At the end of November I posted this about the WWT’s ‘refocus’ document. I’d read it several times and couldn’t really make much sense of it. It felt a little more like something one would find on a corporate website which was aiming not to tell you anything than the sharp new vision for a leading environmental NGO.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out. The redundancies hinted at in the document are playing through and some of what I regard as the familiar faces at Slimbridge have departed. Now, quite a few people close to WWT are wondering what the changes mean for various aspects of the WWT’s work, including some fairly high-profile aspects. We’ll have to see how this plays out over time but there are ripples of concern in the conservation community.
The bigger picture with WWT, I can’t help but feel, is that it is an organisation built on a very strange foundation where captive waterfowl collections bring in the public through the year for a day out and at many sites wintering wildfowl spectacles add to the draw of the centres in winter, and that this produces income and support for a range of conservation work in the UK and abroad. The ‘duck-zoos are us’ model, as it is unflatteringly called at times, is a difficult one to make work particularly at a time of lockdowns and avian flu. But surely it is a difficult one to maintain into the future anyway?
I wonder what the great Sir Peter Scott, genuinely one of the most all-round gifted Britons of the twentieth century, would make of the current conservation scene and of the organisation he set up back in the period after WWII – this year sees WWT’s 75th birthday.
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What’s wrong with a conservation NGO being in the entertainment business? They would seem to have a natural advantage of a) bringing in money without having to beg for it and b) a direct outlet to the public on the value of their work.
The only question seems to be if they can make the duck-zoo work when there are not many visitors. In a sense they are no different from any other zoo except the animals are only there for a few months and come back willingly to be put on display every year.
Yes this is concerning, I know the Trust does sometimes look a bit like a duck zoo, but I guess this is a major source of their income, although severely curtailed this year. Their reserves such as Welney are great and they do great work not just in the U.K. but abroad. They have of course been having a key role in the Great Crane Reintroduction Project and have lead all the wetland work and the establishment of a major reserve on the Bridgewater Estuary in Somerset. Abroad they have been advising China and other Far Eastern countries on the conservation of the Asian flyway, vital for migrating waders and other birds in the Far East. They are also heavily involved in the conservation of the highly endangered spoonbill sandpiper in the same area.
The WWT are therefore a key organisation in conservation. The RSPB went through a major reorganisation a couple of years ago which involved some redundancies and some people leaving the Society so as a member of WWT I wish them every bit of luck in these very very difficult times.
I agree with both Stuart and Alan. If it is wrong to feed wild birds through the winter for both their and our benefit, then we are all guilty. If hundreds of swans come back one year to find no freebies, it would be an enormous blow and I can’t think the local farmers would be impressed. Yes it’s an unnatural but one of our making, if it is to be curtailed, then it needs to be done gradually.
It should also be remembered that it may well be a first experience for many children.
The duck zoo isn’t just entertainment. For many people it is their contact with birds and its a problem for conservationists (birders ?) that they can’t see that not everyone wants to – or can – enjoy wildlife at their level. It is the same with art in the forest – timber foresters say ‘what’s that got to do with forestry ?’ but art is a bridge between people’s (urban) experience of life and the trees and nature. The ‘if they can’t identify it they shouldn’t be allowed in’ keeps popping up subliminally in conservation debates.
As to feeding the swans, I’m continually frustrated by the near complete ignorance of what we have done to our floodplains in the past 70 years. It is a classic example of shifting baselines – everyone knows about neonics on sugar beet because that’s today’s issue but despite Jeremy Purseglove’s ‘Taming the Flood’ the spectacular impact of the drainage campaign, one of the biggest post-war investments in agriculture, has drifted from the race memory because it was already winding down by the 1970s. The Swans need feeding because we have wiped out their winter habitat almost completely.
A problem that WWT has had in common with other zoos is that the captive collections still need caring for even though paying customers are no longer coming through the door. They are not simply no longer raising revenue but are an actual drain on resources. Of course any nature reserve will have on-going maintenance costs throughout the pandemic but I suspect that the staffing costs, feed bills and veterinary care costs associated with the captive collections are a significant extra on top of the costs of wardening the nature reserve. In terms of financial risk management I would expect that WWT will need to look quite carefully at how it addresses this in future.
Having said this, I would agree with Paul that the collections also play a role in raising awareness and turning youngsters on to an interest in wildlife. Furthermore the importance of wetlands may be obvious to wildlife conservation experts but may be a harder, more abstract notion to sell to the general public than saving birds, bees or badgers for example. The captive ducks act as ambassadors who raise both funds and awareness of why wetlands are important and need protection.
It might just be worth taking a look at Ducks Unlimited in the USA, https://www.ducks.org/. At a very high level they and the WWT both want the same thing – more ducks and they sort of do the same things except with different audiences. There is of course a large “cultural” gap but Ducks Unlimited have a very large presence in the Americas and are commercially very successful. There might be some lessons worth learning there.
When I was doing stuff with waders in the USA it was worth having a Ducks Unlimited membership just so you could put their sticker on the car and avoid having you tyres slashed by folks who weren’t sympathetic to “tree-huggers”.
Stuart – indeed. The duck-zoos comment is more about the captive collections at Slimbridge, Martin Mere etc and not the feeding for a spectacle aspects.
You’re right Mark Peter Scott was an incredibly gifted man – if I remember correctly he was bumped from the BBC when it was thought his wildlife programmes were becoming a bit old fashioned, then he strolled off and set up the phenomenally successful Survival TV series on ITV. That’s on top of his other accomplishments ranging from championship sailing and gliding to painting and writing. Some people have a way of unintentionally making your own life seem pretty inconsequential. I think if he was about today he would be extremely disappointed with the WWF – another organisation he helped set up. They are very reluctant to even mention population issues, something PS didn’t shy away from. I don’t believe he’d be particularly impressed with the WWF at times showing more interest in stopping coal being burnt rather than the same happening with forests either. He’s badly missed.