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?
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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!
Bob,
we have reversed that intensification ( I can give you the data if you like) and yet the RSPB claim bird numbers continue to drop. Thats the conundrum.
EP
Paysan savant
Agree with every thing you say Bob which is why i asked if a couple of acres in say each parish would be a great help and think with sympathetic persuasion farmers might agree to this.
One big problem that i feel Mark is aware of is that farmers see any comment by the RSPB as criticism and perhaps regard the RSPB as the enemy which is not true but while Mark is even handed as he quite often praises what individual farmers do some at the RSPB at the same time make silly critical comments that are only relevant to some farmers.
For certain for farmland birds to increase or at least halt the decline the ONLY way is for RSPB and FARMERS to work together so lets hope both groups try a bit harder and do not see each other as the enemy.
I think if there are no farmers on the RSPB main committee then there should be,surely just as important to have someone like that as to have a figure head like Kate Humble,if no farmer on committee then seeing the state of farmland birds and the fact that farmers manage almost all the land in the country it must be a serious mismanagement from RSPB i think.
Sooty / Mark. I read it as well even though I am not a farmer. What seems logical to me is that if a population declines and there is a probable reason for it doing so (whether that is farming practices or otherwise) then the population will eventually reach a position where it can't recover unless the reason for it is reversed. There is always a population level that, if reached, can't be reversed on its own and will need active management (the Tiger may already have reached this).
If the reason for the decline in farmland birds is, even partly, intensification of agriculture then the argument that nothing has intensified since the 90s (and presumably doesn't need changing) only serves to hold the population at a low level. To get it to return to the levels that existed 20 to 25 years ago the prescription for doing so must at least include supporting farmers to reverse some of that intensification.
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Mark,
you know damn well that when you bought Hype Farm you set up a matrix of 40-50 species to gauge the avian health of the farm - some species were there when you bought the farm , some weren't. The Hype Farm matrix is far more balanced than the FBI because it includes an even mix of red list, amber list and green list species which is in keeping with the trend lines of all british bird species generally. You also know damn well that if you used this set of 40-50 species on the FB Index then the graph would not look nearly so bad, the line would be far more horizontal. So why deny it and can't you understand the frustration of farmers like me who would like my farm analysed in the same way Hype Farm is to get a fuller picture of what is going on?
I would not deny that some bird species have seen significant losses due to changes in agriculture brought in during the 1960s and 1970s, you don't have to be a genius to work out that if you remove hedges then species such as yellowhammer which use hedges for nesting and foraging will suffer.
But farming has moved on since the 60s and 70s and the stats clearly show that. Its time the RSPB moved on aswell, you are fighting ghosts when you should be encouraging the current generation of farmers to build on their conservation successes rather than discouraging them by this permament media push and lobbying thrust of trying to demonise farmers as uncaring and causing some sort of wildlife armageddon.