Hen harrier

Some people are very keen on goshawks. See, for example, reference 1. Other people are very keen on hen harriers and I remember my father coming as close to excitement as he ever came in public when he spotted one over some moor as we motored across Wales on our way to a holiday cottage.

And some journalists have bad days, which they indulge with a rather bad tempered rant about something or other. So on Saturday, one was given a centre page spread in the DT in which to dilate about those awful people at RSPB and RSPCA who have the hates for people who like to kill animals for sport. I associate to all those fine ladies in days gone by who used to watch their menfolk kill each other for sport, then taking their pick from among the survivors. Days gone by which included 14th century England and 19th century Mexico. Then to all those townsfolk who flock down to the bull ring to see the sport there.

It seems that the trouble with hen harriers is that they like to eat grouse, so there is some tension between the people who are keen on hen-harriers and the people who are keen on grouse, with the former being into tweeting and the latter being into shooting.

Now I am not that keen on either the RSPB or the RSPCA. They might do good work (although the feeble bird identifier offered by the RSPB continues to irritate me), but they also soak up a lot of money which might be put to better use. So I was interested to read a claim in this article that fund-raising, management and advertising consume near half of the RSPB budget, when RSPB themselves claimed until recently that they spent 90% of their budget on good works.

So off to their web site where their annual reports were invisible, at least to me. So off to the Charity Commission web site where their annual report for the year ending March 2013 was visible. I reproduce one at reference 2 for the convenience of readers. From which I find that their annual income is of the order of £120m of which about £30m was spent on generating that income; a bit like a large chunk of government expenditure going to service government debt. £85m was spent on what they call charitable purposes, and of that £85m about £30m was spent on conservation activities, things like putting up huts and bossy notices on Exminster Marshes. The rest going on research, policy, communication and education. So it looks as if the figures could indeed be so construed to get to the near half figure above - but I don't think that would be very fair. Policy, education and education are fairly muddy waters, but waters in which the likes of RSPB are properly paddling. One hopes though, that it is a condition of employment there, that one gets one's wellies into real muddy waters at least once a month.

All that said and leaving the hen harriers aside, I do not much care for the rather corporate style which the larger and more successful charities have adopted. Maybe it is a condition for success these days, but I still don't care for it and I am nostalgic about the days when charities were run on more amateur lines and their headquarters were not overrun with lobbyists, management consultants and other fat cats.

But good that it is so easy to check up on these things through the Charity Commission web site when the charity one is interested in seems a bit coy. Not the National Trust though - their annual report for the year ending March 2014 (not 2013) is very easy to find on their web site. A legacy of some ex-civil servant doing a stint as their chief executive?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/goshawk-white.html.

Reference 2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/rspb1.pdf.

PS: internet connection very bad here in Epsom yesterday, perhaps because everybody was surfing around in search of presents, although the geekorama was disturbed by Microsoft burning up a lot of disc time on my PC on some indexing activity or other. Things much better this morning.