Whoever chose to shoot two hen harriers at Sandringham could not have picked a worse target. These raptors, which glide over the moors and marshes on V-shaped wings, have been at the centre of a bitter public battle for 20 years.

Conservationists, in particular the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, have been working to save the legally protected species as a breeding bird in Britain, where this year about 400 pairs nested in Scotland and 15 pairs in England. Unfortunately, its main breeding grounds are on the grouse moors, where many landowners and gamekeepers would be glad to see the bird become extinct.

The RSPB believes that gamekeepers, especially in Scotland, put down poisoned carcasses for hen harriers and other raptors to eat. They also claim that gamekeepers secretly shoot harriers and burn heather to stimulate new growth without regard for any harriers nesting in it.

It is undoubtedly the case that adult hen harriers disappear regularly, and in 2001 a Scottish gamekeeper became the first person in Britain to be convicted of killing one, after being filmed covertly by an RSPB camera. He was fined £2,000.

However, the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association argues that it is necessary to keep numbers of raptors down to protect grouse chicks.

This is the nub of the matter. Can grouse and hen harriers co-exist?

An experiment on Langholm Moor, Dumfriesshire, in which all shooting was stopped for five years from 1992, had discouraging results for the RSPB. The harriers increased in number, the grouse disappeared – and then almost all the harriers disappeared. The moor became almost empty of birds.

However, in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, the RSPB and Natural England are now working together with the landowners and monitoring the grouse moors, and both the raptors and the grouse have prospered.

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