Few conservation battles in Ireland have been as fraught as that over the hen harrier.
This mid-sized bird of prey hunts small birds and mammals over bogs, heaths and scrubby moorlands of which, you would imagine, there are plenty in Ireland. However, the bird finds itself threatened with extinction, with no more than 106 remaining breeding pairs in the Republic at the last count in 2022.
For the past 25 years, the hen harrier has been at the centre of a land war. While the boggy lands and rush-filled fields of the uplands have traditionally been dismissed as “marginal” or “non-productive”, they are nevertheless contested between those who see opportunity for commercial development (particularly wind energy generation or timber production), those looking to take advantage of public subsidies (agriculture and forestry grants) and a third group of people whose vision is centred on more traditional farming practices and nature protection. As the plummeting numbers of hen harriers show, this last group has found itself in the losing camp.
Battle lines were drawn in the early 2000s with the identification of Special Protection Areas (SPAs) for the hen harrier, a process required under EU nature directives. The process led to angry farmer meetings, particularly in North Cork and south Kerry. In 2003, a hen harrier was shot and killed, and posted to the offices of The Kerryman newspaper along with a clipping of a story about the bird.
RM Block
The fear, still heard today, was that designations would devalue land and “sterilise” it, ruling out development potential or access to subsidies such as forestry grants.
Although the SPAs were few in number (eight in total; six of which covered core breeding areas, while the other two were wintering grounds), they were large. The Slieve Aughties SPA, straddling counties Clare and Galway, extends over nearly 60,000 hectares. The Stack’s to Mullaghareirk Mountains, West Limerick Hills and Mount Eagle SPA comprises 56,673 hectares of land in Kerry, Cork and Limerick.
When the statutes for the SPAs were signed into law in 2012 there was no financial package to help farmers, foresters or landowners to transition to land practices that would help support the hen harrier.
Commercial forestry, largely Sitka spruce monocultures with clear-felling on a short-rotation cycle, was the dominant land use within the six breeding SPAs. It was felt by many that this intensive forestry model was compatible with hen harrier conservation, as the birds could nest and hunt over ground that was clear-felled or recently planted with sapling trees. However, this habitat disappears as the trees mature and the canopy closes over. This tension between forestry and the maintenance of suitable hen harrier habitat has haunted the debate for nearly 30 years.
Another pressure was agricultural “improvement” – clearance of scrub, drainage of land or fires to promote grass growth - carried out frequently during nesting season.
‘The effects, in particular of forest maturation, on hen harrier populations has become evident through the population declines. Now there are no excuses – we know the actions that are necessary to reduce the pressures’
— John Lusby, BirdWatch Ireland
A third issue is wind energy. A 2021 report published by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) highlighted the overlap between hen harrier habitat and suitable sites for wind turbines, and catalogued many ways wind farms can affect the birds, from direct collisions to loss of habitat and displacement from optimal hunting grounds. It was estimated there were 319 wind turbines in hen harrier SPAs.
In all this time, the situation for the raptor went from bad to worse. The most recent survey, in 2022, showed the national population fell by a third since the previous survey in 2015. Moreover, the SPAs were not doing their job. In five of them, hen harrier numbers declined by between 20 per cent and 80 per cent since designation in 2007. Just one SPA has seen the population increase, while overall populations have declined by more than half in these protected areas.
In 2007, an agreement was reached between the Department of Agriculture, the NPWS and landowner and forestry interests on the management of forestry within the SPAs, but it was declared unlawful by the European Commission. In 2013, it was decided a Threat Response Plan would be prepared – a formal process that is provided for under national laws. It took 11 years before this plan was finally published in September 2024.
The plan’s purpose is to “cease, avoid, reverse, reduce, eliminate or prevent threats to the hen harrier”, but when it finally appeared, environmental NGOs, including BirdWatch Ireland, condemned it as a “failed opportunity” that was “sorely lacking in ambition and in targeted actions to set the species on the way to recovery”.
John Lusby, raptor conservation officer with BirdWatch Ireland, who was a member of the consultative committee for the Threat Response Plan from 2015, describes the situation for hen harriers as “critical”.
“If the population continues to decline at its current trend they will be extinct within 25 years,” he says. Those in SPAs are “barely hanging on”.
The situation with farming has improved somewhat, with dedicated schemes for farmers to improve habitat quality, and “eligibility” rules relaxed to allow farmers claim subsidy on land that is rough with trees and bushes or not being grazed by livestock.
Forestry, however, continues to be a vexed issue. “In areas where there are a lot of plantations, that can limit and reduce the suitability for hen harriers,” Lusby says.
There was a belief 20 years ago that commercial forestry could be aligned with hen harrier conservation, but Lusby says the reality is different.
“The effects, in particular of forest maturation, on hen harrier populations has become evident through the population declines. Now there are no excuses – we know the actions that are necessary to reduce the pressures.”
Commercial forestry can be compatible with conservation of the bird, Lusby emphasises, but “not to the levels that we have in SPAs”, which act alongside a “multitude of other pressures”.
[ Why planting trees could be bad for Ireland’s hen harriersOpens in new window ]
The Threat Response Plan recognises this, Lusby says, but he laments the lack of urgency in its implementation.
A priority of the plan is to “implement a programme of targeted forest removal within the SPAs” to “expand and link prime hen harrier habitat”.
However, the commitment did not come with specific targets or timelines for removing forests and restoring bogs or heaths. Lusby says the plan is a “necessary framework, but not yet a guarantee of recovery” for the hen harrier.
In June, the NPWS published an implementation report for the year up to June 2025 which says the plan is “progressing”, with increased monitoring, nest protection through predator control and a focus on a pilot area for forestry removal within the Slieve Bloom Mountains SPA.
But areas for habitat restoration have yet to be identified, and a number of key targets have already been missed. In particular, the identification of a “national conservation objective” or overall vision for the hen harrier population, something that is needed to inform actions down the chain, was to be delivered in 2025, but has been pushed out until after 2027.
The NPWS told The Irish Times that defining targets, such as a national conservation objective, and deadlines for habitat restoration within SPAs, was not a priority, as there was a need to keep a flexible approach.
There were conservation objectives for the existing SPAs and the priority must be meeting those, they said, while defining areas of habitat to be restored was “not helpful” at this stage given the need to see how hen harriers respond to changes in the landscape.
Nevertheless, the focus for actions in only one pilot area of one SPA, after all the time and studies that have gone into understanding the issues, lacks the urgency or scale of response that is required.
The NPWS admits the process is “slower than we would have liked” and that, if restoration is going to happen, a “step change” is needed in delivery through, for example, financing and planning requirements.
[ Michael Viney: Why do hen harriers find Ireland so hard to live in?Opens in new window ]
The challenge, it says, is “to go beyond one site” and towards landscape-level changes, something that will increasingly come under scrutiny with the publication of Ireland’s National Nature Restoration Plan later this year.
Time is not on the side of the hen harrier, however.
According to Lusby, “there’s no evidence as yet of a population recovery for hen harriers within SPAs”, while the NPWS admits it could take another decade for numbers to improve.
“We’re going in the right direction” it said, “but we will need to accelerate.”
