A reader of this blog contacted the Chair of the National Trust, Sir Simon Jenkins, over his apparent views on raptors as referred to in my blog on 9 July.
And having been in contact with Sir Simon myself he writes ‘The piece was written before I had any link to the National Trust and certainly now reads rather flippantly on a subject on which you and your colleagues clearly hold dear. But I really don’t think that I was totally hostile to raptors, rather commenting on the state of affairs as I was told at the time within the RSPB. For what it is worth I love watching the red kites wheel over my mountain in Wales…’.
When I contacted Sir Simon he told me he was trying to spot an osprey through a thick Welsh mist.
So we should remove Sir Simon from the list of raptor haters and put his earlier article down as an aberration, or perhaps working with the National Trust has shown him the error of his previous ways. Let’s keep an eye on Sir Simon’s excellent writing in the Guardian, just to check there is no back-sliding, and let’s also keep an eye on the National Trust whose large landholdingscould surely support a few more birds of prey in places.
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Well said, Mark – we should always welcome those who have, at last, “seen the light” – but we’ll be watching to make sure this is a genuine conversion!
Not just Birds of Prey but trees as well as most of their holdings in the Lake District are a disgrace. There is presently a pot of £300 million which our dear government have ear marked for deforestation in this country and abroad in an aid for carbon capture. As so many windfarm projects have clear felled forestry and our history of clearing the land is so vivid there could be scope for RSPB as well.