The annual BTO conference took place in Northampton on Saturday – and it was all very good. The venue was good, the food was good, the venue was close to the railway and bus stations and the talks were good and were enjoyed by a good audience of 300 or so.
I mean it about the venue – it was a good choice, not just for the personal reason that it was 25 minutes drive from home but because it did enable travel from London and the Midlands as well as Oxford and Cambridge and those from even closer by. Moving your conference around is a good idea but it has headaches of organisation that don’t afflict more risk-averse options. I wonder where it will be next year, but I can imagine it coming back to Northampton in 5-6 years’ time. Choosing the right venue is c75% research and 25% luck on the day, but choosing the right date is an even bigger gamble – was it skill or luck that placed this event on a weekend with no 6 Nations rugby internationals, I wonder.
It would be normal to say that I was attracted to the conference by the talks on offer, but I booked a place before I knew what they all would be or who was making them, so I was attracted by the organisation and by the hope and expectation that there would be good talks and by the fact that I assumed I would meet a lot of people whom I know but rarely see. The schedule was well-judged to enable friendly chatting and well-presented talks. My brain remembers graphs and maps and tables and there were some memorable ones; where Kittiwakes go between breeding seasons, where Nightjars forage in the Brecks, the difference in Blackbird BirdTrack reporting rate in London from 2022 when Usutu virus was detected, that Shags dive to the bottom to feed and the fact that it is mammals gobbling up Curlew eggs (no surprise). I can remember that the next Atlas project will have the Welsh Ornithological Society and the RSPB as partners, that Common Gulls might be called Commonish Gulls, that there is a fine project attempting to measure success of agri-environment schemes in the Chilterns, that auks can hurt and that Grey Herons used to like big country houses in southwest Wales.
Despite many excellent talks by BTO staff, my favourite was that by Arran Folly from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) on Blackbirds, mosquitos and viruses – he had some excellent science (some of it BTO science) and a couple of good jokes. For more background and some of the science (but not the jokes) click here, click here and click here.
I used to go to conferences and keep an eye open for potential recruits to the RSPB staff, and if I had been yesterday then someone called Jenny Donelan would have been on my list. Not because it’s the first time I have seen a bare midriff on a speaker at a BTO conference (although that deserves bonus points (but I promise I will never emulate)) but rather because her talk was crystal clear and quite interesting. It was given by someone who has a role in training and clearly understands how to get a message across. She had what I thought was a slightly tricky question to answer, and she paused, quite clearly worked out how to put it and then said (what I thought was) the right thing even though (I thought, and she may have thought) it wasn’t what the questioner wanted the answer to be. She was a firm chair too and her ‘I’m afraid there is not time for questions‘ only had the slightest hint of ‘…and if you wanted some you should have finished sooner‘.
I met some local birders and my former and current BTO regional representative, some former RSPB colleagues and Council members, lots of people I have met through a lifetime of birding and bird conservation and quite a lot of people who subscribe to my monthly newsletter, who are supporters of Wild Justice or who use Bluesky and not TwitterX these days. We talked about bird flu, woodpeckers, old colleagues, the state of wildlife, the state of the RSPB, the state of the Labour Party and the state of the government.
It was a great day.
Lest anyone thinks I left my critical faculties at the door, here are three observations.
- All organisations need to watch out for corporate speak. The BTO staff almost to a person thanked the volunteers for their input which is very sweet but I was getting gratitude-overload by the end of the day and the same phrases were used over and over again. Say it less, and say it differently to make a bigger impact.
- Some of the wording on the images was too small – it might look good on a computer screen but not from the back of a large hall with a low screen (so that the rows of heads in front of you may have edited it out anyway)(to be fair, some smaller screens on the sides of the hall helped with this but only for some lucky people).
- Last, another BTO stock phrase is along the lines of ‘this work will be vitally important to the conservation of Species X‘ without giving any indication how that will happen. As a long-term believer that good science is (one of many things) needed for successful conservation I reckon I know something about this, and saying it doesn’t make it true.
But, I say again, this was a great day. I sometimes come away from conferences thinking that they were a waste of time except I met some interesting people. This was not a waste of time and I met some interesting people.
[registration_form]