WHATEVER the season, almost every programme in the BBC’s hugely popular Springwatch series highlights one particular wildlife issue: the plight of the hen harrier.

OK, I exaggerate. It just seems like almost every programme. Pre-Springwatch, it’s probable that many of its future audience had either never heard of a hen harrier or knew little about it. But there can now be none of those millions unaware that the harrier is “this magnificent bird of prey”, whose sky-dancing mating routine over its open-moor habitat is “one of our most exciting wildlife spectacles”.

Splendid, absolutely splendid. Well done, Spring/Autumn/Winterwatch.

I’ll admit I was ignorant of the hen harrier until, one chill March day, long before Springwatch was born, one passed within yards of me as I was sheltering among a remote rock outcrop in Bransdale in the North York Moors. I watched the bird in awe as it flew low to the valley head, seemingly slow but in fact scanning much ground quickly as it occasionally veered suddenly from side to side.

Since then I’ve seen a hen harrier elsewhere in the Moors – in Rosedale, Fryupdale and at Commondale. My most surprising sighting was of a young bird on a post where moorland abuts farmland at Mickleby, near the coast. A large hen harrier perched on roadside heather between Castleton and Lockwood Beck gazed directly at my eldest daughter when she stopped to observe it from her car. To this day she is unpersuaded that it was a hen harrier and not an eagle.

I’ve also twice seen a hen harrier in the Yorkshire Dales, each time near Tan Hill Inn. What all these sightings show, I think, is that our northern moors appeal to the hen harrier, which would be happy to make them its principal home.

But through persecution it is on the verge of extinction. The recent disappearance of a tagged bird from moorland near Grassington is the sixth known hen harrier loss in northern England in just 14 months.

Scandalously, North Yorkshire is the country’s worst blackspot for bird-of-prey persecution. This is a dark underbelly of the image North Yorkshire likes to project of itself as “England’s most beautiful county”.

Red kites, probably drifting over from the colony at Harewood House, occasionally turn up in Ryedale, but they are never seen for long. Even buzzards, now Britain’s most common birds of prey, are still relatively rare in North Yorkshire. That they are slowly gaining ground is probably due to pressure to expand through their growth in numbers elsewhere.

Clearly much more effort is needed to check the North Yorkshire persecution. Detecting – and proving – actual crime is notoriously difficult. What could help, I believe, is a Birds of Prey Charter, well publicised, signed up to by every estate and shooting syndicate, and issued to every holder of a shotgun licence.

There will always be rogue marksmen who find it a thrill to down a “magnificent bird of prey”, and the shooting fraternity already insists it is fully on side in protecting these superb yet highly vulnerable birds. Yet somehow the losses persist.

It is a tragedy, but also nothing short of a disgrace, that we are witnessing these wonderful birds struggle to survive in the landscapes where they should best thrive.