Beating them at their own game

Published on Sunday 20 May 2007 00:39

ON JUNE 4, George Aitken could make history as the first gamekeeper in Scotland to be jailed for wildlife offences. When investigators raided the Blythe estate, a sporting grouse moor near Lauder, last year they found evidence of Aitken's activities all around.

Carcasses of pheasants laced with highly toxic poisons had been laid out in the open to attract birds of prey, since eliminating these predators would allow grouse numbers to increase. The investigators were shocked that these had been placed so close to the Southern Upland Way, a long-distance path popular with dog owners.

Then there were the home-made illegal cage traps in which Aitken had placed live pigeons to lure officially protected birds of prey to their death.

As the 56-year-old gamekeeper pleaded guilty to eight offences at Selkirk Sheriff Court earlier this month, the RSPB made it clear that this was one of the worst cases it had investigated in the last 20 years.

If Aitken is sent to prison when he is sentenced next month, wildlife crime detection will have come of age, proving that the courts are finally acknowledging the seriousness of such offences.

Much of this is down to one man. When Alan Stewart became the country's first full-time wildlife crime officer 17 years ago on a Tayside patch that stretches from the wild Perthshire moorlands to the Angus coast, he was as rare as some of the birds hunted to extinction over the last few centuries. Now there are four full-time and 96 part-time WCOs engaged in hunting down wildlife criminals.

It astonishes Stewart, now retired from uniform but still working as a civilian WCO attached to the Tayside force, that so many offenders still believe they will escape detection. "It may be that they feel because they are working in remote areas very few people will ever find out about what they are doing - and even if they stumble across it, they won't recognise it for what it is," he says. "But times have changed. More people are interested in the environment and wildlife and are more prepared than ever to act as our eyes and ears.

"There are some estates out there still at it - far fewer than there used to be - but we know who they are and once we have the evidence they will be taken to court."

Taking the poisoners to court has been a recurrent theme of Stewart's 40 years on the wildlife beat. He has also tackled poachers and run one of the most successful operations ever undertaken in the UK against thieves who collect the eggs of wild birds for their own private enjoyment.

He has locked horns with illegal seal cullers on the Angus coast, pursued the trappers of Scottish songbirds sold on the international market and attempted to catch illegal hunters who casually decimate the rare freshwater pearl colonies in the country's rivers for their hidden treasures.

Now Stewart has captured it all in a book, Wildlife Detective, which is published tomorrow. It's an unprecedented glimpse into the modus operandi and motivation of the criminals who plunder Scotland's wildlife for their own gain. Shining through it all is Stewart's love of the countryside and its non-human inhabitants, and his unbending desire to protect it from mankind's worst instincts.

"I was brought up in the countryside," he explains. "I was fascinated by everything that grew there, lived there or took place there. During my police career I was never happier than when I was allocated a call that had something to do with animals."

His first wildlife-related bust came as a rookie in the mid-1960s while on patrol on the A9. He spotted a van carrying two of Perth's most infamous poachers, who were known to raid the River Deveron every weekend. PC Stewart moved in and found 43 salmon in the back of the van.

The men insisted they had just had the best angling weekend of their lives, but tests later proved that the fish had been killed by explosives thrown into the water. "That case greatly influenced my career, making me a specialist dealing with poaching cases overnight," he writes.

One of the most mysterious wildlife crimes is 'egging', in which the eggs of wild birds are stolen from their nests for private display. It was a fashionable pastime in Victorian times, but still persists among a diehard fraternity today. Eggers will risk their lives to get their trophies - including the eggs of golden eagles and ospreys. In 1998 Stewart took over Operation Easter, a cross-border database aimed at identifying the UK's major illegal egg collectors. By 2001, there were more than 100 names on the list and their details were circulated to police forces nationwide.

One early success was finding a cache of 3,500 eggs in the home of a man who had travelled to Mull in search of a rare white-tailed sea eagle. He was identified by Devon and Cornwall police, who also found a kilo of cannabis and a handgun concealed in his house.

Partially as a result of Operation Easter, eggers have been fined up to 2,000 and others have been jailed. The database has now been reduced to 50 names.

"Some collectors who were targets have been forced to give up altogether, some now travel abroad to collect eggs and at least two are known to have moved their collections abroad," says Stewart. "All of this reflects the success of an operation where intelligence is pooled and the police and the RSPB work together."

Stewart is convinced that wildlife crime will only diminish dramatically if new generations become aware of the full environmental and financial benefits of the wildlife around them. Take the hen harrier, one of the most splendidly acrobatic yet most persecuted birds of prey. As Stewart writes, "Hen harriers are as welcome on a grouse moor as a thunderstorm at a summer barbecue. If they only ate voles, mice, rabbits and meadow pipits, they would be tolerated and even welcomed. It is the fact that their diet also includes grouse, especially chicks, that makes their presence incompatible with the job of a keeper in producing a maximum shootable surplus of grouse."

The statistics bear Stewart out, with scientific studies repeatedly concluding that hen harriers are targeted on grouse moors. Tactics range from simply shooting the adult birds as they hover over their nests to enticing them with poison baits. Otherwise, the adults can easily be persuaded to abandon their eggs if the area is continually disturbed - the parents fly off to find new territory and the next generation fails to hatch.

In an attempt to reverse the antagonism towards the hen harrier, Stewart recruited two Perthshire primary schools. The pupils were taught about wildlife crime and then taken to see a hen harrier nest for themselves. "The kids learned about the birds and had fun doing so, landowners received praise for their willing participation, and the public became aware of the police effort to curb wildlife crime, particularly against hen harriers. If we get the public involved, we will have more chance of stamping out this kind of crime."

That may be so, but it is not just the public who need convincing. Many of Stewart's battles over the last 40 years have been in bringing evidence to court, only to find progress thwarted by fiscals who place wildlife crime at the bottom of their list of priorities and unsympathetic sheriffs who do not take wildlife cases seriously. A constant refrain from organisations such as the RSPB has been that even if convictions are secured, punishment is negligible, with risible fines.

"Even now I don't think enough attention is given to wildlife crime," Stewart says. "But you often find that the perpetrators are involved in other criminal activities as well. If we can only get them for wildlife crime, it might curb their other activities."

Legislation has been tightened up recently. It is only in the last few years, for example, that police have gained the power to search for evidence linking individuals to wildlife crimes and to arrest suspects, while courts have had the power to jail those convicted only since 2004.

Stewart believes that wildlife crime is falling thanks to there being more WCOs out in the field, better trained prosecutors and an increasingly aware public who are more willing to report misdemeanours.

As far as politicians are concerned, Ross Finnie, the former environment minister, suggested last year that the time had come for special 'environment courts' to be set up along the lines of those already established for domestic abuse and drug crime. There are now 14 fiscals with specialist knowledge of wildlife crime so that, as Elish Angiolini, the lord advocate, recently pointed out, a case "doesn't land in the in-tray of a young fiscal in the middle of a city who has never seen an osprey egg before".

A national wildlife crime unit has recently been established at North Berwick as a multi-agency operation to gather, analyse and co-ordinate intelligence and support the work done by police WCOs.

They will all be needed. In the last four months, police have been called in to investigate the gassing of the entire badger population of Seil Island off the Argyllshire coast, while deer have been butchered in Strathclyde country park by gangs of youths with hunting dogs and airguns.

Meanwhile, some of the older crimes are also making a comeback. Salmon poaching is believed to be on the increase, ironically because environmental improvements are allowing more of the king of fish to return to Scottish rivers. Stewart has witnessed for himself a revival in hare coursing, in which hares are hunted with dogs.

For him, there is still a big job waiting to be done. He is usually in his office shortly after 7am every day. Even after 40 years - and last year's lifetime achievement award from the environmental group WWF - there are cases he still wants to nail.

One is the Perth man who traps finches to sell into the lucrative trade in captive songbirds. Stewart knows who he is and how he operates, how his net is hidden under his stairs and who his contact in England is - all information from a tip-off. That he cannot obtain a warrant for a search reveals how legislation sometimes changes for the worse.

"Forty years ago a sheriff would have accepted that evidence, albeit from an anonymous informant, and would have granted a warrant. Now, unfortunately, it is not good enough.

"All I can do is be patient. At some stage, he will slip up and then we'll have him."

Wildlife Detective: A Life Fighting Wildlife Crime by Alan Stewart (14.99, Argyll Publishing)

Animal instincts

POISONING

A common practice encouraged by the development of sporting estates in the Victorian era, with gamekeepers instructed to cull birds of prey to ensure a plentiful supply of red grouse for the start of the shooting season in August.

Even now, Scotland has the worst record in the UK for attacks on birds of prey. Figures from the RSPB show that between 1995 and 2006 there were 1,113 confirmed incidents of birds of prey being poisoned, shot at or having their nests destroyed - with Scotland accounting for nearly half that figure.

EGGING

Last November, a haul of 7,000 rare birds eggs was seized from a house in Lincolnshire. Many were believed to have been taken from wild birds in Scotland and included the eggs of golden eagles and ospreys, of which there are only 420 and 160 breeding pairs in Scotland respectively. The eggs seized included those of honey buzzards, which make up a very small population in Scotland, and avocets, a rare wading bird which is used as the emblem of the RSPB. The raid was carried out as part of Operation Easter, a nationwide offensive against egg collectors, led by Tayside Police in conjunction with the RSPB. The haul was said to be the biggest in the UK in the past ten years.

TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES

According to the new national wildlife crime unit, the UK is primarily a destination for illegally traded wildlife, though it is also a source and transit country. Live specimens such as birds of prey, parrots and reptiles are sought by collectors and the pet trade, and there are also markets for animal derivatives, such as ivory, and traditional Chinese medicines containing extracts from endangered species.

A rhino horn can fetch 10,000, and a pair of Lear's Macaws 50,000, so there is potential for substantial profits. In 2005 some 7,846 live birds and animals, 332,043 animal parts and 192 ivory objects were seized by investigators.

In six wildlife trade prosecutions in the UK between 1996 and 2002, the total value of wildlife involved totalled 4 million, including commodities such as rhino horns, parrots, birds of prey and shahtoosh shawls.