Blogger: Adam Murray, Communications Officer

What makes the perfect partner? Now do not fret I am not going to get all gushy about how great my wife is, my better half, the wind beneath my wings, the Ying to my Yang. This month on our blog we have been looking at partnerships and it got me thinking about this question of the perfect partner.

Some of the answers came to me on a blustery weekend walk with my Little Chief & my wife, Abi. I don’t know about you but our family day revolves around food and what better way to talk about partnerships than food related interludes and what (in the words of my Dad) “eats well together”.

We started off early with a Sausage Bap & Cup of Tea at RSPB Titchwell Marsh. Here we spotted many usual suspects and made our way to the beach where the Little Chief  took his first sustained steps and found every razor clam shell and pebble totally fascinating.

After finally toddling our way back via my handy work at the Parrinder hide we drove along the coast to Holkham. Here we began the peaceful forest walk to Wells-Next-the-Sea which we had been meaning to do for ages. This is when the blustery weather turned into soggy drizzle, the sort of rain that doesn’t seem to wet until later you realise you are wet through to your pants. We were lucky enough though to see evidence of one our favourite beasties.

Finally we got to our destination and filled up on the Great British tradition of Fish, Chips & Mushy Peas. With the 3 mile walk back past the old dunes in the rain we knew that we were well deserving of a little bit of sweetness so topped up our reserves with locally produced Mint & Choc Chip Ice-cream.

There is nothing more satisfying than a big stomp in the great outdoors with your loved ones. Even when we were wet through to the bone, a cheeky smile from my little one, an encouraging word in my ear from my wife, and a touch of Dad-humour from me, got us through to the end of the day. Now that in my eyes is a perfect partnership – team work.

Therefore, in answer to my original question, I think the way Kate describes a great partnership here

is spot on; “The trick is involving someone who does have the highest level of expertise. Nature is in real trouble and if we are going to save it then we all need to work together. The more we do this, pooling expertise and resources, the more we’ll achieve”.

So whether you are a Great British food combo, a family team or conservation partnership, all are better as a whole rather than as individuals. Here at the RSPB in the East we look forward to working with more partners and seeing what extra things we can “bring to the party”, only this way can we meet our goals of saving nature by 2020

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Photo Credit: Titchwell at Sunset by Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)

Photo Credit: Thames Estuary Furturescape by Eleanor Bentall (rspb-images.com)

P.S. For those curious about how we finished off our culinary daily delights we ended with that other perfect British partnership of Chicken Tikka Masala & Peshwari Naan

What a busy couple of weeks I’ve had! Bouncing here there and everywhere, colouring-in and cutting out, painting, gluing, sticking and crafting... and that was just the prep work! Part of the fun of working with primary schools has to be that you get to be a kid again yourself. I sometimes have to remind myself that yes, playing with puppets, story-telling, make-believing, dressing-up and all those messy, sticky arts and crafts do actually count as “work”! Honestly, it’s a tough life.

Of course, despite the appearance of frivolity, at the core of all the fun and games we are still delivering some key educational messages: hen harriers are beautiful, amazing birds; the moorland landscape is a unique and special place; hen harriers are an integral part of that landscape and while moorland has many uses, we all have a responsibility to look after it for people and for wildlife.

Just last week, I visited a school in North Tynedale which we had previously engaged with in 2008, the last time that hen harriers nested successfully in the local area. The school still had their “adoption” certificate hanging on the wall from when the children named all the chicks and followed their progress from hatching to fledging. Four years later, one boy, who had been in the Reception class at the time and had now reached the grand old age of eight and one quarter, was enthusiastically telling me almost everything there is to know about hen harriers, without so much as a prompt! The information had obviously stuck.

Now this boy clearly had a particular interest in birds and wildlife, and it’s fair to say that every child we work with won’t grow up to be the next David Attenborough. But whether they grow up to be teachers, gamekeepers, business owners, conservationists or even IT consultants, as long as they carry with them the knowledge that hen harriers are a beautiful and integral part of our upland heritage, deserving and in need of our protection, then perhaps we’ll have a future for these birds after all.

“That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,  
In some melodious plot  
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,  
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

Ode to a nightingale
John Keats (1795-1821)

There’s no bird that carries the song of summer quite like the nightingale.
 
Nightingales have been arriving back in their UK breeding grounds over the last couple of weeks, to our collective delight!

Small plain brown birds, sitting only slightly larger than a robin, with a broad tail, nightingales are not much to look at. However, hearing their rich, mellifluous song ring out from an unassuming thicket or a patch of dense scrub, it is easy to see why the nightingale has been the poet’s bird of choice for centuries.

The nightingale song is incredibly powerful. They are the masters of the dawn chorus, and sing during the night too, giving them their name. They are, however, notoriously difficult to spot.

And with nightingale numbers falling by a massive 60% in the last 15 years, it is getting even more difficult to spot a nightingale.

Their decline has been attributed to a number of things, habitat loss, changes in habitat quality, deer grazing, and impacts experienced by nightingale on their migration route and in sub-Saharan Africa where they spend the winter months.  Nightingales are ground-nesting birds, so as well as the direct loss of habitat, nightingale populations can be impacted by recreational activity and cat predation in their breeding grounds.

Breeding nightingales are now mostly limited to south of the Severn-Wash line and east from Dorset to Kent, the highest densities found in the south east: Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Kent and Sussex.

You may have heard about Chattenden Woods SSSI in North Kent, where the woods and surrounding scrub supports more than 1% of the UK population of nightingale. The nightingales there are threatened by an urban development of 5,000 homes.

We have been stepping up for nature, working to ensure this population is protected. Many of you have also stepped up, writing to Medway Council voicing your concerns about the potential impacts of this development on the nightingales.

If you've never heard a nightingale sing - or even if want to enjoy it again - some RSPB reserves which are particularly good for nightingales include: Pulborough Brooks in West Sussex, and Blean Woods, Northwood Hill & Cliff Pools which are all in Kent.

Photo: Nightingale, by John Bridges (rspb-images.com)

The debate about windfarms is heating up again.   Earlier this year, 100 Tory MPs wrote to David Cameron

calling for a cut in subsidies to onshore wind farms and last week Donald Trump appeared in front a Scottish Parliamentary Committee complaining that wind farms (not golf courses on SSSIs) will destroy Scotland.

Three years ago, we received a similar backlash when we published a report

which outlined ways in which the planning system could evolve to enable more wind farms to be built in ways that did not harm to wildlife.

This policy has guided our input to debates about bioenergy, barrages and of course windfarms and is informed by the emerging science about the impacts of renewable energy on wildlife.  This includes research published recently

 which showed that moorland breeding waders are displaced by wind farm construction and that the real threat for some species is not from the turning blades of the turbine itself, but from the construction work which happens before they are even switched on.   The study did not focus on birds of prey or migrating swans and geese, where collision with turbine blades is more often a damaging impact of wind farm development.

The policy has also guided our commitment to reduce our own carbon footprint.  We have, for nearly a decade, sought to reduce our emissions from business travel and from our estate.  I am proud at what we have achieved and am delighted to have been able to announce ten days ago our intention to build a wind turbine at our Headquarters

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