ANOTHER VOICE
How the RSPB is contriving to drive us all mad
AUBERON WAUGH
Whatever one may have against but- terflies — and I agree that in the present plague affecting the entire West Country, they can be intensely irritating — at least they make no noise. Nor, unlike rottweil- ers and ladybirds, do they often attack human beings. Many have forgotten the old age pensioner who was bitten to death by ladybirds outside Minehead in the last great plague of 1976. Up to then, people had thought that ladybirds were disappear- ing, and a few old dears had written to the newspapers saying what a shame it was. Then they came back, like something out of Hitchcock. Another such plague is promised for this year. The rumour went round West Somerset that the corpse of the old age pensioner, when they eventually got to him, was a more horrible sight than anything seen in the Blitz. What made the man's death particularly poignant was that he was a visitor to the neighbourhood, who had come to enjoy the beauties of the countryside. We country-folk are used to the hazards and know how to protect ourselves against them by various wily tricks, like never going out of doors unless we have to, or covering ourselves with sacks and binder-twine when we do.
As I say, I have never yet seen butter- flies attack a human being, but then we had never heard of homicidal ladybirds before 1976, and I would not be at all surprised to learn of some appalling tragedy, almost certainly in Somerset, where the whitened bones of an amateur naturalist, or ecolog- ist, or environmental enthusiast, or what- ever these people now call themselves, are found with only a pair of damp, horn- rimmed spectacles glinting optimistically over the eye sockets to serve as a clue. I have no doubt that even butterflies can be goaded beyond endurance by the yelps and coos of these people. It will be a brave butterfly fancier who ventures down to West Somerset this summer. The fields are swarming with vipers, too — another protected species — and in the present state of government cuts, it is unlikely that any anti-snakebite serum will be available.
I must admit that I am on the side of the butterflies against the butterfly-fanciers, if only because butterflies make no noise. Where egg-collectors are concerned, my sympathies are different. A recent survey of noise pollution, identifying the noises which people found most troublesome, was conducted recently by Bupa. It had two significant omissions. The first was the noise of other people's television sets, which must surely be the biggest single source of annoyance for people living in towns. Dogs, pneumatic drills and burglar alarms were mentioned, even children (or `kids', at any mention of which even the most toughened criminal is expected to burst into tears), but not television.
The other significant omission, affecting most particularly those who live in the surburbs and country places, was the rack- et set up every morning at this time of year by song-birds and other feathered friends, sometimes called the Dawn Chorus. Birds, too, you see, are sacred. At least half of all country and suburban dwellers must suffer from this persecution, and nobody dares complain because we have all been brain- washed into thinking birdsong pretty. So it is, sometimes, when you have two or three of them on the job of an evening; six or seven hundred of them, yelling and shriek- ing their silly heads off at five o'clock in the morning, are more than anyone can be expected to endure. I have often observed how soon majors and other people who retire to live in Somerset tend to go mad, but I always attributed it to the influence of loneliness, and listening to BBC radio. Now I tend to think it is the result of being woken up every morning by the hideous cacophony of these warbling cretins. But what finally drives so many country dwel- lers round the bend is the social inhibition on complaining about it. We are simply not allowed to say that songbirds are anything but delightful. Then the poor old things turn on their radios and, as often as not, have to listen to more birdsong. . . .
I do not think it is because I am getting older, although my mother-in-law, who spent her married life in suburban Surrey, was complaining about it 30 years ago. I honestly think the problem is getting worse. When I was young, nearly every boy in the neighbourhood and several girls used to collect birds' eggs. The same was true of our parents' and grandparents' generations, as several mouldering collec- tions of birds' eggs in the attics — and in most people's attics I imagine — testify. For my own part, I had no patience with birds' eggs as a boy but used to shoot small birds with an air-rifle, sometimes account- ing for five or six a day. Between us, we kept the brutes in their place.
With the new sentimentality about birds, which is no more than a reflection, as I see it, of a sinister burgeoning misanthropy, this is no longer possible. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which disposes an income of many millions of pounds a year, runs its own paramilitary police force, owns or controls vast tracts of land, claims the right to enter and search any citizen's home, let alone his land, has now set up an infra-red surveillance system and is trying to set up a nation-wide system of informers, along the lines of Cuba's Citizens' Council for the Protection of the Revolution, or Stalin's secret police.
In my time I have complained about the activities of the American Drugs Enforce- ment Agency in certain benign and easy- going countries of the Far East; even about the excessive powers of our own Customs and Excise, with its small army of snoopers and informants. But the RSPB is a greater threat to the liberty and sanity of this country than an oppressive government agency, because it has for members single- issue fanatics who appear completely im- pervious in their self-righteousness and in their ignorance of the civil rights of others.
Spokesmen for the RSPB this week claimed that extra powers were necessary to protect our British birds against greedy German and Arab collectors: 'The Ger- mans don't have many birds of their own, so there's a strong market for ours. Falcon- ry is a big pastime in the Middle East so the birds are worth even more money if they are sold to Arabs.'
But among the new powers demanded by Mr Peter Robinson, described as 'Chief RSPB Investigator', was a curfew on all egg collections, forcing them to report to the police every day during the breeding season. Am I alone in feeling that I would be perfectly happy to see every surviving osprey eaten by German war criminals if the RSPB would confine its activities to rescuing seagulls and encouraging sub- urban bird-baths?
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