WHY do you keep printing letters from Ian Mitchell? We all know that he has an obsessive hatred of the RSPB and perverts the story of their fight to save our corncrakes.
He says there are millions of corncrakes in Russia. Well, I don't want to have to go to Russia to find a bird that there used to be thousands of here in Scotland. The logic of his argument is that so long as someone else cares for their environment we don't need to take care of ours. It is utterly selfish and reprehensible. What happens when agricultural changes in Russia start to cause declines?
He argues that that the RSPB doesn't care about the trapping of corncrakes in North Africa, but ignores the fact that it was RSPB research which uncovered the trapping in the first place. The RSPB's international work for bird conservation is renowned.
But it is Mr Mitchell's underlying assumption that beggars belief. Does he seriously believe that Scottish conservationists should ignore the plight of corncrakes in their own country and then lecture other people about how to save their wildlife? This view represents the worst form of patronising, arrogant cultural imperialism.
Despite constant telling he refuses to understand that you can't save this bird on reserves. It is a bird of farm and croftland, and that is why efforts to save it by working with crofters and farmers is the right approach for the RSPB to take. The 11 RSPB reserves in Orkney were not established to save the corncrake, but to help a whole range of other species. They include, for instance, sea cliffs and heather moorland, places where no self-respecting corncrake would ever breed. To argue that the corncrake isn't hugely successful on such reserves is fatuous nonsense.
Letter pages thrive on controversy but this one is beyond the threadbare. It has become one man's obsession based on a gross distortion of the truth. I am heartily sick of it.
Rodger Spillane,
13 Cathcart Place, Edinburgh.
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