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Today's Times regards today's launch of the Campaign for the Farmed Environment as a last chance for English farmers to adopt green measures - wow!  That sounds a bit harsh really - given the good work by so many farmers already!

But Peter Kendall, the NFU President, is quoted as saying '“Many farmers do a lot of valuable work at their own expense. But we know, too, of the cynical minority who have never been involved in agri-environment schemes and it is our task to get them involved.” . 

Those are tough words to come from an NFU President and demonstrates the seriousness with which the NFU and CLA are taking the task.  Good for them! 

And the RSPB is keen to work with farmers who want to do even more for wildlife on their land - or who want to take their first steps in that direction.

Back in the spring and summer we were lobbying for set-aside to be replaced with a mandatory set of actions for farmers to implement to benefit wildlife.  That didn't happen, instead Defra went for a voluntary option for farmers.

The NFU's and CLA's Campaign for the Farmed Environment, their response to that challenge from Defra, will be launched at the farm of NFU President Peter Kendall later today.

We wish the CFE every success - in fact we have been working hard with lots of others to make it a success.

A key target will be the doubling of the area of in-field options implemented under agri-environment measures.  This includes options such as beetle banks, skylark patches and nectar-rich field margins.  If implemented then such measures will do a great deal of good for farmland wildlife.  We know skylark patches work very well on our own Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire.

But these possibilities have been open to farmers all along, so the question is - how will the CFE encourage more and more farmers to join in?  Well, Peter Kendall will have to be using his persuasive talents to the full (it's a good job he is very persuasive), travelling to NFU groups around the country no doubt, to sell the messages to his membership.  He will be backed up with advice from many other organisations and regional coordinators that have cost the taxpayer £1.5m (there - you didn't know that the voluntary approach meant that you had volunteered the money did you?).  In fact, as a taxpayer and consumer you have many stakes in this - I hope you want wildlife to flourish in the farmed environment, you are paying farmers their Single Farm Payments, you are funding agri-environment schemes, you have now funded regional coordinators and you go out and buy British food (I hope).

But Peter must be a bit worried about whether he can pull this off.  It was he and the CLA President, Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, who persuaded Defra down the voluntary route - now the ball is in their court.  If they don't manage to enthuse farmers and land owners then they know that government might impose stricter and more onerous measures which would apply to all farmers. 

But let's look to the bright side - the farming industry have been given a chance to shine.  A chance to deliver the goods without being forced.  Many farmers are doing their bit already - will they be able to transmit their enthusiasm to those farmers who have stood outside the agri-environment schemes or who, so far, have implemented the schemes in a minimalist way?  Let's hope so, because our countryside wildlife is a precious and threatened resource.

I found these two extracts of a speech by President Kennedy on 10 June 1963:

Our problems are manmade; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.

and

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.

JFK was talking about  about peace but his words seem to apply perfectly to the problem of climate change.  How big can world leaders be in Copenhagen in December?  Will Man's reason be applied to the problem?  We all breathe the same air and we are all mortal.

I'm told that the Government Chief Scientist, Prof John Bedddington, was interviewed on BBC TV last night and on the shelf behind him was a copy of State of the UK's Birds - a joint publication by RSPB, BTO, WWT, CCW, NE, NIEA, SNH and JNCC (alphabet soup!).

You can read it here without being Government Chief Scientist

The autumn colours this year are lovely - last weekend's winds put a lot of leaves on the ground but there are still many leaves on the trees near where I live and I'm looking forward to more weeks of greens, golds, reds and browns.

Before next autumn's colours delight us, a general election will have taken place and we will certainly see cuts in government spending and perhaps a reorganisation of government departments and agencies.

So what about the Forestry Commission if we are thinking autumn colours?  Set up in 1919 to ensure a strategic reserve of pit props for the mining industry the Forestry Commission is now a non-Ministerial government department whose aims are to protect, expand and promote the sustainable management of woodland and increase its value to society and the environment. 

My experience of FC staff is that they are a very enthusiastic bunch, and good on delivering on the ground, but their enthusiasm is sometimes greater for expanding and promoting the management of woodland than for delivering the wider public benefits which could come from the land under FC's management.  There are many, many exceptions to that generalisation but, if anything, the wider vision of what Forestry Commission England can deliver has narrowed in recent years. 

I found this description of what the Dutch Forest Service, Staats bos beheer, does very interesting.  At least in words, this seems a more rounded and progressive definition for what a state forest service should do.  There are real questions about whether the state has a part to play in growing commercial timber crops - since we don't have a state fishing fleet, or state farms, and we no longer need that strategic reserve of timber for the mines, isn't growing trees just a business like growing wheat, oil seed rape or potatoes?

The Dutch model seems pretty relevant to the English situation.  Both are crowded countries with high population densities and have suffered great losses of biodiversity-rich habitats in recent  decades.  Staats bos beheer manages 250,000ha with c1000 staff and Forestry Commission England manages about 260,000ha with about 800 staff.

FCE already has a large area (c60,000ha) of non-forest land under its management (including a large heathland estate - but FCE has been a bit slow in contributing fully to the government heathland recreation targets) and is converting another large area (c50,000ha) back to restore native woodland on ancient woodland sites where conifers were planted in the past.  So we are already getting on for about half of the land area being committed to wider wildlife, landscape and other public goods rather than hard-nosed traditional forestry.  This is good - that's probably what a state forest service should do although the Dutch model is far clearer about the direction of travel and, I guess, the direction leads to a much closer fit between what the Forestry Commission does and what Natural England does. 

Whatever comes out of the next twelve months before we see the autumn colours again, we should seek to ensure that the really special areas of land currently managed by FCE remain protected for their wildlife and landscape value.  A time of financial cuts and government reorganisation is always a dangerous time for the natural world (which is why we'd like you to sign the RSPB's Letter to the Future please!) but a secure future for the wildlife that has been protected by  the Forestry Commission for so many years needs to be part of that future.

I hear on the radio this morning that you and I are giving the Royal Bank of Scotland another £25bn - that's £25,000,000,000. 

Or £400 each.  Or the average wage of about a million people.

A couple of years ago we didn't use to talk about billions except in terms of astronomical distances or the age of the universe - real physical things that were still mind blowing.  Now, hardly a day goes past without hearing that billions are going into this or that.

On the same radio programme I heard my old university chum, Simon Stuart, talking about the IUCN Red List - and how many species are heading for extinction on this badly-managed but still beautiful planet.  You really wouldn't want to be an amphibian - they are having a really tough time.  And about one in eight of the world's bird species is threatened with extinction.

Coming back to those £25bn of ours.  I do hope that the money will be well spent.  I hope it is providing funding for projects that make the world a better place and not ones which increase greenhouse gas emissions or habitat destruction.  If you want the same, then please sign the RSPB's Letter to the Future and strengthen our call to politicians to protect and restore the nature on this planet.

Many people talk about the hen harrier problem - but we are often talking at cross-purposes. 

As far as we can tell, in England, there were only six successful hen harrier nests in 2009 - so we regard the hen harrier problem as being the lack of these birds.  To hear some people talk, hen harriers are everywhere, overrunning the countryside and gobbling their way through red grouse and wildlife like nobody's business.  Those half a dozen English pairs must get around rather a lot!

This summer one of those six pairs nested in a cereal field in southern England - not in the more usual moorland location.  The RSPB was involved with Natural England in protecting this nest - we worked with the farmer concerned and the police.  Just in case the birds return next spring I won't say any more about this pair except to celebrate its existence and to thank all who played a part in its protection.

John Swift, Chief Executive of the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, said: “A bad winter has left the hen harrier population even more vulnerable than before – this means that everybody must concentrate on doing what they can to ensure that the moorland habitat continues to be well managed and that persecution is confined to history.".  Well said John - we await others to speak out in the same vein.

And, one more time, as we edge our way ever closer to the 200,000 signatures on our bird of prey pledge - please sign it!

We have solar panels on our roof that heat our water. 

Now they never seemed a great financial investment but they do reduce our gas and electricity use significantly. Maybe such panels should be made much more of a standard fitting on new houses.  Sometimes we have so much hot water we can't use it all - I'd love to be able to sell our hot water to our neighbours in some way - it seems silly that we have abundant hot water and they may be using fossil fuels to heat the water for their bath or shower in the house next door!  It's not difficult to imagine ways of building new housing where such green technology is shared in some way.  Surely the future will have more of such green technology?

So it's a shame that the firm that installed our solar panels has ceased trading - it seems that it's difficult to make money in the UK out of the green future.

A report in the Independent on Sunday claims that wildlife crime has doubled in the last year.  This includes poisoning of birds of prey as well as badger baiting, poaching, hare coursing and egg thefts.

We regard ourselves as a nation of animal lovers, and tend to criticise Mediterranean countries for illegal bird-liming and killing protected migratory species - but these figures suggest that UK incidents are now occurring at 120 each week.  How wildlife-friendly are we Brits?

And these figures must be, surely, the tip of an iceburg.  After all, when an eagle is poisoned its family don't get on the phone to report it  - there is no missing eagle search. 

And when a shot rings out on a grouse moor early one morning, and a hen harrier falls to the ground, the body is likely to be picked up and buried or destroyed so that the evidence is not available.

Apparently Northumbria has the highest rate of wildlife crime - we must take that with a pinch of salt since wildlife crime is so difficult to detect and is, understandably, not the absolutely highest priority for most police forces. 

Birds of prey, particularly golden eagles and hen harriers, are ruthlessly persecuted in far too much of the countryside.  Our bird of prey pledge is heading towards its target of 200,000 signatures - please sign it to show you are a nature-lover who wishes the law to be respected.

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.