Pheasants and Buzzards: Pt 2


A few weeks back I posted a piece on the shooting of buzzards and the increased pressure on this species imposed by pheasant rearing landowners and keepers. You may remember that towards the back end of last year the government proposed and then rapidly withdrew a a plan to "sub lethally" control buzzard populations to limit losses of pheasants. Last week I was handed a paper on this subject and I think it makes for interesting reading. Titled "Pheasants, buzzards and trophic cascades." and written by A. C. Lees, Ian Newton and Andrew Balmford it was released about four months ago. I'm not sure where I stand re. copyright but I would like to quote some of this paper.
The Abstract sets out the discussion quite succinctly: " The partial recovery of large birds of prey in lowland Britain has reignited conflicts with game managers and prompted a controversial U.K. government proposal to investigate ways of limiting losses to pheasant shooting operations. Yet best estimates are that buzzards are only a minor source of pheasant mortality - road traffic, for example, is far more important. (How many road kill pheasants do you encounter on an average rural drive?) Moreover, because there are often large numbers of nonbreeding buzzards, local control of breeding pairs may lead to their replacement by immigrant buzzards. Most significantly, even if successful, lowering buzzard numbers may directly or indirectly increase the abundance of other medium-sized predators (such as foxes or corvids) which potentially have much greater impacts on pheasant numbers.


Buzzard Buteo buteo. Guilty of a minor impact on pheasant numbers

When Wildlife Minister Richard Benyon suggested that buzzard numbers could be controlled by nest destruction and translocation the general public and conservation NGOs were not pleased. When he changed his mind (not a U-turn!) it was time for the Countryside Alliance and similar outfits to get annoyed. Between 20 and 35 million pheasants are released by the shooting industry annually, adding to the wild bred stocks. The paper uses a case study of 486 reared pheasants that found that 37.5% were shot and 36% predated or scavenged - principally by foxes. "In this study, raptors were implicated in the deaths of <1% of individuals." Another study in Dorset found that 5-13% of pheasants are killed on the roads.

Conceptual map of interspecific interactions taken from the paper by A.C.Lees et al.

"It is estimated that for each paired buzzard in southern Britain there are up to three additional non-breeding birds (Kenwood et al 2000)" So get rid of your local buzzards and more will soon move in. "Two recently prosecuted Shropshire gamekeepers discovered the extent of such immigration for themselves when they illegally killed over 100 buzzards on one estate in less than six months (Evans 2008)" Over 100 buzzards in less than six months!! Anyone who likes to see a buzzard soaring overhead will no doubt have a strong reaction to news like this.

Ring-necked Pheasant Phasianus colchicus 20 - 35 million released in Britain every year.

An interesting point made by the authors is that : "Although buzzards may have a minor negative impact on game populations by direct predation, this may be more than compensated by buzzard predation on other predators such as corvids which, through nest predation, may have significant impacts on the reproductive success of the wild breeding stock of pheasants." The authors go on to point out that rabbits cause damage reckoned at £180 million annually - and we know what buzzards do to rabbits! Removing buzzards may impose subtle economic penalties on land-owners as well as leading to increased numbers of foxes, which kill at least four times as many pheasants as do buzzards.

Fox Vulpes vulpes. The main predator of Pheasants

The main concern of most people who are not stakeholders in the pheasant business was that the Benyon proposal: " would inadvertently give the greenlight to wider raptor persecution - this at a time when illegal persecution already looks set to drive Hen Harriers Circus cyaneus to extinction in England." I believe that this would definitely be the case. The current laws are already ignored as it is by some.

Common Buzzard Buteo buteo

The paper makes no bones about its findings stating that: "By ignoring their population biology and interaction with other species, ad hoc local control of predators such as buzzards could just as likely exacerbate losses of pheasants as reduce them. In the future, effective game management interventions will require far more rigorous analysis of the ecological, conservation, and economic consequences of maintaining supernormal densities of introduced game species than has been achieved so far."
I'd like to bet that this will not happen. Money talks!


Common Buzzard Buteo buteo

The paper ends, as expected, with a comprehensive list of references but, it does not give a link to an online version and I only have a hard-copy.

 

Pheasant Pluckers!

I am reading 'Adventures Among Birds' by W. H. Hudson. First published in 1913 it celebrates its centenary this year. It is remarkable and very sad how so little has changed or improved in a century!
The book contains 27 chapters, each a memoir or a musing or a series of anecdotes or idle meanderings amongst the world of birds. One such chapter is entitled 'The Sacred Bird'. You would not know by the title that he is discussing the Common Pheasant Phasianus cochicus. The title is ironic. To most this bird is not sacred at all but to shooters, landowners, gamekeepers and their ilk it is the most sacred bird. So sacred that all other living creatures need to be extirpated to ensure the Pheasants' happy survival...so that it too can be shot! Hudson talks of the desire of landowners to make the bird artificially abundant so that an estate which yielded a dozen or twenty birds a year to the sporstman would be made to yield a thousand. This necessitated the destruction of all the wildlife supposed in any way and in any degree to be inimical to the pheasant.

Male Pheasant - Feeding in our garden

He talks of a keeper 'Who shot all the local Nightingales because their singing kept the pheasants awake at night'. Another case is 'of an old heronry in a southern county, in the park of a great estate. On my last visit to this heronry at the breeding season I found all the nests hanging empty and desolate in the trees and was told that the head keeper had killed all the herons because their cries frightened the pheasants. They were shot on the nests after breeding had began.'


Male Pheasant - In the garden!

And I have to quote this passage: 'Another instance...throughout a mid-June day I heard the sound of firing in the woods, beginning at about eight o'clock in the morning and lasting until dark. The shooters ranged over the whole woods. I inquired of several persons as to the meaning of all this firing, and was told that the keeper was ridding the woods of some of the vermin. More than that they refused to say; but by-and-by I found a person to tell me just what had happened. The head keeper had got twenty or thirty persons, the men with guns and a number of lads with long poles with hooks to pull nests down, and had set himself to rid the woods of birds that were not wanted. all nests found, of whatever species, were pulled down, and all doves, woodpeckers, nuthatches, blackbirds, missel- and song-thrushes shot; also chaffinches and many other small birds. The keeper said he was not going to have the place swarming with birds that were no good for anything, and were always eating the pheasants' food'.
Now I suspect things have altered very little. I was enjoying a few pints of the local bitter in a pub in North-west Norfolk last Sunday evening talking to an acquantance who lives there. I had been out walking during the day and I had seen upwards of five Ban Owls Tyto alba and I had just finished mentioning this fact when he informed me that he had erected a Barn Owl box in his garden but was getting little joy out of it due to the local jackdaws moving in. Furthermore he was becomoing increasingly concerned about the number of Barn Owls being shot by local farmers because they were suspected of tacking pheasant chicks. I didn't know that his was happening...was it even legal? I love to see Barn Owls, I'm not too bothered about the semi-domesticated Pheasant. Then I was told that this same farmer had killed 46 Foxes last year. 46!! all caught in snares. When he was asked if this was legal the farmer replied that it was, so long as the snares are checked every 24 hours. I couldn't believe what I was hearing!

Close-up of greater coverts of a dead Jay's wing
 

The following day we went for a walk around Holkham Park - we were there for three hours and the sound of guns going off never stopped. We only came across one shooter wandering home carring his dead pheasants. But we did find a recently deceased Jay Garrulus glandarius lying at the edge of a field. There were no obvious signs of how this bird had met its end. It clearly had not flown into anything, it had not been attacked... we suspect that it had been shot. Was it vermin? Was it a danger to the sacred pheasant chicks or was it just a laugh to shoot it!