My local football team, the mighty Rushden and Diamonds is currently 8th in the Blue Square Premier League - that's 8th out of 24 teams.
Seeing your performance in the context of others is always informative and sometimes really useful.
So did you know that the UK is 4th place in the EU (out of 27) for the highest rate of income tax? and 12th, out of 15, EU countries in the proportion of our energy coming from renewable sources? and top of the EU cocaine using league? and top of the EU asthma suffering league? and we were 8th in the EU days lost to strikes league table back in 2006. This gets a bit addictive!
In terms of farmland bird population changes, the UK is 11th worst out of 40 European countries over the period 1990-2000. And we were even closer to the bottom, as I remember it, in a previous analysis which covered the period 1980-1990.
Farmland birds declined in most European countries (but increased in just a few) and I wonder what we can learn, maybe nothing, in terms of how the league leaders, Austria, practise their farming? In Austria, farmland birds did pretty well apparently. And Austria is top of the league, it seems, and if you ignore Liechtenstein (which we all do!), in terms of organic agriculture. It can't be that simple can it?
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
Sooty - there are indeed some farmers and landowners on RSPB Council. We do not control predators at Hope Farm - maybe there would be even more birds if we had? And, as far as predators and skylark patches are concerned - without skylark patches, skylarks tend to end up nesting along the tramlines where they are susceptible to predation by mammals walking along those same tramlines (and tractor wheels!). The skylark patches are not connected to the tramlines and so they are difficult for mammalian predatos to get to once the crop has thickened up - that might be one reason why they work.
I agree with you about working with farmers. The remarks here of essex peasant, a farmer who spends a lot of his life talking to other farmers about the RSPB it seems to me, shows how difficult that can be. essex peassant puts a lot of his effort into talking down the declines in farmland birds, talking down the RSPB's work with farmers and talking down the beacon of hope that is Hope Farm (you see he calls it Hype Farm here). None of this helps.
And it is worth going back and looking at the blog piece I wrote on stone curlews a little while ago. That 'story' was press released in the same way as our other farmland bird press releases but, maybe because it was a good news story, it received very little media coverage - that's one reason I write this blog - to give some of our work with farmers a little more publicity.
And I do think that an acre or two on every farm, managed like we do at Arne, would be a great asset. I almost hesitate to say this, because we have moved on and there's no point looking back, but that is a little like set-aside used to provide, and quite a lot like what we argued could replace set-aside - but we lost that argument to those like essex peasant!