Bird Fair – another update
I thought I knew a bit about the Bird Fair but it’s interesting to find out new things. And there seems to be a quite a lot to find out about the Bird Fair too – from what people say.
There is a wikipedia page about the Bird Fair – I don’t think I’d seen that before – click here. We should not believe everything on wikipedia but if true then this shows that the contribution of the 2019 Bird Fair to BirdLife International was the lowest since 2002.
I’d assumed that the Bird Fair was a stand-alone charity but it isn’t. It is a subsidiary charitable company (that may not be the correct term but it’s close) of the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust (see here) with its own set of accounts (see here).
I find accounts quite difficult to understand but those of you who are more adept with them might find something of interest.
The Bird Fair is, formally, much less of a joint venture between L&RWT and RSPB than I had imagined.
Over the years the Bird Fair has been a successful and growing event but in recent years it has (as I have written in this blog) seemed to me to be in slight decline. A rainy 2019 (coupled with other pressures to do with travel insurance requirements) and competition from other events, then followed by the impossibility of holding an on-the-ground event in 2020, and the uncertainty of any such event being possible in 2021 surely put the future of Bird Fair into the ‘questionable’ category? And the driving force behind Bird Fair, Tim Appleton (originally with Martin Davies from the RSPB), is no longer involved with all of this.
I wonder what the RSPB, BirdLife International and the long term sponsors of the event see as the future of Bird Fair. I hope that all this is under active consideration and I’m not sure that those decisions are wisely left to a single county Wildlife Trust.
I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to this subject now and again.
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