The NWT Annual General Meeting will be held at Cley NWT on 27th October - that would seem to be a good place for someone to ask a question about the increase in non-conservation events at Cley. Even if the trustees disagree its important they know what the perception amongst some regular visitors is.
Good thinking James. I hope some people care enough to follow this up. Unfortunately the subject raised is one that has irked me for several years so I'm going to have a little rant. I suspect I know the reasoning behind it. Funding. Other national conservation bodies like the RSPB have also lost direction for me. Far too many coffee & cake days and fluffy toys and grossly over-priced goods and bird-food, and not enough useful conservation action. A look at the RSPB accounts shows a huge annual turnover but a relatively small percentage of this goes into conservation issues. I sincerely hope not but I fear the Wildlife Trusts (not just Norfolk) may be heading the same way.
It takes massive amounts of money to fund conservation as we operate it currently but I believe considerable amounts of money are spent by conservation organisations on what I perceive as 'wastes of time'. There is little point reaching out to the children of the next generation to make them into conservationists if we don't do anything NOW to protect what little we have left. Too much window-dressing and not enough viable action I believe. Money is apparently being spent on irrelevant projects when the real need is for land accumulation and on-the-ground monitoring of species diversification and numbers. I see no point in having nature reserves if we don't know what is on them and we don't know if we are protecting it adequately.
I know that times change, and that conservation costs vast amounts of money, but I wonder how effectively it is currently being done. What point erecting a hide suitable as a nuclear bunker if you have to put up fences that you can barely see through to keep away a few predators that are destroying breeding waders? It was never thus!
What point protecting a few coastal wetland reserves for (amongst other things) breeding Lapwing when virtually the whole of the county is devoid of any life due to farming practices/planning permissions, etc. Where have the inland breeding Lapwings gone? 'Nero fiddling whilst Rome burns' springs to mind.
Energies and finances are currently being directed into Cuckoos and their passage routes and wintering quarters. Fascinating, but what is being done to address the fact that the cuckoo population that once bred on our farmland is gone, leaving only riverine and coastal dune/wetland populations left? It has gone because its host species are gone, the host species are gone because the insect prey is gone. Pesticides, herbicides, neonicotinoids... all poisons being pumped into our world and nobody in our elected government is doing anything about it because they simply don't care, or at least they don't care enough to accept a loss in profits to rectify it.
The 'State of Nature 2016' report (which I urge everybody to read) is a portrayal of our dismal ineptitude and clearly shows we have failed miserably in our responsibility to our future generations to preserve the nature of the UK. Successive governments have failed us, and our conservation movements have failed to lobby those governments effectively, as have those governments failed to lobby the European Parliament adequately.
I'm wholly behind resolving the raptor persecution issues highlighted in the Hen Harrier story, but I still wonder how the financial and time-span commitment to this is effective for a species that we offer little protection to at many of its UK roost sites. I sincerely hope the Government debate over this issue goes well but I fear that too many of the people being 'briefed' will have a finger in the muddy pie of land-ownership or shoot-tenancy to actual want to change anything.
Sadly, I don't pretend to have the answers but I do feel what we're doing at present is woefully short of minimum requirements. Call me cynical if you wish but I don't see music evenings, cheese scones and jacket potatoes changing that. I fear Sydney Long and associates would not be overly impressed.
