Nature conservation under coronavirus

Our wildlife conservation organisations are small, medium or large businesses within one very particular sector. I ‘phoned around a few of them today to ask what they are doing as a result of coronavirus.

Just about all of them said that they were sticking to government guidelines – and they are all waiting for, and expecting, and planning for, a new set of stricter guidelines. But once you get beyond that phrase then it seems as though, to some extent, they are being led by the reaction of the public and of their staff.

Naturally, there are quite a few people self-isolating because they have flu-like symptoms – it’s March, quite a few people would be expected to have flu-like symptoms. But there are staff who have been abroad on holidays to dodgy areas – it’s amazing how many people go skiing in Italy – or to conferences.

And the number of people opting to work at home is increasing. Some organisations are encouraging this and some are moving towards this being the norm for a while. Of course, it depends what your job is whether it is feasible or not, and also it depends on the IT system you have and what options it gives you. Where staff need to be in the office then some are organising rotas so that offices aren’t crowded and the burden, or risk, of travelling is shared equally.

Many are cancelling internal face-to-face meetings and discouraging staff from attending all but ‘essential’ external meetings.

Any public events into the future are being kept under review with the expectation that if they are in April or May then they probably won’t happen and after that, who knows?

Staff giving talks to bird clubs, members’ groups and external audiences are finding that these are mostly being cancelled for the few weeks ahead.

Fieldwork is becoming a little more difficult – some landowners, understandably enough, are less keen to sit down and chat to a complete stranger from afar about access to land and farming techniques than they would normally be.

Those organisations where foreign travel is a large part of their business model are rapidly reviewing what staff do if they can’t go abroad – there will be a lot of emails answered and inboxes tidied up but that only takes up so much time.

A few mentioned the fact that trustee meetings were a bit of a problem because they often brought people quite long distances, involved sitting fairly close to one another for hours and often involved people who were in or getting close to being of a more susceptible age. They are also difficult to replace by technology where trustees have no consistent technological hardware in their homes or software between their ears.

But the general mood was positive. Some mentioned that they thought that more people would be keen to get out in the fresh air and experience nature – not necessarily in crowded hides or visitor centres though. Everyone was expecting life to get more difficult but there was a real air of wanting to cope and to find ways around all the difficulties ahead.

But our wildlife NGOs are expecting things to get a lot more difficult before they get better – and I guess they are right.

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