Like any other publication working to a deadline industry journal, Gun Trade News, can be forgiven for sometimes missing out on a story; however, there are limits and its October issue set some kind of record when on its appointment page, Movers and Shakers, it announced that the trade’s business body, the Gun Trade Association, was seeking a new director. The item spelt out the job’s key roles and invited hopefuls to get their applications in by September 30th. All of which will have come as big surprise to Simon West, whose appointment to the role was confirmed last July.
Elsewhere in the same issue Gun Trade News did not let itself down, especially on its Shooting in the Media page, where the excellent Caroline Roddis interviewed Ian Gregory, the man behind the You Forgot the Birds website. For those unfamiliar with it, You Forgot the Birds was the brainchild of a group of shooters among them Sir Ian Botham, who as both a passionate shooter and bird enthusiast, had become despairing of the RSPB’s focus on raising money and then spending only a fraction of it on the welfare of its charges. Gregory has had considerable success in alerting the wider world to the way in which some and perhaps many RSPB reserves may have become ecological sinkholes; a suspicion borne out by the RSPB’s long term and categorical refusal to audit the numbers of birds in its charge. This suspicion becomes further entrenched by the way in which the body has now enthusiastically embraced predator control, something it has widely condemned in the past when practiced by gamekeepers and landowners. However, what may turn out to be You Forgot the Birds’ and Gregory’s greatest triumph may be in turning the lunatic fringe of the bird world against the RSPB. Already the twittersphere has been alive with vituperative exchanges between those who oppose any kind of controls on predators and RSPB insiders, who know first-hand (but dare not speak of it publicly) about the carnage being wrought on some of its reserves. They will also know that the policies it has adopted to keep the problems at bay – feeding red kites, building badger proof fences etc.,) simply delays the problem and/or shifts it elsewhere. If these early signs go the way they did with the RSPCA, we can expect the extremists to attempt to gain a foothold on the RSPB Council, followed by a long and tedious period of in-fighting, before common sense triumphs (as it is now doing at the RSPCA) and everybody at then finally remembers the birds.