Rural communities tend to have complicated relationships with their bird populations, cherishing certain species (pheasants, partridges, grouse) while cursing others (buzzards, geese).
So it follows that the charities that, in name at least, exist to safeguard such creatures have a challenging role in the countryside, pitting the lives of fauna against the livelihoods of farmers.
While holidaying on Islay several years ago I noticed the tension between locals and local Royal Society for the Protection of Birds officials over the Greenland and Barnacle goose. One year it was okay to shoot them (the geese, that is), the next it was not.
Some form of accommodation between the opposing interests was eventually reached, with farmers being compensated for not killing the birds, though geese numbers have become destructively high and a new cull was proposed in December.
Predictably enough, the move, which will prevent much crop damage, has been attacked by the RSPB, an organisation that has become increasingly successful in alienating country people.
The latest person to object to the charity’s tactics is Scottish laird John Mackenzie, who has put up ‘RSPB not welcome’ signs on his Ross-shire estate, after ‘years of frustration’.
‘Landowners, farmers and gamekeepers have always been an easy target, constantly being blamed by the Society for the poisoning and shooting of raptors,’ he said. ‘They are so big and powerful now, someone has to try and make them stop and think.’
There will never be agreement between the RSPB and the rural economy over the ethics of predator control, and whether it is right that buzzards (thriving by anyone’s estimates) are protected at the expense of grouse, song birds and ground nesting species.
But it is the tunnel vision of the charity, the lack of courtesy of its staff interfering in the running of estates, and its focus on making money that have angered those with vested concerns in the land.
There is another protest against the RSPB, in Caithness and Sutherland, over a proposed nature reserve, and Mackenzie has persuaded landowners in other parts of Scotland and in northern England to put up ‘keep out’ signs too, as a warning to the Society.
The Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association has also long had run-ins with the charity and last summer SGA chairman Alex Hogg accused it of ‘demonising’ his members, the ‘vast majority of whom work within the law every day, under very trying circumstances, to produce a balance of species as well as a surplus of grouse to shoot’. The RSPB could spend donor money ‘more wisely’, he said.
The charity has been accused of using resources from its millions of pounds in donations to campaign over climate change, and support wind turbines, which destroy thousands of birds. It has a financial stake in the green energy supplier Ecotricity (which builds turbines); it fields more than 400 fundraisers; and splurged £6 million on television advertising last year.
Some of these grievances against the charity were raised by the former cricketer Ian Botham, who launched his ‘You Forgot the Birds’ movement in November, along with farmers and conservationists, to demand RSPB reform.
Botham said the leadership of the RSPB was a ‘dictatorship’ that had ‘messed up its finances’, betrayed its one million-plus membership of bird lovers, and exerted undue lobbying influence at Westminster because of its size.
It is not the only charity to lose sight of its mission, in pursuit of more fashionable goals. The World Wildlife Fund Scotland has restyled itself as a political cheerleader for the government’s green policies and far extended its remit as a conservation body.
As one Courier reader wrote this week, WWF Scotland is a ‘propaganda machine’ for the renewable industry and has departed from its core ethos.
Staff salaries at leading charities such as the RSPCA, RSPB and WWF have soared as revenues and donations have dropped, with six figure incomes commonplace among chief executives. The highest reported in Scotland in 2013 was £160,000 paid to the head of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Some might argue that the bosses of such good causes deserve their rich rewards, but all these charities should ask themselves what comes first: nature’s welfare or their own.