BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Swindon Addick" data-source="post: 3230246" data-attributes="member: 69901">If I owned a piece of land and wanted it to be available for locals to walk dogs on, or for any other benefit to local people in terms of green space, I would give it to the Parish Council, not the RSPB.The RSPB exist to preserve birds. They have a duty under UK charity law to use their resources for that purpose (plus anything else that appears in their official charitable objectives). If the best thing for the birds is to sell the land and buy another area that's better suited to conservation objectives, it's actually quite difficult for the RSPB to justify not selling.It seems from the reports that they've gone to a fair bit of effort to check whether the donor had any wishes for the use of the land that they were unaware of. Fair play to them doing that - if I left a piece of land to ANY charity and had views on its future use, I'd write those instructions explicitly into my will or into the terms of the contract when I handed the land over. I wouldn't expect them to contact my friends and ask if there was anything I'd forgotton to tell them.</blockquote>