There are some parts of my job which give me no pleasure at all.
This is one such issue.
One hundred years ago – three years before the start of the First World War – a law was passed to prevent the poisoning of wildlife, including birds of prey – an early piece of wildlife legislation. With this law in place you may be forgiven for thinking that bird of prey poisoning is an activity which should have been consigned to history. Sadly, that is not the case. Every month our team of investigations officers attend a series of reported incidents involving the deaths of peregrines, red kites, eagles and buzzards. Half a million people enjoy watching these birds every year with the RSPB through our Dates with Nature scheme. But the sickening sight of cold corpses of these birds lying next to a poisoned bait or lying dead in their nest with their dead chicks beside them are images that the public couldn’t stand, and even the most hardened wildlife crime investigators still find these scenes distressing.
Our latest Birdcrime publication reveals 128 reports of illegal poisoning in the UK last year. And, the provisional figures for this year suggest a similar pattern. In 2010, 20 red kites, 30 buzzards, two goshawks, eight peregrines, five golden eagles, one white-tailed eagle and one sparrowhawk were found poisoned in the UK. We believe that the number of recorded incidents is way below the actual number.
The finger of suspicion points at some of those in the gamekeeper profession. But Alasdair Mitchell – representing the National Gamekeepers Organisation – is outraged at the deaths of these birds of prey too and he has given us the organisation’s assurances that there is no hiding place for any member found guilty of persecuting birds of prey. This is welcome news. The NGO rightly does not want a few bad apples to bring the profession into disrepute.
Scotland has successfully introduced legislation preventing anyone possessing pesticides and poisons if they don’t have a legitimate need for them. We believe that these same laws should be adopted in England and Wales too. For example, isn’t it sensible that only arable farmers should be allowed to possess stockpiles of chemicals used to control pests in crops of wheat or barley?
There are so many issues facing the countryside at present that moving towards a brighter future for birds of prey is an aspiration worth fighting for. We won’t solve bird of prey crime overnight, and I’m sure that our team of investigators will still remain busy. But given assurances from those governing gamekeeping and a law change in England and Wales, perhaps we can look forward to a time when birds of prey can fly safely in our skies. Time will tell.
How do you think we can stamp out illegal poisoning of birds of prey?
It would be great to hear your views.
Why doesn’t the RSPB do anything to help the Atitlan grebe, the Mauritius night heron or the Tahiti rail? Why does our international conservation department not launch any projects to save the Choiseul crested pigeon, the Jamaican red macaw or the impossibly named bishop’s o’o’?
The simple reason is that it’s too late for these birds – they have already gone. Conservation can only save what we have left – we can never bring back what we have lost. And if we forget them then we have failed to learn a vital lesson.
So that’s why I’m so excited about a remarkable exhibition taking place this month at the Rochelle School on Arnold Circus in London, a short walk from Liverpool Street station. Ghosts of Gone Birds features artworks based on extinct bird species by some of the UK’s top artists and illustrators including Sir Peter Blake, Ralph Steadman and Jamie Hewlett, the co creator of cartoon band Gorillaz. And it’s not just artists, there are also musicians on board from bands including Elbow, Doves and British Sea Power.
Those birds mentioned above are a few of the more obscure species featured in the exhibition, but some of the well known casualties of habitat loss and persecution include the great auk (represented on a knitted blanket created by the novelist Margaret Atwood), the passenger pigeon and, the most famous extinct bird of them all, the dodo.
We can conduct scientific surveys, write policy reports and lobby politicians but it is only when issues enter into the public consciousness that we can make a real difference. What better way to achieve that aim than through art, music and culture – a language we can all understand.
But also, this is a poignant reminder that when a species is gone, it's gone for ever. If ever there was a motivation to do more to prevent further extinctions, well, this is it.
Listen to Ralph Steadman and the exhibition’s organiser Ceri Levy on Radio 4's Today Programme this week or visit the Facebook page - www.facebook.com/ghostsofgonebirds
Since launching our campaign, Stepping Up for Nature, in March this year, a staggering one millions steps for nature have been taken by RSPB supporters. That's one every 18 seconds.
Our campaign is designed to help meet the international targets to halt the loss of wildlife and begin its recovery by 2020. At our launch we said that it was right that governments should focus on those things that only they could do, while others, such as NGOs and businesses should do more. We said that we would step up and do more for nature and we would work more smartly with others and our supporters so they could do more. And that's exactly what we have done.
In the past six months, folk have fed garden birds, lobbied governments about the planning reforms, marine protected areas and CAP reform, donated money to save rockhopper penguins affected by an oil spill in Tristan da Cunha, recorded information about wildlife through Make Your Nature Count, put up nest boxes or volunteered for the RSPB.
To those of you that have done your bit - nature thanks you!
And as for governments? Well, you can read my earlier blog postings and make your own judgement. But I make this observation. If the big tasks of government are to set a strategic vision for how they plan to meet the target, underpin this ambition with the right laws and policies, provide a framework for delivery on the ground, ensure that we have the right information to inform decisions and secure adequate funding, well I would conclude that performance is patchy and there is room for improvement.
Oh and finally, if you did not read SImon Barnes' piece in Birds magazine on Stepping Up for Nature (why ever not?), here it is again in full. It pretty much sums up everything that we are fighting for. So, why not read it and then, yes take another step for nature...
What has nature ever done for us? By Simon Barnes
The RSPB has asked us all to Step Up for Nature. Ridiculous. I mean, what has nature ever done for us?
Well, there’s beauty, I suppose. Have to admit that most people’s idea of beauty involves things like grass and trees and limpid streams, iridescent plumage, the flash of butterflies, lofty snow-covered mountains, the teeming oceans. All right then, beauty.
And music. We all need music in our lives. We got rhythm from the drumbeat of our mothers’ pulse: but melody came from the birds, and the first musical instruments we made were bird-imitating flutes. Beauty and music, then, OK, but apart from that, what has nature ever done for us?
Well, food. Every morsel that we eat came originally from the wild world, and a lot of it – fish, for example – still does. True, we’ve tamed much of our food resources, but most of the things we grow depend on wild pollinating insects.
The services of pollinators in this country have been valued at £440 million a year, and 90 percent of that is done by wild insects. We would lose one of every three mouthfuls of food if we lost our wild pollinators. But apart from beauty and music and food, what has nature done for us?
There’s water as well as food: the fresh water that we drink, that we wash in, that makes our crops grow, that waters our livestock, that sustains ours lives, comes not from human ingenuity but from the wild skies: and it is kept pure by the processes of nature.
And there’s pharmaceuticals. Between 25 and 50 percent of prescription drugs originally came from wild plants. These include quinine, which prevents and cures malaria, aspirin, which comes from willows, and morphine.
Then there’s sanity, and with it, healing. In the pressurised life of the developed world, we rely more and more on nature to keep sane. Pressured urbanites take weekends in the country as often as they can afford it. They buy a second home in the country if they can, because they “need to get their batteries recharged”. Many live in leafy suburbs and commute, rather than live in the idle of town. People take holidays in the hills of Tuscany, or Cornwall, or the Scottish highlands: more battery-recharging.
Nature is healing. People get over traumas by leaving the city. People recovering from operations do so faster if they have a bed by the window, faster still of they can see trees. We deal better with physical and spiritual hurts if we can get back to nature: the idea of a nature cure is a very deep part of ourselves.
Then there’s clothing, which originally came from the nature, and the heat and light of fire. Without these things, we wouldn’t have developed into modern humans: and we took these things from nature. All the same: apart from beauty and music and food and medicine and sanity and healing and clothing, let us ask: what has nature ever done for us?
Nature gives us adventure: the feeling that we can leave the easy life and do something challenging: something not altogether comfortable physically, but which brings deep rewards. We take a walk, with or without dogs: we climb mountains, take boats on rivers, ride horses, play golf, get lost, get found again, generally move a little way from our comfort zones and come back feeling refreshed and altogether rather splendid.
Nature gives us understanding: of our individual selves, of our nation, of our species. If we read the poems across the ages, we see how they place humans in the context of other species and draw from it crucial understandings of the way we are and the life we lead. Nature explains ourselves to ourselves.
Nature gives a sense of human achievements, of the power that humans have over the planet, over our own destiny, a sense of almost limitless power. And with that, it adds a sense of humility: that sense that we cannot create a rainforest only destroy one.
Nature tells us that we are lonely in our human conditions: that human uniqueness carries with it a great sense of achievement and a great sense of failure. Nature tells us to feel both pride and shame. Nature gives us perspective: something that we cannot get when surrounded only by the works of humankind.
Nature gives us wonder: a sense of the bewildering and glorious fabulousness of life: something that not even the greatest works of human art can do. Nature also tells us that we are not alone: that we are one of many, that we are mammals who eat and breathe and copulate and defecate just like any other.
Nature is the way that planet works. Nature not only gave us our existence in the first place: it makes our continuing existence possible. Life – ours and that of every other living think on the planet – depends on the great and complex web of life that we call biodiversity. Without nature we would never have existed in the first place and could not exist now.
So I ask this. Apart from beauty and music and food and water and medicine and sanity and healing and clothing and heat and light and adventure and understanding and a sense of power and a sense of humility and pride and shame and perspective and wonder and isolation and belonging and our initial existence and our continuing survival – what has nature ever done for us? If you can think of anything, you’d better Step Up.