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If you read the Farmers' Guardian online you will have seen this rather lurid headline; Agreement on wholesale cull…of grey squirrels.  If you read the article then it quotes me as saying: Dr Mark Avery, RSPB director of conservation, took part in Saturday’s (July 25) CLA debate on wildlife. He said: “If I could magic away the grey squirrel tomorrow, I would make that decision.”

The quote is accurate but the headline is not! 

In fact, my remarks were made in response to a CLA spokesperson who said something like "The species my members would most like to see killed are grey squirrel, mink and muntjac deer."  My response was something very close to this:  "Well, I don't think that my members would be nearly so keen on killing them.  But I can say that if I could click my fingers and magic them all away then I would click away.  Of course, in reality it isn't as easy as clicking your fingers and the practicalities, cost and a whole range of other issues means that it's nowhere near as simple.".  I said something like that and would stand by it. And by the way, I don't remember the Acting Chair of Natural England, Poul Christenson, signing up to a grey squirrel cull either but then he doesn't have his photo in the Farmers' Guardian - pity , he is much more handsome than I am!

Grey squirrels are known to be the major cause in the massive decline in numbers of our native red squirrel, American mink cause havoc for water voles and some ground-nesting birds, and muntjac deer are having massive impacts on our native woodlands.  All three are introduced species and there is evidence from all over the world that introducing non-native species into any country can cause major ecological, and sometimes economic, problems.  I'd click my fingers to magic them away - but that isn't an option.

Do you know anyone called Brocklehurst?  Apparently it was a Mr TV Brocklehurst from Henbury Park in Cheshire who has the strongest claim to having introduced the grey squirrel into the UK - in 1876.  There are about 58 Brocklehursts per million of the population in the UK - that's about 3600 of them.  Maybe we should ask them to round up all the grey squirrels and ship them back to the USA under the 'polluter pays' principle?  That's got as much chance of succeeding as any other plans to remove the UK's grey squirrels!

These things happen in the media.  Maybe the journalist who was present had nothing to do with the headline - maybe that was written by an excitable sub-editor who wasn't present on the day.  I'd defend a free press quite strongly, I'd be less keen on defending that 19th century Mr Brocklehurst, but I think we'll have to live with free squirrels for quite a while.

I've just been looking at the 2008 figures for lapwing, snipe and redshank numbers on lowland wet grassland RSPB nature reserves.  That's reserves like the Ouse Washes, West Sedgemoor, Otmoor and Ynys Hir.  Overall numbers increased from those of 2007 and were also higher than in 2005  - when our current nature reserve strategy began.  This is good news but you can never take anything for granted with these birds - they face so many complex threats - and I wouldn't guarantee that this year will see further rises.  I'll let you know when I can.

But it reminded me that last year the Countryside Alliance mounted a campaign called Save the Waders which asked people to sign up to a Downing Street petition to call for more wader-friendly policies and to recognise the role of predator control in saving waders.  This was a thinly disguised campaign against various predators - foxes, badgers, buzzards to name but three - and a bit of a campaign against the RSPB too.

The campaign seemed to have sunk without trace but, remembering the ability of the Countryside Alliance to fill the streets of London with angry people, I thought I ought to check what was happening.  The Downing Street website shows that only 247 people signed the petition before it closed this year on April Fools' Day. 

Well, I say 247 signed up to it but that actually includes a few names that are clearly fictitious (Hooray Henry Chinless-Twit), and some that are actually against the petition.  Some of the apparent signatories are interesting: a few grouse moor owners, the current chair of the Moorland Association, the former and current Chief Executives of the Scottish Countryside Alliance and a couple of trustees of Songbird Survival.  Call me cynical but these are the people who always seem to me to be rather more anti-raptor than they are pro-wader.

You can also read the 10 Downing Street response to those 247 people - and the response seems to me to be eminently reasonable and encouragingly well-informed. 

Breeding waders are in trouble in the UK - particularly in the south of England and Wales.  Their numbers have been hit by land drainage, flooding, the switch from spring to autumn cereal sowing, silage cutting, maybe climate change and in some places probably by increases in numbers of generalist predators such as crows and foxes (particularly foxes, I think).  Much of our work is spent working with land-owners and trying to influence government policy so that the right habitat is in place for these birds - and we do have some successes.  And we recognise that, in some cases, control (that often, but not always, means killing) of predators such as foxes can help wader populations recover.  However, the generalised swipes at almost any predator contained in the Save the Waders campaign were clearly not well thought through and I guess that's why it was so unsuccessful.

In contrast, at the Game Fair over the weekend 600 people signed up to our bird of prey pledge which aims to show politicians that people want legal protection of birds of prey to remain.  That pledge now has well over 140,000 signatories.  This certainly doesn't mean that more people like birds of prey than like waders - but it does seem to show that people are keen to add their voices to help sort out real issues and they see illegal killing of birds of prey as a real issue.

As I wandered around the Game Fair at the weekend in my half-veggie way (see yesterday's blog) I did have a very nice venison burger.  I guess this was from a deer farm rather than a shot beast but who knows?  It was delicious!

And our freezer often contains the odd pheasant or wood pigeon.

Now I've always thought that eating an animal that has been living wild in the countryside, and which was despatched rapidly by a bullet or bunch of shotgun pellets, must be morally better than eating something that was factory-farmed.  And I've always thought it might well be healthier for me.

However, a conference held in the USA last year, and attended by RSPB staff, draws attention to surprisingly high lead levels in meat from species that were shot with lead bullets or lead pellets.  Ingesting too much lead is bad for wildlife and for people.  Much of the conference was directed at research on the impacts of lead on the tiny Californian condor population.

I don't think that my venison burger will have done me too much harm - but then it's probably too late and too far gone in my case! - but we know that a variety of organisations are talking about this as an issue that needs to be addressed. 

The Game Fair is not the place to be if you are a vegetarian!  So it's a good job I'm only half way there at the moment!

As you walk around the showground the smell of fried bacon, venison burgers and sausages assaults the nostrils.  I like a nice bacon bap and I'd have to say that those provided by the Barn Bacon Company were my favourite and were the best value for money I encountered.

So what's all this about being half-vegetarian?  Isn't that like being half alive? half pregnant? or half male?  No, I don't think so, it's more like using half as much petrol, half as much pesticide or making half as many mistakes.  In other words, it's not, for me, an all-or-nothing decision - eating less meat is perfectly feasible, and may make a positive environmental difference.

I know lots of vegetarians and admire their will power, and they each have given up meat for different reasons but mostly on animal welfare grounds.  The thing that pushed me towards eating less meat was the realisation that meat-production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and that meat production led to inefficient land use decisions in a world that is a crowded place.  About 40% of cereals grown in the UK are fed to livestock - imagine how many vegetables could be grown on that land that could go more directly into human food consumption. 

In the 'rewilding' 'debate' on Saturday, a gentleman from the audience made a point suggesting that we couldn't spare land for nature when there are people starving across the world, and an ever-growing world population.  I think he's wrong.  If we destroy the nature around us the world won't  be worth living in and won't sustain a growing human population.  Much more effective would be to find a way that we can all live on this planet but reduce our impact on it.  Eating less meat is one of my decisions in that direction.

Having the odd meat-free day is not a big deal, and actually I think I enjoy the meat that I do eat more for not having it every day.  This year I am averaging four meat-free days a week.  The Game Fair is not the place to get your average up!  And I will be visiting the Barn Bacon Company next year.

Well it rained a bit and the crowds seemed thinner than the previous two days but the RSPB stand was very busy.  And I recovered my blackberry too!

Lots of people signed our bird of prey pledge - I think we are over 500 for the three days which is much better than last year's Game Fair at Blenheim.

One man shot himself, only metaphorically, in the foot when we asked him whether he would like to sign the pledge and he said 'No, I'm a gamekeeper!' and still was unable to bring himself to sign a pledge against the illegal killing of birds of prey after we pointed out that the National Gamekeepers' Organisation had signed already.   This example, a rare one, but a real one, shows that amongst a few people in the shooting community hatred of birds of prey is deeply entrenched.  But I would like to stress that we received a warm, polite although occasionally challenging welcome at the Game Fair over the three days.

A colleague and I visited the (rather swanky) marquee of Bettws Hall estates to touch base with them on the events at their Shropshire Kempton Estate last year (see my blog post of 14 June on buzzards).  We were given a warm and polite reception and they signed up to our bird of prey pledge.

I have a few other thoughts coming out of the last three days but the next few hours are my weekend so they'll have to wait!

And the final Game Fair bingo scores (see blog post of Friday morning)?  Well, 16 out of my 20 suggestions did come up (one man who didn't like us very much trotted out quite a few of them today!) - I wasn't shouted at, I wasn't sworn at, nobody said that our staff on the ground are good but the senior staff are hopeless and nobody said we are too anti-windfarm.  All the others did, and they make up a mixed bag of praise and criticism - that's fair enough, and to have those discussions is one of the reasons why we attend the Game Fair.  Another reason is to meet lots and lots of RSPB members and potential members who want to talk to us about how much they enjoy wildlife and how much they care about it.

A sunny day back at the Game Fair.

I was part of a discussion about 'rewilding' - which was less about the type of habitat recreation the RSPB has done at Lakenheath, and more about species reintroductions and introductions, past and present.

The subject of a reintroduction of white-tailed eagles to East Anglia came up.  It's amazing how scared the landed gentry seem to be about a bit more nature in their lives!  Anyone would think that the plan was to let tigers go in central London!  Don't they know that white-tailed eagles are living in many European countries from the Netherlands to Poland without eating babies, destroying farming productivity or wrecking the rural economy?

It occurred to me that quite a few of the introduced species that people have problems with were released in the past by the landed gentry.  Grey squirrels, Muntjac deer and Canada geese all were released from stately homes.  Should we be applying the 'polluter pays' principle and seeking redress from their successors?

I offered a tongue-very-firmly-in-cheek deal - we'll forget eagle reintroductions when the release of 30 million non-native pheasants each year is halted. 

Lots of good discussions today and the Game Fair bingo score rose to 11 out of 20.  The weather forecast looks a bit dodgy for tomorrow.

Arrived at Belvoir Castle at 0810 and left at 1940 - so quite a long day, interspersed with sun and showers and lots of talking.  It was a good day.

I was part of a discussion on windfarms where Maria McCaffery from the British Wind Energy Association was given a hard time by a vocal and well-informed group of local campaigners against a windfarm near them.  The RSPB's point of view is that we will need more windfarms as part of our response to mitigating climate change but we must put them in the right places and we need to listen to local views to help decide which are the right and wrong places.

After the debate I was at the CLA President's lunch where I was delighted to be sitting next to Charlie Brooks (see my blog post of 17 July) the ex-jockey, ex-racehorse trainer and now novelist and Daily Telegraph columnist.  Charlie wrote a piece recently saying how daft the RSPB is - so it was nice to meet him.  Did someone have an excellent sense of humour putting us on the same table for lunch or was it one of those happy chance events.  Whichever it was, we had a good chat about set-aside, farming, the RSPB, raptors, world population and the day that Suny Bay (a marvellous grey horse trained by Mr Brooks) won the Hennessy Gold Cup at Newbury.

A little later the RSPB had a reception at our stand and the guest speaker was Richard Benyon, a Shadow Environment minister who signed up to our bird of prey pledge - lots of people were signing up all day which was great!  Mr Benyon did say nice things about the RSPB and said that illegal killing of birds of prey must be marginalised. 

Later still the Shadow Secretary of State for the environment, Nick Herbert, visited and said that he had posted an article on the Guardian webpage which mentioned his recent visit to the RSPB's Hope Farm and the article that Graham Wynne had contributed to a website that the Conservative Party has set-up for people to put forward their views on the environment.  Graham's article is, of course, worth a look.  It questions the extent to which we can value nature in monetary terms and points out that the value of a skylark's song is enormous but difficult to quantify.

Also met lots of RSPB members and lost my blackberry!

And how are we doing on Game Fair bingo (see previous blog post)?  I have already got 8 out of 20 and there are two more days to go!  Off to bed now and back to Belvoir early tomorrow.

Today I'm off to the Country Landowners' Association Game Fair - the summer do for hunting, shooting and fishing folk (and lots of other people too!).  In fact, I'll be there, at Belvoir Castle, all weekend, so do visit the RSPB stand if you'd like to have a chat or say hello.

It'll be a busy weekend as there will be lots of visitors and people to talk to, but also we have a reception on the Friday afternoon, I am doing two debates (on windfarms and re-wilding the countryside) and I have an invitation to the CLA President's lunch and a few other events too.

Do I look forward to it?  Yes I do, I have been to almost all of the Game Fairs of the last 15 years and have been present on all three days for most of those.  We meet a lot of RSPB members, recruit some more and are there to put our views across in an open and friendly way.  And last year around  400 people signed our bird of prey pledge - we hope to see even more pledges signed this weekend.

The theme of our stand is around the question - are shooters and conservationists like chalk and cheese?  I think it'll get quite a lot of comments.

It may seem odd to some of the RSPB's members that we attend an event that is so dedicated to country field sports.  And it clearly seems odd to some of the attendees that we are there too.  Some RSPB staff have had some very unpleasant conversations while at the Game Fair, including having a gun pointed at them, and one of my sweetest-looking young female staff was called a 'hard-faced ***' by a red-faced middle-aged 'gentleman'. 

Despite this, I am convinced that the RSPB should keep attending the Game Fair because land management for field sports has such an important part to play in nature conservation and we all need to keep talking.  Added to that, there are a lot of people who I am really looking forward to meeting, and talking to, whom I rarely see except at the Game Fair.  So I hope that we have a constructive weekend with plenty of debate but no rudeness or aggression. 

Having been to the Game Fair so often I have a feeling I know what types of conversation I will have, so let's play Game Fair bingo!  Here are 20 things that have been said to me over the last few years.  How many will come up again this weekend? 

1. All the RSPB's members are townies, of course

2. You're all anti-farmer

3. You campaign against field sports

4. Someone will shout at me

5. Someone will swear at me

6. You are too anti-windfarm

7. You are too pro-windfarm

8. Why don't you campaign against cats? It's because your members are all little old ladies with cats aren't they?

9. The RSPB is a really good organisation and I'm glad to see you here.

10. Mark - it's good to see you here prepared to talk to people.

11. Why do you oppose all predator control?

12. The hen harrier problem

13. Badgers are eating all the ground-nesting birds

14. Buzzards are an increasing problem

15. A gamekeeper goes out of his way to say something nice to us

16. A Conservative MP says something very nice about us in public

17. Sea eagles - they are a huge problem, aren't they?

18. RSPB nature reserves are under-performing

19. The trouble with the RSPB is that their staff on the ground are quite sensible but the people who run the organisation are all just interested in spin and membership

20. I really enjoy seeing the red kites near my house

Let's see how we get on - I'll keep you updated on progress each day!  And I'll touch on all these issues in future blogs. But if you are attending the Game Fair - come and say hello!

I've just been looking through the proofs of our annual nature reserves review and it's a lovely document which will be available at the Bird Fair in August, and on our website around the same time.

Over the next few weeks I'll summarise some of the stories that are in that report but it got me thinking about the RSPB's 200+ nature reserves.  They are such diverse sites, from Ramna Stacks to Marazion and from Belfast Harbour to Minsmere.  I like all of them of course, although I reckon I've only visited about 120 so far, but I do have some favourites.

As a school boy I volunteered at Arne, in the summer of 1975 - in fact the warden at the time, Brian Pickess, handed me the envelope with my A-Level results!  I spent time counting cars driving past (I forget why!), doing bird counts and clearing litter.  At least that's what I remember.  But I also remember seeing Dartford warblers, Sika deer, sand lizards, adders, smooth snakes and getting to love the heathland habitat that supports them all.

A few months later, I was volunteering again, this time at Minsmere, in my gap year before university.  Minsmere in February and March 1976 was a much smaller and less busy nature reserve than the present set-up with its visitor centre and cafe. Then there was a small green hut (was it green - again that's how I remember it?) perched above the sand martin colony where visitors had their permits checked and validated.

Minsmere is still a marvellous place with a variety of habitats that mean that its wildlife is amazingly diverse. On a visit this year I saw a barn owl hunting, heard bitterns booming and began to learn the difference between the cries of black-headed and Mediterranean gulls nesting on the Scrape. 

My first job with the RSPB was working in the Flow Country in Caithness and Sutherland - where we now have our largest nature reserve at Forsinard.  Although there is, like at Arne, plenty of heather the wildlife is quite different of course.  The Flow Country has dunlins and greenshanks, common scoters and black-throated divers, merlins and golden eagles, Arctic skuas and common gulls nesting across its wide open watery heaths,  And you'll hardly see a person all day however far you walk.  It's a bit like a small piece of Scandinavia hidden away at the top of the UK mainland. 

The Dinas is another favourite of mine - a Welsh oakwood which, again, I used to visit as a child.  Here in the spring the characteristic birds of western oak woods return - the pied flycatcher, tree pipit, restart and wood warbler.  It's a lovely wallk around the conical hill of the Dinas by the River Tywi and it was here, last spring, that I took my friend the journalist Mike McCarthy of the Independent newspaper to introduce him to the wood warbler and the places it lives as he was writing his excellent book 'say Goodbye to the Cuckoo'.  Mike's book captures the beauty of the place far better than I could.

The danger is that I could keep writing for another few thousand words about RSPB nature reserves and what they mean to me.  I suppose that there is a mixture of head and heart involved here.  Each site represents a continuing financial and emotional commitment by the RSPB - owning and managing land isn't cheap - and so we have to manage them carefully to try to deliver their full wildlife potential.  A lot of effort goes into management planning and delivery.  But they are also, all of them (?), just wonderful places, each with its own character and personality.

Tell me which is your favourite RSPB nature reserve, and why.

A while ago I coyly disclosed that there has been a pair of eagle owls nesting at one of our nature reserves this year.  We think that they have reared two young successfully.

I remember the first eagle owls I saw, and I haven't seen many since, in the mountains of Les Alpilles, near Les Baux, north of Arles while I was working in the south of France.  They are really impressive, powerful and magnificent birds with an attention-demanding hooting call.  Size is not everything when it comes to birds, but this is an uber-owl! So, if they are so amazing, you might ask 'Why the coyness?'.

The tricky thing about these birds is that they only have a tenuous claim to be native species in the UK.  There is a fossil record of UK eagle owls but they may well have died out about 9000 years ago.  That's quite a long time ago - about 4000 years before Stonehenge was built. 

All the records since that time probably refer to escaped captive birds - many of them of Indian rather than European origin.  The nearest eagle owls to the UK are a few pairs in Belgium and the Netherlands but the species has spread westwards through Europe in recent years so they are heading in our direction.  However, eagle owls don't often fly over stretches of water (maybe a bit like tawny owls don't nip over to Ireland - there are no tawny owls there) and I am grateful to a German colleague at the RSPB for giving me the following interesting snippet which backs up how reluctant this species is to cross the sea.  The island of Heligoland is 30-40 miles off the German coast and has been the site of a bird observatory for well over a century.  It must be one of the best-watched sites for birds in Europe.  Despite all the rare, inconspicuous, skulking and difficult-to-identify birds which have been recorded on Heligoland there has never been a record of this stonking great owl.  That is pretty strong evidence that eagle owls aren't whizzing around making cross-sea journeys and so it seems to me very unlikely that eagle owls have arrived unaided and unassisted in the UK for thousands of years.

And I am amazed that there are thousands (yes, thousands!) of eagle owls in captivity in the UK, of which probably c65 a year escape and c40 a year remain at liberty!  So it's easy to believe that 'our' eagle owls are escapes from captivity and difficult to believe that they or any other eagle owls have got here naturally.  So does that make them a native species?  I don't think so.

Introduced species often cause conservation problems - and eagle owls are powerful predators.  Would we want them eating their way through our fauna? But if they used to be here thousands of years ago, and live in similar places elsewhere in Europe, should we be concerned about their impacts or not?  These are tricky questions and we know that government officials and agencies are wrestling with them now in order to set policy so that they can tell or advise land owners like the RSPB what to do.  Some landowners may love eagle owls, I'm sure some others will hate them.  It's impossible for the RSPB to dislike such a magnificent beast, but we do recognise that allowing a 'new' top predator to become established by accident may (but it's difficult to tell) have consequences for our truly native fauna.

What do you think that government policy should be on cases such as the eagle owl?  I have to say, personally, I'm torn between loving the bird and fearing its impacts - what do you think?

The second Ashes test came to a glorious conclusion, unhampered by rain, but the oilseed rape harvest at Hope Farm has started and stopped.

Here's an idea - although I have to admit it probably wouldn't work with me - or Jeremy Clarkson! 

To encourage people to buy fuel-efficient cars why not make those that are most environmentally-unfriendly only available in ghastly colours?  How many gas-guzzlers would there be on the roads if that cool, black 4x4 were pink with purple spots? 

I guess it wouldn't put off Jeremy Clarkson - who claims that he is an RSPB member by the way! 

Great news!  Two pairs of cranes at our Lakenheath Fen nature reserve have well-grown young.  One of these is capable of quite decent flight and the other is almost there - fingers crossed! 

And this is at a site which was a carrot field only about 14 years ago!  That's some turn-around.

There's been a small population of cranes in the Norfolk Broads for many years but the birds are now slowly making a break for other wetland sites and it's great to have them at Lakenheath which is already one of the most wonderfully satisfying wetlands to visit - cranes, bitterns, marsh harriers and bearded tits as well as a small number of pairs of the very rare and elusive golden oriole.  And those are just some of the birds - there are plenty of others and plenty of other wetland wildlife too.

Cranes aren't incredibly rare or threatened in a European context - after years of decline, most European populations are increasing.  But there aren't very many of them nesting in western Europe and there ought to be!  Cranes were once common in the UK - the number of place names such as Cranfield, Cranbrook etc demonstrate that - but they were wiped out centuries ago by habitat loss and hunting.   Now we are able to put back the habitat and conditions that cranes like, in places such as the Norfolk Broads, Lakenheath, Otmoor, the Somerset Levels and Moors and further afield on Anglesey, Mersehead, Loch of Strathbeg and the Flow Country, then let's hope that cranes find all these sites.

The cranes haven't been very quick at expanding their ranges to date so we are planning to give them a hand too.  I've just received a begging letter from the RSPB (as a Life Member my name is in the system so I sometimes get letters from myself!) asking for support for our crane appeal so that we can reintroduce cranes into a secret location on the Somerset Levels and Moors.

I was able to visit the site where the release will take place a few weeks ago.  Having grown up in Bristol and north Somerset I know the Levels well, and love them to bits.  On a beautiful summer evening I walked across a wetland seeing snipe, hearing a distant curlew, and soaking up the beauty of this special landscape.  I was with Damon Bridge who is our Project Manager for the Great Crane project.  We talked about the challenges ahead in the reintroduction project but also about how wonderful it would be to see cranes dancing in courtship display, see them flapping slowly across this unique landscape and hear their bugling calls ringing out over the Somerset wetlands. 

The Levels are a bit like The Fens (but to my biased eye, much, much nicer!) - flat wetlands divided into fields by ditches rather than fences or hedges, much of the area is at or below sea level, and the human population lives in some fear of flooding that could damage farming, property and lives.  There are differences too - the Levels are divided by rows of hills - The Mendips to the north and The Poldens further south. And then there is the emblematic Glastonbury Tor sticking up from the flat landscape.  In this flat wetland King Alfred planned his 9th century defeat of the Danes and there must have been stacks of cranes living in Somerset then.

In my youth, not quite as long ago as King Alfred, we regularly visited the Levels to see the landscape, watch the birds and (don't tell anyone) sometimes to buy peat for the garden!  These are peaty wetlands and our nature reserve at Ham Wall, which now has breeding bitterns, has been created on an old peat works.  Now the RSPB, Natural England and the Somerset Wildlife Trust are recreating wetlands here and wildlife is coming back. 

Cranes might get back to the Levels on their own - but if they do, then it will almost certainly take a very long time.  We can give them a hand, just as we gave red kites and sea eagles a hand, and just as we are giving corncrakes and cirl buntings a hand now.  We're putting the right habitats back and some of the wildlife, the water voles, the dragonflies and many of the plants, will rush back unaided, but the cranes need our help and I feel very happy that we are going to give them a hand. So happy, that when I finish writing this, I will donate £50 to our Great Crane Project Appeal myself.

The Great Crane Project is a joint project with the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust and Pensthorpe Conservation Trust.  We've already secured a grant of £700k from Viridor Credits Environment Company and that covers about half the total cost of the 6+-year programme.  I hope you'll feel able to support this work too - and if you do then thank you very much, we'll spend it well.  Now, where are my credit cards?

As a participant in the Breeding Bird Survey I received a copy of the analysed data for 2008 in the post this week.  It makes fascinating reading - as always.  I'll pick out a few of the highlights, but first some history.

The UK, but particularly England, has been well off for information on trends in breeding bird numbers for decades.  The BTO's Common Birds Census was set up in the early 1960s after a couple of hard winters and worries over the impacts of agriculture on birds, and did a fantastic job in compiling information on common birds.  The data were collected by volunteers who visited a self-chosen site early in the morning on several days through the spring and summer.  All bird were mapped and then experts at the BTO would pore over the maps and assess the number of territories of all species. Then you stitch all the results together across the country and you have a picture of trends in numbers.

The CBC was set up in the early 1960s after a couple of hard winters knocked bird populations down, and in response to concerns about the impacts of agriculture.  The data were collected by volunteers who visited self-selected sites on about half a dozen early mornings through spring and summer.  Then BTO experts pored over the maps and assessed the number of territories for that site and year.  And then all the data were stitched together to come up with a picture for the country as a whole.

The CBC was a great scheme when it was set up, a world leader, but after three decades it was showing its age.  Its main drawbacks were that it was very time-demanding on volunteers and staff alike, most sites were in south-east England, the habitat coverage was restricted to woods and farmland, and there were worries about how representative the sites were of the countryside as a whole.  That sounds like a long list of problems but each was a niggle rather than a deal-breaker and so it took a lot of thought before the decision was made to start a new scheme - the Breeding Bird Survey.

The RSPB never had any formal involvement in the CBC but we played an important part in the birth of the BBS. As major users of the data we felt that the time had come to revamp the recording scheme and invested our time and money in the development of the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey.  The RSPB remains a major funder of the scheme which now is based on two volunteer visits to over 3,200 randomly chosen 1km squares across the whole of the UK.  Although breaking with the past was hard, after planning it carefully, we've never looked back.

In the current report I find pages 8 and 9 fascinating - and they give information about the scheme rather than about the birds!  There was a dip in the otherwise strong growth in coverage in 2008 (probably because of the start of the BTO/SOC/BWI Atlas fieldwork) but the geographic spread of sites covered is incredibly impressive and now means that regional results can be compiled in a way that would not have been possible with the CBC. 

My eye always tends to look to the trends of farmland birds - for 2007-2008 I was surprised to see a mixed picture of mostly small increases and decreases. I would have expected that the first year without set-aside would have seen a drop in overall numbers but perhaps the substantial drop in 2007 meant that a further immediate fall was unlikely. 

The big movers, up or down, in the BBS stakes since its inception in 1995 are Canada and greylag geese (both doubled in numbers), red kite (quadrupled!), ring-necked parakeet (7-fold increase!), great-spotted woodpecker (doubled), stonechat (trebled) and yellow wagtail (almost halved), wood warbler, willow tit and turtle dove (all more than halved). 

There is a story behind each of these big changes, and I may come back to some in future, but the one that caught my eye was stonechat - largely because I don't live in a part of the country that has breeding stonechats and so have little personal experience of the trends over time.  The stonechat is increasing in numbers in Scotland, Wales and England.  Is this another species benefitting from climate change?  Certainly stonechats are much commoner in farmland in France and Spain than they are in this country.  But to have more stonechats on our coastal heathlands and along the moorland edge is a great prospect.  These chirpy little birds, with their sharp 'chack!' calls, are delightful.  Let's not forget that some species are doing OK whilst we fight to get a better deal for those which aren't.

If you'd like to participate in the BBS then please do contact the BTO - your efforts will be greatly appreciated by the RSPB and BTO and will be used by us and the governments of the UK to form part of the picture of the state of the UK's birds.  And many thanks to Kate Risely who is the BBS National Organiser!

It's been a busy week for the relatively new Department for Energy and Climate Change, and its Secretary of State Ed Miliband, with the production of a Renewable Energy Strategy and a Low Carbon Transition Plan. 

We ought to see DECC as a kind of HM Treasury for carbon - setting budgets for other government departments, the country as a whole and having enough clout to make them stick.  This week's announcements already demonstrate that massive progress has been made in planning for the UK to play a laudable and leading role in reducing the magnitude of climate change.  The challenge now is to make these plans stick - that's always the challenge, and all the more so in this case because there are plenty of unknowns and difficult choices ahead.  So it's certainly not all in the bag - the road ahead is tough!  But let's just pause and celebrate the fact that between them the two Miliband brothers have been instrumental in bringing forward a Climate Change Act, setting up the Climate Committee and putting the UK on a path to dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas pollution that really does put the UK in a good position to go to international talks in Copenhagen in December and speak with authority about what needs to be done globally because we have started to do our bit. 

Now there are a whole load of faults in these two strategies; too much reliance on biofuels, too little emphasis on energy efficiency and energy saving, not enough action on aviation emissions, wishful thinking as to the speed and size of contribution of new technologies and generally an over-reliance on future technological fixes rather than good old thrift and cutting down but these documents do form a cogent plan and we welcome them both.

And that welcome includes the plans for a leap forward in renewable energy production from wind, wave and tidal power.  In fact, not just us but with our friends in the National Trust and CPRE we issued a joint statement welcoming government commitments to generate 15 per cent of the country’s energy from wind, wave, sustainably sourced biomass and solar power by 2020, while protecting the natural and historical environment.  That doesn't mean for our part that we will fail to oppose windfarm applications in places which are wildlife hotspots, and we remain very proud of our successful campaign to stop the building of a massive windfarm on the Isle of Lewis, but we do think that as part of a cogent plan we need more renewable energy from those places where it will do no or little damage to landscapes and wildlife.  I can see 10 wind turbines from my bedroom window in Northamptonshire, they are turning as I write this, and they haven't blighted the landscape and they haven't wiped out the local wildlife.  I was rather surpised to hear Simon Jenkins on Radio 4's Any Questions this evening seeming to say that he thought we should oppose every proposal to build wind turbines - he is Chair of the National Trust and their position on the need for renewable energy to come from the right places is very similar to our own.