War of the World's - Conservation versus Extermination

The chances of anyone being caught are a million to one he said
The chances of anyone being convicted from Moors and still they kill!

A nod to Jeff Wayne's lyrics in the opening of War of the World's

Not a lot to post as I've not been out, then I read this extract from Raptor Persecution Scotland in a third blog post about the poisoned White-tailed Eagle on Donside. Nobody has EVER been convicted of killing an Eagle in Scotland despite the evidence as detailed in this SNH Report. There are a couple of photos below the text from Montrose Basin.

https://raptorpersecutionscotland.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/analyses-of-the-fates-of-satellite-tracked-golden-eagles-in-scotland.pdf  

The extract; "the chances of the culprit actually being caught is still disproportionately minuscule in comparison to the weight of the sentence.

In fact, there has never been a successful prosecution for the illegal killing of an eagle in Scotland. Ever. Even though scores of them have been found illegally shot, poisoned or trapped over the years, and scores more have ‘disappeared’ in suspicious circumstances (confirmed by a Government-commissioned report), not one single eagle-killer has ever been held to account.

Not one.

Why not? Because the evidence required to convict is almost impossible to attain. For example, ten years ago three golden eagles were found dead on a prestigious grouse-shooting estate in Sutherland. They were found within days of each other and all three had been poisoned with banned chemicals. The police raided the estate and found a stash of 10kg of Carbofuran (a banned pesticide) inside a locked shed. This was the biggest cache of carbofuran ever found in the UK and was described as being ‘enough to wipe out the entire Scottish golden eagle and red kite populations several times over’. They also found poisoned baits laid out on the hill. At least one of those eagles died with the poisoned bait still in its beak – that’s how potent and fast-acting some of these poisons can be.

An estate employee was charged and the case went to court. However, he was only convicted for having possession of the banned poison. He wasn’t even charged with poisoning those eagles simply because there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that he had laid the bait that killed those eagles.

So when the Scottish Government tells us that the maximum sentence for poisoning an eagle has been increased to a five-year custodial sentence, in this context it’s totally meaningless because the poisoner will evade ever being brought to justice."

Lapwing

Very distant Little Ringed Plover, was with a second bird thought to be a juvenile which may be proved if I can get a frame from a video I took