When Prince Charles is having an evening in with the Princess Royal, HM The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh, I wonder whether they ever, as keen Patrons of most of the UK’s wildlife conservation organisations, discuss the state of nature and the state of nature conservation.
Would they ever think of writing a letter along these lines, I wonder?:
As your Patron I am concerned that, despite your best efforts, nature continues to decline around us. I can’t help but feel that if you looked at the possibility of working much more closely with other wildlife conservation organisations this might increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of some of your work.
Wouldn’t take much, would it?
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More likely that he watches spring watch and says “eaten one of those, shot one of those, chased one of those from the back of a horse and set the dogs on it”
This is not a position statement on where I stand, but in the interests of fairness I have to say I was very impressed by what Prince Charles is doing at Highgrove – as well as being exemplary, he and his staff are using his real-life organic farming to preach a different approach more widely.
The raptor issue is interesting – like certain Government Ministers, if you are surrounded by people with a reinforcing view it takes a real effort of will to break out – more perhaps than the Royals can manage, but perhaps more culpable in an elected Minister as in Buzzardgate.
Agreed Roderick, as always a sensible approach but I would also add that any royal who donates to Songbird Survival or whatever they are called these days should be “drummed out” of RSPB royal patron or not. At least the minister in question can loose job and/or seat in the commons.
Song bird survival is funding valuable research into the decline of passerines in the UK and often in collaboration with highly reputable bodies like the BTO. Please see this press release which outlines that at least seven species of bird species including bullfinch, tree sparrow and reed bunting are suffering a decline which is strongly correlated with increases in predators namely sparrow hawks.
http://www.songbird-survival.org.uk/cms-assets/documents/80890-25061.btopressrelease08-03-10.pdf
So what is so wrong about supporting such an organisation financially . Could it be that their statements are upsetting the ” I worship birds of prey brigade and won’t have a wrong thing said about them”
As I understand it the link between SS and BTO is no longer strong because further work showed those links between sparowhawks and the passerines mentioned were tenuous at best. SS are now working with GWCT on a crow control experiment, which some believe is poor science and may be illegal under the provisions of the general licence, that be as it may it seems SS willonly work with those that give them the right answer!
Most of the senior people in SS are big landowners who farm and shoot. Nothing wrong in that but those two occupations usually lead to an illogical and outdated hatred of predators and a dislike of the ideas that agricultural change drives bird declines. Prince Charles has some interesting things to say because he has an interest in the countryside, some things he says and does are good, others not so, rather like the rest of us but as he himself says on many things he is no expert. His attitude to predator and predation ecology is likely to be jaundiced, due to his lifelong shooting background, as is my own attitude to royalty, the aristocracy and those who fawn over them is by my politics. I’m also a bird of prey enthusiast and scientist so I KNOW that almost all the arguments put forward by the raptor haters are, to put it bluntly CRAP and those that aren’t in this category is probably only because they’ve not be examined in detail. Put simply Raptors are part of biodiversity and not a cause for its decline.
Before anyone places any more derogatory remarks on here about Prince Charles I would suggest they read the reviews of his book “Harmony” on the Amazon website.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Harmony-New-Way-Looking-World/dp/0007348037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1363691225&sr=8-1
Prince Charles’ depth of learning and understanding in relation to the natural world is amazing. Many of his long held and much derided beliefs are now accepted as the way forward. He realised a long time ago that the problem with nature conservation in his country is that the population as a whole is too far disconnected from nature. It asks if you have your priorities right and then shows you that No you really haven’t. His research for this book has been by talking directly to many people who would be totally inaccessible to the everyday Joe Blogs and he certainly has not wasted this opportunity.
“Prince Charles’ depth of learning and understanding in relation to the natural world is amazing”
You said it
I wonder how well informed the Queen was when she donated to Songbird Survival. It is relatively easy to present them as another organisation that is trying to do good for nature (who doesn’t want to save songbirds?) and the fact that they pursue a deluded mission to rid the skies of birds of prey may not have been made particularly explicit to her. I imagine that a fair number of songbird survival supporters give their money to what they think is a good cause without knowing too much about what they actually do and what they stand for.
Of course in her position the Queen should be properly advised about the charities she supports but I do wonder if she necessarily believes personally that there are too many sparrowhawks. Perhaps we should take it on ourselves to write to her and point out that the organisation she has donated funds to is not a true friend of wildlife. If she then persisted in supporting SS then any criticism would be entirely justified.
Mark – bad night was it?
This has to be your most worthless blog ever !!
I have no doubts that Charles has already communicated something similar to those politicians in office post 1997 – indeed he was always being told off by New Labour for doing so!
I think he was told to ‘mind hid own business’
Trimbush – so nice to hear from you, thank you.
I thought of you during Cheltenham and was tempted to pass on the tips I received – fortune-nately- for you – I didn’t
But me curlews are here and that’s just grand!
Makes a lot of sense what Prince Charles is suggesting – but in practice could it possibly improve things and over what time frame?
As an example in 2002 The Moorland Forum was formed. Initially this forum consisted of 24 member organisations which has now more recently reached 30. For many, many years this forum was regarded by many including myself as a glorified talking shop.
However things at long last look like they could be changing and progressive movements in the likes of moorland habitat improvement, etc may hopefully be around the corner.
Only time will tell!!!!
” …Please see this [songbird survival] press release which outlines that at least seven species of bird species including bullfinch, tree sparrow and reed bunting are suffering a decline which is strongly correlated with increases in predators namely sparrow hawks”.
What an icy torrent of drivel, David H.
People are getting wise to the less-than-latent agenda of that *cough* organisation.
Completely & utterly devoid of science, logic, fact, reason and many might postulate…. honesty.
Well I will say something derogatory about Charlie,it is really simple to be high and mighty about just everything when you get income coming in from just being born to the right Queen.He does not care about very little except profit and certainly does not care about beautiful Hen Harriers.
By the way David H…
Are you the “Dave H” who stated in a comment to a post by Mark Avery back in July 2011, that this (same) study does:
“…show that there is no evidence to show a link between predator numbers and prey species (songbirds) numbers…” (quote).
Please this link below and in particular, “Dave H’s” comment.
https://markavery.info/2011/07/26/songbird-survival/
If you are the same chap, be it David H or Dave H – then why are you now suggesting, 18 months later that this (same) study shows a “strong correlation (between declining songbirds and increasing sparrow(gap)hawks)”.
Of course, there may be two or three (or more) David H’s or Dave H’s in the world, all of whom seem equally baffled by science.
I wouldn’t use a Songbird Survival press release to wrap my chips in. It would only spoil the taste.
I’m no ardent royalist (not since November 2007 anyway) but I’ve always respected HM’s intelligence and judgement. I was surprised and disappointed, therefore, when she bought into SS’s nonsense. At the risk of being carted off to the tower I can’t help wondering if her faculties are quite what they were.
The SBS interpretation of the BTO results was one of the most notorious pieces of ‘non-science’ outside the climate change denial industry. SBS picked a very small number of BTO’s scientifically cautious statements and used them completely out of context. That is their right – I hope we will continue to have the freedom of speech which allows people to say what they think and even to make these sorts of quite spurious claims – and also to allow others to debunk them.
It was good SBS funded the research which was neutral and worthwhile. The results surprised noone – any more than that, having spent their money, SBS were going to reach the conclusion they wanted regardless of what the BTO came up with.
DavidH – as Paul and Roderick explains, the SS/BTO relationship has now broken down simply because the research did not bear out what SS expected. To be fair, they have not extensively tried to criticise the methods (as would happen in scientific circles under similar circumstances) but they did try to re-interpret the results when they originally appeared. Unfortunately, this is not unique to SS and happens widely even within conservationist circles and if you want a fairly unpleasant little project check this out (but please do not discuss on this blog):
http://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/nhi775/cat_predation.htm
This piece of work is excellent but it contains some elements that make it useless as a conservation argument (see if you can spot them) except for small mammals (there is a slight clue) yet it is still used as the basis of a lot of debate in places like Facebook and Bird Forum. I have even been accused of not reading the science for pointing out what this paper actually says.