Saturday

This is the first time for years and years the RSPB AGM has been held away from London (and it’s back in London next year). The ICC in Birmingham was a short walk from New Street station and a perfectly good venue. As I arrived I remembered that I had been here before – for Tory party conferences.

The RSPB has over 1.1m members (and rising), the Conservative Party has 134,000 (and I would guess falling as UKIP rises) but unfortunately the RSPB is not running the country. Would I really want that – not really – but they couldn’t do much worse the ConDems really?

I met quite a few old friends (not just RSPB staff who are former colleagues) and some new friends.  Three people told me how much they had enjoyed reading A Message from Martha – one of whom (and this is really nice for an author) said that he had finished the book the night before and all the way through the last two chapters had been thinking ‘That’s what I think!’.

There were fewer than usual recognisable faces in the audience, as you would expect with the change of venue. No Philip Astor asking a question about killing things but Clive Cohen had made the journey to ask about killing things from a different perspective.

One familiar face was Graham Wynne who, as a Vice-President, was chairing the event. He slipped very easily into being in charge again – it made me smile.

There was mention of Sir Ian Botham but we didn’t see him in the audience.  The RSPB’s Finance Director, Alan Sharpe, was very clear that 100% of the RSPB’s expenditure is on its charitable objects and 90% of it on conservation work. The audience was not the least bit bothered about this issue, I felt. There was no murmur of concern (except over the time and expense that will be wasted on this complaint to the Charity Commission) and no muttering in the corridors either before or after the event as far as I could tell.  If the hope of the ‘Shooting Three’ had been to sow seeds of discord then they had failed completely – the RSPB still has the trust of its membership.

The wind turbine at The Lodge is going ahead, I’m glad to say.

A question was asked about Hen Harriers and I was interested to hear Stuart Housden making a good and passionate response from a Scottish point of view, and Graham was indicating that we would then hear from Martin Harper but Mike Clarke jumped in.  It was a slightly strange thing to do as Mike didn’t have anything much to say on the subject but the RSPB is against people killing Hen Harriers.

There was an interesting question about lessons learned where Tim Stowe (International Director) put forward the failed rat eradication project on Henderson Island as a lesson learned – good for him! And good for the RSPB! And we members don’t blame our NGOs for being ambitious and failing, we blame them for being unambitious and succeeding.

There was another question about international work which maybe should prompt the RSPB to start talking about that aspect of its work (about 10% of the total – but Sir Ian Botham, Martyn Howat and Sir Johnny Scott wouldn’t count it as conservation work, of course) rather more. The RSPB is very, very quiet about its international work, and also, really, about much of its conservation work, and that is bound to get it into the type of awkward position that it finds itself with the nuttier members of the pro-shooting and anti-RSPB community.  But here’s a good news story on albatrosses (not real nature conservation, of course, because it’s not on a nature reserve) which was used at the AGM as well…

There were three new Council members elected:

…and the president made a really good inspiring speech at the end of the event…

But one of the more interesting parts of every RSPB AGM is the presentation of the RSPB Medal.  It has been given to a few stars of the conservation world, and a few duffers too, but this year was a year for stars. The RSPB Medal was given to the team, from BTO, SOC and Birdwatch Ireland who produced the Bird Atlas.  This was a good thing to do (and on Andy Clements’ birthday too!).

And then it was time for lunch for most people, but time for me to head off to the Manchester Science Festival to talk about Passenger Pigeons. On the journey I was thinking about the RSPB.  It’s in pretty good shape but it needs to talk about conservation a lot more.  It has an awful lot to talk about. It’s still the best nature conservation organisation in the UK.

 

 

 

 

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