in a patch the farmer left standing as habitat, and each held three chicks. The male, ringed as a chick in 2016 in a different part of the country, had raised four young with one female at the same site in 2025, after no Montagu’s harriers bred in the UK between 2020 and 2023.

In late July the RSPB’s raptor fieldworkers, working under research licences, fitted 5G satellite tags to one juvenile female from each nest, the first time the technique has been used on young Montagu’s harriers in this country. Mark Thomas, the charity’s species lead for the past 20 years, said the tags “give us a direct insight into these birds’ migration and survival”. The UK breeding population peaked at roughly 30 pairs in the 1950s.

Rare here, secure abroad

Mr Swan congratulated the RSPB and the host farmers, and noted that the birds nest on the ground, often in cereal crops, “where they are vulnerable to the likes of foxes and crows, just like gamebirds”. His objection was to the framing he said he read in a BBC report quoting Mr Thomas.

“The truth is that we do not have a British ‘population’ on the brink and at risk of extinction, rather we are at the very edge of the range of a highly migratory and widespread European and Asian breeding species that is recognised as ‘least concern’ in international terms,” he wrote. “The odd birds that visit and breed with us are insignificant in overall population terms, no matter how much we treasure having them here.”

He also questioned the suggestion that climate change is working against the species, arguing that a bird at the north-western limit of its range might be expected to spread north in a warming climate, “hopefully resulting in more of them breeding with us, and not less”.

Why does the scale of a species’ status matter to shooting?

Mr Swan’s wider point is one the shooting community has made about its own quarry. Woodcock, he noted, are red-listed in the UK on concerns about declining breeding numbers “despite remaining relatively secure globally, with no sign of a significant decline in our wintering populations”, while curlew are a species for which Britain carries a particularly heavy responsibility because a large share of the declining world population breeds here.

“Recognising distinctions like this should help us direct limited conservation resources to where they can achieve the greatest benefit,” he wrote, adding that the significance of Montagu’s harriers here “lies more in what its occasional nesting attempts tell us about range expansion, migration and habitat conditions” than in any contribution Britain makes to the species’ overall status.

What happens next?

The two tagged juveniles and their siblings will follow the adults on a migration of roughly 3,500 miles to wintering grounds in West Africa, and the RSPB says it will post updates on the tagged birds on its Montagu’s harrier pages.

Mr Swan’s blog can be read in full on the GWCT website, and the RSPB’s account of the tagging is on its news pages, both linked below.