Can’t we meet in the middle?

The RSPB’s CEO visits Flea Barn to try to find some middle ground, but Richard Negus fears the yawning chasm is too deep

My vehicle’s windscreen once sported three car stickers. Beneath a Game Conservancy partridge and a Back British Farming tractor, an avocet in a white roundel delved into the letters R, S, P and B. No longer is this the case. The divide between the RSPB and the shooting community has widened, becoming increasingly visceral over the past two decades.

The charity’s recent alliances with pressure groups and its own negative lobbying on topics such as general licences, gamebird releasing and moorland management have left many former allies feeling at odds with an organisation they once largely supported.

In an effort to discover why the shooting community has seemingly so fallen out of love with the RSPB, we invited its CEO, Beccy Speight, to visit Flea Barn. Our aim was two-fold; to let Beccy see first-hand how shooting and conservation aid modern farming and stewardship in bringing about meaningful nature recovery, and to learn where our similarities end and our differences begin.

Beccy’s tour was led by farmer Ed Nesling and Richard Gould, my Purdey Award-winning business partner. I trailed behind, accompanied by Eliza Leat and Mark Nowers, the RSPB’s Operation Turtle Dove officers for Suffolk and Essex, who have helped us survey the bird life of Flea Barn.

We stopped to watch a flock of yellowhammers flit away from a laid hedge, which gave us a chance to pause and get down to the business of the visit. Richard raised a topic we repeatedly returned to — the lethal control of pests and predators.