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The subject of grey squirrels has come up a few times on this blog.  Yesterday I met a couple of representatives of the Red Squirrel Survival Trust.  We had a very good discussion.

To tell you the truth, I was a bit nervous about it, as I was a little worried that we might be asked to get out our guns and start blasting away at grey squirrels all over the UK.  And that fear was based on previous discussions on this subject with others.  But yesterday's talk was very sensible - and actually quite exciting.

There is no doubt that the decline of the red squirrel is caused by the non-native grey squirrel.  A combination of competition for resources and the spreading of a disease that kills off the reds cause the reds to disappear. 

And the decline of the red squirrel has been every bit as dramatic as the decline of the corncrake - both have been lost from huge areas of the country where they were common at the beginning of the last century.  Now because the corncrake's decline has been pretty much entirely caused by land use changes our successful programme to reverse the decline has focussed on working with land owners and managers to provide the right habitat.  For red squirrels there is plenty of suitable habitat but it is currently occupied by disease-carrying grey squirrels.  So any red squirrel conservation programme has to deal with the greys - and since they cannot be chatted up and persuaded to move that means either moving them or killing them (to put it bluntly!)(although the possibility of feeding them sterilising drugs is always raised as a distant possibility).

Now my problem with previous discussions about this subject has been that the enthusiasm for killing grey squirrels has seemed to me to overwhelm any thoughts about whether that killing would actually do any good for the red squirrel.  We had a very different and thoughtful discussion yesterday. 

I learned about the success of conservation action on Anglesey where a few red squirrels survived but greys were taking over, before a combination of a cull of greys and topping up of the red population seems to have been very successful.

A successful conservation programme for red squirrels needs to protect the habitat of red squirrels where they still thrive (places like our own nature reserve at Abernethy which is a great place to see red squirrels), stopping the spread of grey squirrels and the transmission of squirrel pox disease (this has to be targetted at the Scottish/English border and we are cooperating with this work on our nature reserves in the north of England and south Scotland) and the setting up of new populations in former parts of the range (maybe there are some RSPB nature reserves which could play a part here).  This programme is not easy, nor will success be achieved quickly - but there is a rational basis for effective action here.  And that's what excited me about the discussion.  I suppose that through not knowing enough about the details I had almost written off any prospects of success with reversing the decline of red squirrels - but yesterday's discussion brought me up to speed and convinced me that progress was possible (even though not assured!).

I was also glad that the impacts of grey squirrels on woodland birds were not overstressed.  Certainly greys eat birds' eggs and nestlings - but then so do reds!  And the evidence that greys have been important in the declines of any of our declining woodland species is meagre (despite people, including us, having looked quite hard).  Many of the declining woodland birds are declining right across Europe - and there aren't grey squirrels anywhere else in Europe apart from northen Italy. 

So I was excited by the discussion we had with the Red Squirrel Survival Trust and we look forward to working with them and all other rational red squirrel conservationists.  So enthusiastic was I that I talked to some colleagues about it over lunch and am grateful to one of them for pointing out this interesting report, that pine martens may help stop the spread of grey squirrels.  Of course, pine martens were once very common across much of the UK and it is possible that their persecution and removal created the conditions under which greys found it much easier to spread.  Interesting!

This jet changes everything is the modest claim of an advert in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review.

One of the things that I do to try to stimulate my brain (OK - maybe unsuccessfully!) is, every now and then, to buy a random magazine off a rack, one that I don't necessarily expect to interest me, and see what it contains.  It's not a sure-fire winner, but it is how I came to be a subscriber to HBR because I discovered a lot of interesting articles.

But this month an advert caught my eye.  Apparently the Embraer Phenom 300 changes everything because it only costs $3,519 per hour, cruises at 518mph and carries seven passengers.  Well, I'm pretty sure that this won't change my life.  But my first hope when I read the headline was that this was the greenest plane yet invented - that it uses less fuel and flies much more efficiently.  Maybe it does - but that isn't how it is being sold.

There's a long way to go before we are truly in the mindset that will minimise our damage to life on Earth.

Andorra, the Vatican City and the USA are the only nations on Earth not to be full parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity now that Iraq and Somalia have ratified.

What can one say?

What do Andorra, the Vatican City and the USA have in common?

Answers tomorrow.

I spent some of yesterday evening sitting under a dinosaur's tail.

Yes, you've guessed, I was in the Natural History Museum and listening to Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for Defra, give the annual Darwin lecture.

The evening was a celebration of Darwin (whose bicentenary it is this year (and whose On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago)), a celebration of the Darwin Initiative (which funds expertise-transfer on biodiversity from the UK to other countries) and a celebration of biodiversity itself.

Mr Benn spoke very well.  He didn't say anything (bar one thing, see below) that I haven't heard him say before but don't get me wrong, I don't tire of hearing him speak about the natural environment because he speaks with passion, knowledge and conviction.  

I was sitting next to a lady from a large financial company and rather mischievously asked her whether she'd be voting Labour after hearing Mr Benn speak.  She smiled, rolled her eyes, and said no but then surprised me by saying that she would think about it if Mr Benn were standing for Prime Minister because she thought that he was an admirable politician.

One of Mr Benn's best phrases, which I first heard him use in a speech in Cambridge a while ago:

“The truth is that the great challenges before us – our changing climate, the security of our food supplies, human development and biodiversity loss, are bound up together.  They are as separate only as the fingers of a single human hand are separate.  It is how they work together that makes them so special.

That phrase is almost a definition of sustainable development.  It is joined up thinking.  Will it lead to joined up action?

Mr Benn announced, so this was the completely new bit, that the group which will look at ecological networks and what extra is needed to join existing sites of high nature value together, will be chaired by Prof Sir John Lawton FRS.  Sir John is one of the UK's leading environmental scientists (and an ex-chair of RSPB Council - and a keen and knowledgeable birder to boot!) and we'll be bending his ear on this subject if he'll let us!

I'm in the northeast this weekend visiting my daughter at Durham and so we went out for a drive today.  Would it be the highly educational attendance at a major twitch to try to see the eastern crowned warbler at South Shields or a visit to the relatively new RSPB nature reserve at Saltholme?  Although I felt slightly drawn to the first British record of an oriental warbler there really wasn't any difficulty about the choice.  Saltholme it was.

We'd last been there in February on another parental visit (!) and there were lots of signs of progress since then - more paths were open, the children's play area was open (and being used) and the place had more of a lived in atmosphere! 

We're talking Teesside - an industrial landscape near Stockton.  We'd driven through Hartlepool (seeing a purple sandpiper by the statue of Andy Capp) and then past the controversial Able UK site with the 'ghost' ships.  And then the landscape is flat wetlands with lots of metal work on the horizon.  First, there is the famous transporter bridge across the Tees which formed the backdrop to so many scenes in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, and then there are wind turbines, power lines and an amazing collection of chemical works.  It feels like one has been put down in a chemistry set - strange pipes, tubes, flasks and towers are dotted around.  Smoke, of a variety of colours and smells, emerges from them.  Occasionally flames dramatically shoot skywards.  Even in the flat grass fields pipes emerge from the earth with stopcocks and valves on them.  It feels like an enormous single factory clothed inadequately in wet fields.  But the wildlife doesn't seem to mind at all.

We watched a fox hunting for voles in a field around midday.  It looked very much at home amid the chemistry set - and seemed to be catching quite a few small rodents in the grass. 

Later a stoat scurried across the path with another rodent in its mouth.  My godfather told me how to tell stoats from weasels - weasels are weaselly identified because stoats are stoatally different (I've remembered that for over 45 years)!

There were lots of ducks at Saltholme - flocks of wigeon and teal, quite a few shoveler, gadwall, tufted duck and pochard, and a few pintail - although I didn't see a mallard they must have been around too.  Big flocks of golden plover were roosting and occasionally taking to the air making it difficult to know how much time to spend watching them wheel in the sunshine and how much time to spend looking for the peregrine that might have scared them.  But they just seemed to be spooky - I saw no danger to them.

A Slavonian grebe was buffetted by the waves and fed mostly in a small creek in sheltered water.

Common seals looked like enormous, grey, beached bananas on the muddy shore.

A rare blue-winged teal from the other side of the Atlantic was just down the road so I joined the group of birders taking a look.  I overheard one of the party say he'd driven for five hours to try to see the eastern crowned warbler and failed - but that it was better than sitting at home smoking too much and worrying about missing it!

Some will remember this day for the blue-winged teal and the missed eastern crowned warbler.  But I'll remember the fox as well.  And I'll also remember that the sun shone some of the time and that there were a lot of happy people enjoying nature whether it be really close views of beautiful ducks such as gadwall or distant ones of blue-winged teal.  And that all this nature was framed in what would normally seem to be an unpromising industrial landscape of an enormous chemistry set.

Now why should I send you to another blog?  Seems like a way to lose readers doesn't it?  But in the hope that you might come back, and in the spirit of saying 'well done!' to a fellow blogger, do have a look at James Marchington's blog.

James comes from the shooting community, and you'll see that he occasionally takes a pot-shot at me (here, and here and here) but his blog of 31 July, which I've only just seen, was right on target.  Well done James for being clear that shooting folk need to make sure that their pastime is beyond reproach.

And, please do help us reach the 200,000 signature mark on our bird of prey pledge.  And that includes you, please, James!

I've been reading the Thames Estuary Airport Feasibility Review on proposals for an airport in the Thames Estuary - the so-called Boris-island airport.  Actually there are a range of proposals that are milling around - some on artificial islands and some on the existing north Kent coast. 

This is an interesting analysis of the document, but my own reading of it is that it is pretty thin stuff!  The author, Doug Oakervee, states clearly and honestly that some of the report is based on anecdotal evidence and limited research - and that the more expert reader might find parts of the report superficial.  I think he's right - but I'm no expert.  Even so he concludes that 'we are not yet in a position to decide when or how or exactly where it [an airport in the Thames Estuary] should be built.'.  If you add 'whether' to how, when and where then you've probably got the right answer!

The environment and climate change are mentioned a few times, as is the RSPB itself, but the assumption behind this report is that we are going to be flying an awful lot more in 2030 than now.  Are we?  In reducing our overall greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 how does that fit in?  No, seriously - how do more airports and more flying fit in with reducing our impact on the climate?

And the wildlife impacts of such a proposal are hardly touched upon - there isn't even a map of the areas designated for their nature conservation value in the report (although such maps aren't hard to find - here are some: SPAs, inshore SACs). 

On the other hand, the impact of wildlife on airplanes is mentioned as a bit of an issue!  Birdstrike in an area noted for its high bird populations will be an issue.  So once again it's 'let's worry about what damage wildlife might do to us (if we build an airport in a daft place) rather than worry about what damage we might do to wildlife.'.

I see Boris Johnson has appointed Professor Sir David King to chair a panel looking further at this whole idea.  Interesting!  Sir David pushed climate change firmly up the political agenda when he said that it was a greater threat to the world than terrorism.

One of the EU nature designations that covers parts of the Thames Estuary comes from the Habitats Directive - Boris's Dad, Stanley, was one of the authors and architects of this Directive.  Stanley - have a word with Boris please!

I spent yesterday at a workshop for staff on our Letter to the Future campaign - it was fun! 

Numbers of signatures are building well - although there is a long way to go to overtake the bird of prey pledge which is now over 190,000!

One comment we have had on Letter to the Future is that it is a bit like motherhood and apple pie.  Well yes it is - but if we don't stand up and speak out about the important things in life then we may lose them!  If hundreds of thousands of people support our Letter to the Future campaign then we may be able to persuade politicians to be nice to wildlife in their spending and cutting plans! 

I am thinking of launching the Apple Pie campaign - I bet if we got hundreds of thousands of signtures on that there would be more apple pie in our lives too!   

Last Wednesday I went to a Parliamentary reception where Plantlife launched an excellent document – the Ghost Orchid declaration – calling for greater investment in plant conservation.

It was a good evening with lots of MPs and peers – with a preponderance of Tories.  It was almost as though only Conservatives like flowers – that can’t be true, can it? 

We got a bit of (mostly) gentle ribbing about how much money goes into bird conservation compared with how much goes into plants, especially fungi.  The contrast is quite stark on the face of it.  However, if you see the most recent RSPB reserves review document you will find that 74% of British vascular plant species are found on RSPB nature, not bird, reserves so we are doing our bit. 

I’d love there to be more resources put into nature conservation as a whole – and I’d like to go bird-watching on a whole string of Plantlife nature reserves in the future.

I am a member of Plantlife and think they are a really good conservation organisation.  We work closely with them on a range of issues and hope to work even closer in the future.  We find that the way they think almost always fits with our analysis of an issue and so that makes it easy to collaborate.  So, providing your RSPB membership is fully up to date why not think of  supporting Plantlife too?

As I was heading towards the event last week I was walking through St James’s Park when two greylag geese flew over me and, what can I say? left something behind.  I had to rush back to get a clean shirt after being bombed by those birds.  I really think that nicely behaved plants need our support!

Last Thursday I travelled back from almost three weeks at political party conferences and was desperate for fresh air and the chance to see some wildlife.  But I also wanted to listen to David Cameron's speech so I parked in the countryside near my home to listen to the radio.  As I listened, two red kites were wheeling around in the sky above the car.

They were magnificent, with gorgeous red tails and brightly patterned wings, and showed mastery of the air as they dived and soared together.  This sight is now fairly common where I live in Northamptonshire because red kites were reintroduced by the RSPB and others several years ago - and because levels of illegal persecution of wildlife have fallen in lowland areas. Watching those birds made my day.

As I watched, and listened to the speech by the man who might well be the next Prime Minister, I thought of the fact that in many parts of the UK birds of prey are still illegally and cruelly killed - and that some people are making the case that there are too many of them and that reductions in numbers should be legalised.

We need to ensure that future governments continue to give birds of prey full legal protection, and so we must send a very strong signal to all UK politicians.  Our bird of prey pledge is doing fantastically well - it is already at 189,000 signatures - the RSPB's most successful campaign ever in terms of numbers.  We need to push on to the 200,000 mark to show politicians that we, the public, care about birds of prey and wish to see them prosper in the countryside around us.

Over dinner last week in Manchester a group of us were discussing how well, or badly, agri-environment schemes work.  There was an academic, someone from the political world, and people from industry  (I won't be more specific because it was a private conversation).

Agri-environment schemes are voluntary schemes where farmers sign up to manage part of their farmland in prescribed ways to deliver wildlife - for example they sow nectar-rich plants on the edge of fields to increase the numbers of bees and other insects.

The RSPB is very keen on such schemes, and so are many farmers, but the schemes aren't perfect (alhough here in the UK they are generally better than in most EU countries, and, at least arguably, in England they are better than in other parts of the UK).  We would like to see the schemes tweaked a bit, not hugely, to get them to deliver more for the taxpayer's money.

The issue that we discussed was whether one could pay by results, for outputs, rather than for what the farmer does whether or not it works.  So in the example of nectar-rich margins one might pay per bee rather than for the farmer having the margin!

The idea is attractive in that in most financial transactions you want to pay for a product rather than an intention, but there are a couple of problems wih the idea. 

The first problem is the cost of monitoring.  How do you monitor those bees?  Or, to use a bird example, if you pay by the breeding lapwing how do you count the nests?  And how do you deal with the farmer who says that you should have come yesterday before a fox took the eggs?

A second problem is to do with the fact that if, perhaps initially, there aren't enough lapwings to go round then some farmers are going to strike lucky whereas others are doing all the right things but have been unlucky.  You might say 'tough!' (I wouldn't!), but you can see how it might put off farmers joining the scheme.  There are probably other problems too - but those two are quite significant.

In our discussion a potential solution emerged - and like all solutions it brings its own problems - but the idea hasn't gone from my mind so I thought I'd share it with you.

How about paying a percentage of the current payment to all farmers who are in the scheme and then top-ups depending on the regional change in lapwing numbers?  This solves the monitoring issue because for all regions of the UK we have quite good monitoing data from the BTO/JNCC/RSPB Breeding Bird Survey.  So if the bonus were based on the trends of a basket of farmland birds (which would make a lot of sense) across several counties then monitoring becomes less of an issue - far less of an issue (for birds anyway - still a bit tricky for bees!). 

And 'unlucky' farmers in the scheme would still benefit.

An additional gain would be that it would encourage farmers to use their ingenuity to seek other means to increase farmland bird numbers - for example taking advice from the RSPB, FWAG and others, or reading widely on the subject.  Farmland birds would become a crop whose successful production would benefit the farmer.

One of my companions said that a similar system works for pea production - prices are paid to a whole range of farmers based on overall quality and yields rather than on a farm by farm assessment.

I'm still thinking about it - but the idea does have some attractions.  What do you think?

My September copy of British Birds is still mostly unread (and October popped through the door recently) but an item in Adrian Pitches's excellent regular feature News and Comment drew my attention.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service have established that a fifth of the US population 'count' as birders if you include anyone who has travelled more than a mile from home for the primary purpose of observing birds and/or anyone who closely observes birds at home.  These yanks spent an estimated $36bn on birding goods and services - about $750 each - annually.  This spend generates lots of jobs and lots of taxes for the government and, the argument goes, is a measure of the economic and therefore political clout of we birders.

I wonder how many UK citizens would qualify as birders by the same measure?  A fifth of the population?  Maybe - I wish the RSPB had 12 million members!

But I also wonder whether this economic angle is the right one.  We are so used to seeing 'worth' and 'value' expressed in terms of money.  The more these people flew, the less efficient their cars and the higher the price of telescopes then the greater worth to the US economy.  Is that really a good measure of the relevance of this activity?

You can't measure everything's importance in financial terms -  that's my belief anyway.  The economic value is important, but of greater interest to me is that so many Americans make nature part of their lives.  That's fantastic - and if you add in the hunters and walkers and fishermen too (obviously there will be lots of overlap) then the number will be very high.  If those people ensure that politicians take notice of the natural world in their policies then the world will be a  better place in future. 

But is there much evidence that recent US Presidents have taken a very pro-nature view of the world (yes! and no!)?  Maybe if 48million Americans made their views known to politicians then we would see more sign of environmental sympathy in US international policy.  But you do have the chance to make your love of the natural world clear to UK politicians by signing the RSPB Letter to the Future - and please ask a friend to do so too!

Back in March, the conservation world lost one of its finest standard-bearers with the death of Sir Martin Doughty.  This weekend many of his colleagues and admirers are carrying out a memorial walk and I am sorry I can't be there with them.

But I am thinking of Sir Martin.  I can't say that I knew him very well but he was one of those people I bumped into in meetings and at events on a regular basis and, because he was always friendly and approachable, we would often swap stories, jokes, gossip or political intelligence.

He and I shared a love of raptors and the wild places they often inhabit and of Spain and its state-run hotels the paradores.

Sir Martin helped guide Natural England into existence - and it's now three years old - from the merger of English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural Development Service.

How is the toddler doing?  And would Sir Martin be proud of it?

In the last three years the proportion of English Sites of Special Scientific Interest which are recovering or in favourable condition has increased from 73% to 89%.  That's pretty good - and a shared achievement with Defra (and indeed with landowners such as ourselves!) - and puts the government on track to meet one of its environmental targets next year.

The proportion of farmland covered by environmental schemes has increased from 45% three years ago to 65% now - again a shared achievement with Defra and landowners, but one in which Natural England can take a great deal of pride.  And one which should pay off handsomely for our wildlife.

Natural England has developed its scientific understanding of issues as varied as set-aside and renewable energy - and although Defra hasn't always listened, it has been clear what Natural England was advising, and why, so the public could see that the ultimate government decision had been informed by independent scientifically informed advice.

Perhaps Natural England has spread itself too widely and gets into too many things rather than concentrating on its core areas.  For example, it could be doing much more on habitat restoration and recreation to enable the wildlife of the future to adapt to the climate of the future.

And we'd like Natural England to work more closely with us and to take more notice of our sage advice!  But then we'd say that of most organisations!

And so I am sure that Sir Martin would be proud of the still-developing Natural England.  It has real achievements in the bank already.  As far as the future is concerned, it may need to live up to dictionary definition of its first chair's name: doughty - stouthearted, courageous, brave.

It's a month since I had my last stroll around Stanwick Lakes with a pair of binoculars.  It's great to have the time to go for a walk and see some birds.

Last time, back in mid-September, I saw garden warbler, lesser whitethroat, willow warbler and chiffchaff, but not today.  Today there were snipe, golden plover, water rail, flocks of skylarks moving overhead and my first redwings of the autumn.  Last time felt like an autumn day at the end of summer, whereas today was an autumn day near the start of winter - at least as far as the birds were concerned.

And there were two jays - the first I've seen at Stanwick for years (I know - I've checked on Birdtrack!).

No rare birds, nothing to set the pulse racing - but a lovely walk with time to recharge the mental batteries and a couple of hours to connect with the changing seasons.  I love nature.