NATURALISTS OF THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE - THE BACKBONE OF NATURE CONSERVATION

1000 YEARS OF NATURAL HISTORY

37

NATURALISTS OF THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE - THE BACKBONE OF NATURE CONSERVATION BARONESS YOUNG I looked at the title and thought ‘Well that says it all really there is nothing more to say’, but there is a lot more to say. It is true that long before conservation was invented there were naturalists. Naturalists strode the earth like dinosaurs, and they had shared common characteristics: they had a fascination for the natural word, a thirst for knowledge, a feel for investigation and classification, analysis and cataloguing. Some of them also had the shared characteristic of being intrepid and brave, particularly those who strode out into foreign parts and discovered new species and habitats. Some of them were excellent at science, others were less strong in that department. Let’s just look at some of the great naturalists of the past millennium. We all of course have heard of Darwin. Darwin operated at the level of establishing “universal truths”. I went to the Galapagos to see his finches and one can understand the feeling of excitement he must have had going from island to island. Seeing these finches as a piece of living evolution with small differences eventually mounting up to large differences between the smaller and the larger finches. It was a great kick for me recently to go to Tring and handle a specimen with a label written in Darwin’s own hand. Gilbert White, another famous naturalist, operated at the other end of the scale. He didn’t sail the world looking for “universal truths”. He sat in Selborne and catalogued, in a meticulous day-inday-out way, Selborne’s natural history. Gilbert White was not brilliant at science (he thought that swallows over-wintered at the bottom of ponds) but, nevertheless, the meticulous documentation of Selborne’s natural history gives us a very living picture of what a piece of English countryside looked like 250 years ago to compare with the Selborne in modern age. It was quite a vivid evocation of the change when the Daily Telegraph, at the last celebration of Gilbert White’s anniversary, came up with the theory that there is actually more biodiversity in Selborne now than when Gilbert White was around. What they hadn’t quite noticed was that some of the rarer, more special creatures, plants and animals were gone and what we had a lot of was collared doves, magpies and carrion crows. So as far as biodiversity is concerned volume is not enough. The diversity of biodiversity is just as important and naturalists of course are very much into the diversity of biodiversity.

My favourite naturalist from history of course is Audubon - being a bird person you couldn’t expect anything else. Audubon had that wonderful trait of early naturalists - he shot and ate everything that he described and catalogued.

Reading Audubon’s text and looking at his pictures one is forced to remember that it is only comparatively recently that we have had the luxury of modern techniques and modern science and modern technology to enable us to study wildlife at closer quarters. I had a modern Audubon experience recently in Wales. R.S.P.B. was about to be given a very nice piece of wetland in Wales as a gift from an elderly lady who wanted to have it properly looked after, after she passed on. I was walking round the ‘about-to-be reserve’ with her and there was a small wooden duck hunting lodge close to one of the open

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

38

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 36

water bodies. She showed it to me, and over the fireplace were hanging stuffed crossed Spoonbills. She could see the note of horror in my eyes and she said to me “Don’t worry! - before the Wildlife and Countryside Act.” “It was a terrible story,” she said, “we shot the female the night before and the male was in such an emotional state by the morning we felt the only thing we could do was to shoot him as well.” That was the last two Spoonbills in Wales so the spirit of Audubon alas appeared to be lingering on there. Of course the great plant hunters were also very evocative creatures in their own right. I come from Scone which is the home of the Douglases, who brought the Douglas Fir back to this country. One of the largest Douglas Firs existing was the tree under which I used to play daily when I was in short socks. My school indeed was called The Robert Douglas Memorial School and a huge plethora of different and exotic species was everywhere in the habitat that I inhabited in my early years. These famous naturalists were very much collectors, cataloguers and describers.

Of course there are famous naturalists here locally, Claude Morley who founded the Suffolk Naturalists’ Society seventy years ago was a great entomologist and ClaudeTicehurst the ornithologist wrote The Birds of Suffolk in 1932, but there has been a kind of Darwinian process going on in the world of naturalists itself. Conservationists have evolved from the naturalists - the line of evolution has split and naturalist and conservationists continue on in their work on a parallel evolutionary track. For me the splitting point coincides with the point at which rates of extinction of species started to rise in this last 5% of the millennium.

The Suffolk Naturalists’ Society itself went through this stage. - about 40 years ago the Suffolk Wildlife Trust was formed as an offshoot of the S.N.S., so there we see the Darwinian divergence. Since then, conservationists and naturalists have developed along parallel evolutionary tracks. Sometimes in a symbiotic relationship, sometimes in a less symbiotic relationship.

Today we are joined by a whole range of other disciplines in the work of looking after wildlife in this country. I don’t know if you remember the Maureen Lipman advert in which she confides to the world “well of course my son - he’s an ologist” Biodiversity and its conservation is not just about the “ologists”, its about “ists” in general as well as “ologists” Its about ecologists, understanding the interactions within systems in which species exist and system ecology is becoming more and more important as we struggle in the implementation of the Biodiversity Action Plan in the country to establish properly what the relationship between species and habitats is.

We also need to engage with agronomists. Agronomists are often the most influential people on farms, they are able to make significant input into changes in agricultural systems and in agricultural practice.

Hydrologists are very important people for conservation nowadays as wetlands are one of our most threatened habitats. Management and fine-tuning of water levels and the hydrology of re-creation of habitats are absolutely fundamental if we are going to meet the targets of the Biodiversity Action Plan.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

1000 YEARS OF NATURAL HISTORY

39

There are people who are even less connected with the land and wildlife we must engage with, for example; economists. In conservation these days we depend very much on economists, because biodiversity and its conservation needs to sit at the heart of the sustainable development agenda that is coming up the political agenda at the moment. Sustainable development is very much about finding solutions that deliver for the economy and for social welfare as well as for the environment. So the economists are fundamental to what we do.

We have to establish biodiversity as a key test as to whether as a nation we are living sustainably, whether we are making decisions about every day social and economic issues that are environmentally sustainable and we need therefore to use economists and economic techniques to do that. We are using these techniques to put values on biodiversity so that people can understand them lying alongside social and economic values. We are also using economic instruments to encourage people how to behave well for the environment as opposed to behaving badly. We’ve seen some modestly successful economic instruments introduced so far - the escalator on fuel taxation designed to make us all think about whether we really do need to get in to the car, whether we can have a more fuel efficient vehicle, whether we can take the train. I hope in the next budget round that the Chancellor will stay true to his promise and introduce an aggregates tax to try and increase the amount of recycling of aggregates rather than ripping aggregate material from under S.S.S.I.s, S.P.A.s and S.A.C.s. I hope that the Chancellor will continue to keep his bottle and introduce an effective climate change levy to help mitigate some of the pollution issues that are leading to climate change because that is an important issue for biodiversity. We are also using economists to demonstrate that the environment and biodiversity are economic assets and this is particularly true here in Suffolk where a large part of the wealth of this county is totally bound up with its biodiversity both in terms of its attractive landscapes for tourism, its agricultural processes but also because it is a an attractive location for inward investment which can create jobs and enhance the quality of life.

We also need social scientists because of the social element of sustainable development. We will not win the arguments for biodiversity and conservation unless we can demonstrate that they are relevant to people. Unless we can engage people with them and show that preserving and conserving our biodiversity is important for communities and for rural development. Much of the wealth of these communities is bound up with its biodiversity, its environment and its landscape and that’s good for people because it creates employment and stable rural communities.

We need political scientists. Many of the policies that impact on land management or natural resources need to be amended to be more biodiversity friendly. Agriculture polices particularly, fishery and forestry polices, but there are other polices beyond those that seem immediately relevant to conservation which are none-the-less fundamental. World trade policy in the next World trade round is probably going to be the most fundamental thing internationally for biodiversity conservation in the next 2–3 years. If we get that horribly wrong, we are all going to have great difficulty in our individual countries in keeping the conservation momentum going.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

40

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 36

Technologists are another group of people we need. Conservation is becoming more and more dependent upon information systems. Particularly as naturalists you will understand the need for good systems for recording, storing and manipulating data and for presenting it. However, the technologists operate at the other end of the spectrum as well. For example, I was at a splendidly uplifting conference recently where a group of practical land managers got together under the umbrella of IMPACT - an initiative English Nature set up to bring together conservation land managers to share their experience of what works and what doesn’t work in practice. They talked about all sorts of things - like ‘flying flocks’ which I know that you have several of in Suffolk (they don’t have wings - don’t worry), but the technology side of that conference was the invention of new ragwort pullers and sundry other things of great importance for conservation management.

Most importantly, I think, we need the educationalists. Much of what we care about needs to be passed on to succeeding generations. We need to find ways of integrating conservation and biodiversity in to school’s curriculum, into further education and into learning for life. So we can gather more and more people round who understand what wildlife is about and its importance for people.

So naturalists and conservationists have had quite a long symbiotic relationship but we need all these other “ists” around us now in order to do the job.

Conservation depends very much on the sorts of skills field naturalists have. We have recently been looking at English Nature’s science processes because it was very much a misunderstood process. English Nature isn’t a body crammed full of scientists doing lots of monitoring and original research - we are simply not funded to do that. We are a conservation body and we’re very much a Government Agency. However, what we can do is try to demonstrate what field work and science is needed in order to be able to meet the targets and priorities that are important for nature conservation. English Nature’s science process is about showing what needs to be done in the science, naturalist and monitoring fields; collating work that is being done by a plethora of bodies to try and solve conservation problems and, from time to time, commissioning original monitoring and scientific work where there are gaps that need to be filled to enable our understanding of a particular conservation problem.

The parallel evolutionary track of conservationists and naturalists means that its now quite possible for staff in the conservation organisations not to be excellent field naturalists. They have come up a different path, and have different skills, so that they may not be good at recognising what they are trying to save, or have in-depth knowledge of that particular species or taxon.

The challenge for the future is where are we going to get good naturalists of the future? Universities are not automatically turning out people who have good field skills. The importance of societies like this is that those with a keen amateur interest, or those who have come through a professional biological education or conservation education but need to learn more, can come and work with fellow keen naturalists and gain the field skills that they need and

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

1000 YEARS OF NATURAL HISTORY

41

keep those refreshed. I’m not a biologist and I always feel deeply guilty about that fact, but I do go out on Friday night with a botanist and do another set of quadrats so that I can try and keep my hand in. It’s a bit like bird watching, if you don’t go to the estuaries for a while you forget how you can tell one wader from another. So its not just about giving people original field skills, but how, in a very busy and complex conservation world, we can keep those skills upto-date.

I’m delighted to be sharing a platform with some incredibly eminent naturalists - Oliver Rackham, Francis Rose, Gathorne Cranbrook, Pat Morris, a whole variety of people who are famous in their field and who have been very charismatic leaders for the naturalists’ cause. There are some very eminent names in Suffolk and I never know whether or not to mention names because: a) you embarrass the people you name and b) you may find that you have not named somebody who is going to feel desperately left out. However, let me have a try. Here in Suffolk there is Yvonne Leonard the Breckland plant specialist, there is nobody else really who has that knowledge anywhere else in the world. Every single Suffolk Bat Group volunteer knows more about bats in Suffolk than anybody else in the world but especially people like Nick Woods and Alan Miller. Margaret Grimwade has shaken hands with every badger in Suffolk. There is a huge range of Suffolk Ornithologists’ Group members who have produced data for the forthcoming Birds of Suffolk Atlas and who are regularly out in all weathers doing WEBS counts and Common Birds Census and a whole variety of other bird counts. Of course we have our own Gilbert White here in Maurice Charlton - the Gilbert White of Sudbury who knows every bat, badger, Great Crested Newt and practically everything else within 10 miles of Sudbury and shares his enthusiasm as much as he can. We have local heroes in naturalism as well as the national and international heroes.

Conservation organisations need these local heroes because we need them to understand what’s going on. I think that its true to say that if the British Trust for Ornithology and all of the dedicated volunteers and monitors who work with them had not been doing the Common Bird Census and other regular censuses of bird life we would not have know that common agricultural policy was the single, biggest cause of environmental damage in this country at the moment. It was very late in the day when the data that the B.T.O. produced really hit our headlines and we began to understand that there was something very, very serious going on here. I think that we have learnt a lesson from that in terms of how to keep an eye on data on a much more regular basis in order to understand what declines are happening. The B.T.O. data was also useful for another rather happier event when “set aside” - that ghastly policy that nobody liked because it was about diminishing surfaces and about leaving land untilled - a thing that farmers don’t like doing. It was never-the-less a policy that I loved because it was the only major policy right across the face of our arable countryside that gave wildlife a little bit of a chance, even if it was a very transitory chance. It was only because of the B.T.O. data on farmland birds that we could see that once “set aside” was at its height that we had actually managed to stem the decline of farmland bird numbers as a result of “set aside” policy being there for a very brief period. Alas “set aside” is no

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

42

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 36

longer at that high level, but it did give us a clue as to the scale and size of changes in agricultural policy and practices in this country needed even to flatten out some of these declines in farmland birds which we know are also mirrored in the insects of farmland and the rare arable weeds. So conservation organisations really need good naturalists and the information that they produce to tell them what’s happening. The Suffolk Naturalist’s Society yourselves have produced a whole range of publications about orchids, freshwater snails, butterflies and practically everything else that crawls or creeps. These are really important snapshots of this county’s wildlife and will remain important as an historical record documenting what’s happening in the countryside, well into the next millennium. We are all waiting for the forthcoming Birds of Suffolk Atlas and the publications of the Mammals of Suffolk which I know is based on many years of survey material which many in this room have been involved in collecting.

Let me just talk about priorities for conservation for a moment so you can understand what the needs of the conservation movement are and what we will be looking to the naturalist community for over the immediate future. My priorities really fall into three chunks, first of all the special sites -the S.S.S.I.s, the European designated sites, Special Areas for Conservation and the Special Protection Areas. Of the S.S.S.I.s there is one ghastly figure that sticks in my mind and that is that 29% of the conservation features of S.S.S.I.s are still in unfavourable condition and they are not improving. - that has got to be a priority for the S.S.S.I. series and for conservation on S.S.S.I.s in the future.

One of the things we need is that when the Queen stands up with her little, half-mooned spectacles and her speech in her hand at the time of the Queen’s speech in five weeks time to start off by saying “My government will introduce legislation for the better protection of S.S.S.I.s” - now when she says that I will be sure that it’s going to be there. But she hasn’t said it yet, and there is still five weeks to go. Five weeks is a long time in politics so harass your MP and write to anybody you can. We want the S.S.S.I. legislation in the Queen’s Speech. Associated with that is not just legislation, but a whole variety of changes promised with it that will make it possible for us to be effective in getting more of these unfavourable S.S.S.I.s in better condition.

Monitoring will be vital, we don’t know what the conditions on S.S.S.I.s are like unless we monitor them and we certainly won’t know if we are getting any better unless we continue to monitor. The naturalist’s skills have another major contribution to make to the improvement of S.S.S.I. quality and that is the whole business of understanding autecology - understanding how individual species live. The story I always tell is about bitterns and reed beds.

R.S.P.B. used to think there were lots of bitterns in this country -about 50–60, until somebody had the bright idea of recording bittern voice patterns and discovered that instead of 40 or 50 or 60 bitterns happily breeding away in this country, we had actually got about half that number. Instead of sitting still and booming, they were rushing around booming here, there and in the next place.

When we were counting three bitterns, there was actual only one bittern. We are now down to about 20 or below so we are really close to the edge in terms of bittern conservation. There was an example of a piece of observation and

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

1000 YEARS OF NATURAL HISTORY

43

science bringing a much more real appreciation of true bittern numbers.

However, more important was the realisation that bitterns need reed beds, and there was a lot of work amongst a whole variety of partners to improve the quality of existing reed beds and to create more. It is true to say that we do have more and better quality reed beds, but we do not have any more bitterns yet and there we have a missing link - we still don’t quite understand what the bittern needs to thrive. That is where field naturalists and observation are going to be absolutely vital alongside other scientific processes to try and work out how we manage our reed beds to prevent the extinction of bitterns in this country. So S.S.S.I.s have got to be a big priority for collaboration between conservationists and naturalists.

The second priority of course is the Biodiversity Action Plan. The B.A.P. is a pretty unique phenomenon in British public life. I don’t know any other walk of life where there has been such a widespread effort among statutory bodies and voluntary bodies, individuals, businesses, local and national government to produce a common hymn sheet of priorities for this field of human endeavour. We have got to make sure that we keep the biodiversity process lively and exciting and charismatic so that people want to be engaged with it. It is a way in which we can harness all of our various efforts to the same priorities and really make a difference. At the heart of the B.A.P. are action plans for species and habitats. Let me just dwell on some of the work that is going on species. - I’m personally tremendously disappointed because I wanted to champion a B.A.P. species - it was called Young’s helleborine. Dr Young, who found it, didn’t much like the idea of me championing it - but tough! It lived only on four sites - two in England and two in Scotland all four of them were heavy metal contaminated slag heaps so it did seem to me to be the sort of plant that needed a friend or two. Alas Dr Young pulled a fast one, just as I was about to formally become the B.A.P. champion for this species, by declaring that he was wrong and that it wasn’t a species after all. It was one of these wretched things that mutate and that it had mutated on into something completely different so there is no longer a Young’s Helleborine for me to champion.

There are lots and lots of other species in the B.A.P. and many of you will have been involved either in studying them, counting them or simply being fascinated by them. English Nature’s Species Recovery Programme works with a whole range of partners focussing on individual species and what they need to recover. There are about 200 species in the Species Recovery Programme at the moment and we have had some success. Ten have now been brought back from the brink of extinction in this country, another 30 have reached significant milestones in their recovery. The naturalist input into that project has been absolutely fundamental, particularly where the rarer and less charismatic species are concerned. I was accusing the Wildlife Trust this morning of nicking all the ones with big eyes and fur and fascination. They have got the otter, the red squirrel, the dormouse and the ones that the public loves , but who loves the medicinal leech? or Lundy cabbage? Only I could possibly love Primula scotica which David Bellamy says reminds him of me because it’s pink, it’s Scottish and fortunately she’s not small and delicate. We

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

44

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 36

need naturalists who are interested in the rare and abstruse and the stuff that lives in difficult places that the public is never going to get excited about.

These species are all part of biodiversity and are just as much on the brink.

The third priority for conservation is the wider countryside; not the special sites, not the focus of the B.A.P., but what is happening generally in our countryside. When I first went to English Nature I was amazed at how much work we do behind the scenes influencing in great detail a whole range of policies right across the face of public life in this country. It’s a bit like a swan, our policy work is very serene on the surface, but below the surface we’re paddling like hell. The most important one is agricultural policy. In the recent round of European reform of the Common Agricultural Policy we didn’t do very well, but one thing happened that I am not quite sure the UK ministers twigged when they agreed to it. Some decisions could be made at UK level as opposed to having to be resolved at European level. That was pretty important because up until now when we pressed for some sorts of agricultural reform that would be good for biodiversity we were told ‘terribly sorry we can’t do it because of Europe’, but now some of these very key decisions are in the hands of our Minister of Agriculture. I have just two simple things I want him to do. One is about the balance of money spent on schemes that are for wildlife-friendly farming and for sustainable agriculture as opposed to the old 97% of C.A.P. that is spent on intensive and damaging agriculture. There is a principle called ‘modulation’ - it’s simply about robbing the rich to pay the poor. It’s about taking a tiny slice of that big chunk of money that is in mainstream agricultural support and putting it into the agrienvironment and rural development small pots that currently exist. Much of it will still go to the same farmers, but it will be for different purposes, and it will be in support of an agriculture that’s not only good for wildlife, but also good for rural communities and good for the economics of farming. None of which are delivered by current agricultural policy. I would suggest that you all write to your MPs recommending that ‘modulation’ in farming is a good thing for biodiversity.

The second thing I would like him to do is to attach a set of low level basic environmental conditions to the 97% of mainstream payments. Every farmer who gets public support should be asked to do a very modest, basic set of environmental objectives. In that way we could get the totality of the farming countryside beginning to be slightly more environmentally friendly. That’s called “environmental conditionality”- just in case you should happen to write to your MP. I think that the main message for C.A.P. is that we have got to get the money not just to work once in terms of economic support to farmers, but to work twice or three times over for its living. Not just delivering economic benefits, but also social and environmental benefits. It reminds me of an Aberdonian farmer who died very suddenly. His son, also Aberdonian (and extremely mean, as Aberdonians of course aren’t,), went into the Aberdeen Press & Journal office to put the obituary notice in. He thought ‘I had better make this short because I don’t want to spend too much money on it’. So he went up to the girl at the desk and said ‘I want to put an obituary notice in, it will say “Sandy Read, Boghead, dead”. The girl on the desk told him that he

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

1000 YEARS OF NATURAL HISTORY

45

could get another three words in for the minimum charge. He thought about it, and the following day, when the Press & Journal was published, the obituary read “Sandy Read, Boghead, dead. Volvo for Sale” - that’s what we want from Common Agricultural Policy money!

There is going to be a very exciting development in agricultural policy which you’ve contributed to and it’s coming up fast on the rails in the next few days or weeks in the middle of November. Government, in a fit of enthusiasm when it wrote the Sustainable Development Strategy, decided that it would have some indicators of sustainable development -13 of them. They didn’t like the words sustainable development, so they called it “indicators of the quality of life”. One of those 13 indicators is about birds - because there was good data about birds to show the effect of agricultural policy on their populations.

Naturalists were able to demonstrate to government, in a very public way, that their polices were doing nothing to stem the decline of farmland birds and that this has an influence on the quality of life. We could not have done this without keen ornithologists out there in the field doing this work. What’s more we are going to be able to back this up further with a piece of work that English Nature has just had the results of. Again, based on amateur observations. Bird decline numbers are virtually mirrored in the decline of arable weed plants in the arable areas. We are beginning to amass the evidence that this is not just about “tweety” birds, but it is about our biodiversity generally and I think that that is a tribute to the dedication over many years of field naturalists.

Let me just finish by talking about naturalists for the future. There are three things that we need to do for the future where naturalists will have an absolutely fundamental role. Firstly, in explaining to those who aren’t keen on this stuff what is important. English Nature has been drawing up Natural Area Profiles to describe what’s important in biodiversity terms in particular areas of the country. Here in Suffolk you are well equipped to do this and much of the data we have used has been drawn from the work done by naturalists in this county. We are now using this data at regional level with new regional government processes for economic development. We need to get over at a regional level what is important in biodiversity. Because if biodiversity is a key test as to whether decisions are sustainable, we need to know what biodiversity we have already got, and which bits of it are the most important indicators of the quality of biodiversity and conservation in their region. We need good data, clearly laid out and simply explained in a relevant way to the people who are making decisions. We also need it to be exciting so that people begin to get the “bug” and understand why we are so nuts about all this stuff.

The second role in which future naturalists will be important is in setting the targets. B.A.P. set a whole range of targets for species and habitat recovery in this country. The process I described in terms of the ‘quality of life’ indicators at national level is going to be repeated at regional level. We will need to use local naturalists’ data to interpret to people at regional level what sort of targets they should be aiming for in terms of their biodiversity.

The third area that naturalists have a key role in, is in helping keep the score. Somebody once said to me that football would be “a bloody awful game

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)

46

Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 36

if nobody kept the score” and conservation is a bit like that. For many, many years we undertook conservation without ever keeping the score. We didn’t know what we had before we started, we did a bit of conservation and then we didn’t know what we had at the end of it all. Now we have to be much more explicit. We are dealing with a whole variety of players in this field who have a very business-like approach. We have got to be equally business-like. We need very good monitoring data and we need to understand what’s going on within ecological processes in order to demonstrate whether the decisions and actions, taken by a whole variety of players and policies, are actually producing the goods for biodiversity. We need good scientific evidence and we need good data and monitoring and I think that sets up quite big challenges for naturalists for the future. It needs excellent organisation, a wide range of volunteers and a much tougher approach to common standards. We must all count, record, store and manipulate data to a common standard. Data joined together can be immensely powerful which it can’t be if it’s in your back pocket in your filing cabinet. The value of independent and neutral Record Centres at a local level cannot be underestimated. The initiative for the National Biodiversity Network which is aimed at taking the processes of the Biological Record Centres and gluing them together to make a national accessible data set for a whole variety of users is absolutely fundamental.

Campaigning for getting enough money to set that up is one of my key priorities.

Conservation is at an exciting time, there is lots to play for we are making good progress in some areas. Although, if you get out of the wrong side of the bed in the morning, it is easy to get depressed about some of the things we’re not managing to crack. Naturalists of the future are vital and societies like this are important particularly in attracting new blood into the system - young people who you can share your excitement with so that they can become the excellent field biologists of the future. If conservation is like football and somebody needs to keep the score you are the referees for nature conservation and I want to thank all of you for the work that you do and the interest you show and very good luck to the society for the future. (text prepared by D. K. and M. N. Sanford from a recording made at the conference) Baroness Young English Nature Northminster House Peterborough PE1 1UA

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)