Fighting for Birds

1. Early years
2. Flow Country days
3. In the pink – roseate terns
4. Counting, cubes and curves
5. Is it ever right to be nasty to birds?
6. Special places
7. Hope for farmland birds
8. Reintroductions: putting something back
9. Nature reserves
10. Climate
11. The raptor haters
12. Trying to change the
13. Advocacy in practice
14. Snippets
15. Whither the RSPB?
16. The tangled bank
17. What we need to do to win
Index

Mark Avery worked for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for about 25 years, starting as a research scientist and leaving, in April 2011, as Director of Conservation. As such he was at the forefront of many of the major then-current conservation issues facing birds, and indeed other wildlife, and was often called upon by the media, policy makers and many others for comments and to make decisions which affected conservationists generally and the RSPB in particular. Many of these decisions will continue to have effects for many years to come. 

His views on some of the issues have been aired on his blog (www.markavery.info/blog) since 2009, but only since he left the employment of the RSPB has he been able to be completely frank and not necessarily follow the RSPB line. Fighting for Birds follows on from this and sets out to clarify and summarize many of these major issues, to put forward Avery’s own take on them, and to note how far some of them are from being resolved.

He states early on that the book is not an autobiography but you would be forgiven for disagreeing when reading the first four chapters. These describe his formative years and how he got into birdwatching and natural history and then became a professional ecologist, studying bats (Chiroptera) as well as birds and working with several leading scientists in the process. However, this is really just setting the scene for the other 13 chapters which are the meat of the book, and should be required reading for anyone with aspirations to be an advocate for conservation, and especially for anyone who has any influence on environmental policy. Also of course, anyone interested in conservation and the environment will get a lot of information and some forthright views both on the issues themselves and on how they should be tackled in the corridors of power where it matters.

Chapters labelled such as ‘Is it right ever to be nasty to birds?’, ‘The raptor haters’, ‘Trying to change the world’, ‘What we need to do to win’ and ‘Climate’ show that he tackles some of the main issues facing bird conservation and indeed the worldwide environment. We get a personal view which at times can be very hardhitting and critical of both people and organizations, many of whom purport to be ‘doing good’. Many ordinary birdwatchers and conservationists will certainly not agree with him at times but, with such cases as the Hen Harrier Circus cyaneus controversy in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, he clearly states the various opposing views, accepting for example that Hen Harriers do eat quite a lot of grouse and that therefore there is a major issue to be tackled. Compromises have to be made at times, though in this case his own stance is clear: he is opposed to driven grouse shooting. 

Not all is polemic though. There are chapters on the role of nature reserves and special places, on reintroductions, on advocacy (how and how not to do it!) and on farmland birds, and he does not flinch from the RSPB with a chapter entitled ‘Whither the RSPB?’ which describes both its current state and what are his hopes for its future – he is a life member. There are tensions and conflicts, both within and between organizations and often with those seemingly on the same side. The trick for all of them, having weighed up the evidence, is to come out at the end with a clear direction. I suspect nobody will agree with everything he says, but there is a lot of common sense here as well as what amounts to a history of the conservation movement over the last 25 years or so. Some of the major issues have a separate chapter – see above – but several bits which did not quite fit into any other chapter are collected together in Chapter 14 as ‘Snippets’.

There are one or two minor errors, but they do not detract from what is a mighty good read. Chris Packham in his Foreword says he read it in one go and I know he is not alone in that. However, reading it like this is not essential and indeed dipping into specific chapters on particular topics usually produces a useful summary of a major issue, spiced with Mark’s general good humour and interesting and often amusing anecdotes.