The Cape Bird Club

Letter to BirdLife SA members  –  October 2007

Welcome to all the migrants, both birds and the Springboks -- after their six-week flight to France. Welcome to the waders and welcome to the swallows. BirdLife’s most enthusiastic membership has had functions for all of those. As always spirits lift when Spring arrives with promises of summer.

Much has been happening at BirdLife, from huge representation by BirdLife SA in Nairobi for the all Africa meeting to a delegation flying to the Eastern Cape for an excellent imbizo with the East Cape Bird Club, at which there was, as the politicians say, a frank and fruitful exchange of ideas. Once again, lack of communication between your headquarters, your council and supportive bird clubs and members was pinpointed as a problem. These bi-monthly letters are a small contribution towards improving communication.

Invitations to great events keep arriving, and I can only wonder at just how much is happening in birding in this country, how much is done by volunteers and how far we have come in just a few years. Birding routes multiply like mynahs, yet behind each one is a hard-working team logging up more meeting hours than enjoyable birding times, for which they deserve our thanks. Then there are the bird fairs, proliferating everywhere for the benefit of us all.

Yet my overwhelming feeling this month is of frustration. There is so much exciting stuff to be done by BirdLife and my limitations keep us from achieving implementation. The one area in which I was confident we were doing well was funding. A close look at our books by BirdLife SA’s audit committee showed this is not so; we continue to live a little from hand to mouth. Finances are in reasonable shape so we are not bankrupt, but this year we are headed for quite a loss and will have to dip into our new sustainability fund, which is a great pity. Some pretty tough steps have been taken to make sure this does not happen again next year and we declared September to be fund-raising month for all your managers, who were asked to put other work on the back burner. Naturally BirdLife’s managers prefer to do their real jobs, from conservation and education to protection and tourism, but without funding there are no jobs to do. We were mildly successful; much remains to be done on bequests and corporate membership.

Good news is that at the time of writing 32 Important Bird Area (IBA) assessments have been completed and Neil Smith expects our members to have done 51 by the end of the year. That’s off a base of zero  (England’s first score against the Springboks in France). Not quite as good is the progress on the Sabap 2, the atlasing project, where 392 atlas cards for 260 pentads have been completed by 571 registered atlasers  of whom only 74 have been active. I am aware the atlasing sounds daunting, but once you start you’ll find it easier than you think. Remember the first time you used a cellphone. Not that I now understand all the things my cell does, but similarly, you don’t have to be an expert on atlasing, just tick the birds you see. And defining the boundaries of pentads is not so tough, although a TomTom or other crafty device is a help.

Your Council has agreed to have a strategy session over three days in February 2008, a time sacrifice for which I am grateful. A quick whip-round the room at the October meeting to discover what Council members thought were our three priorities as a council revealed this list:

  • Profile, funding, membership;

  • Membership, marketing, funding;

  • IBAs, shorebirds, endangered birdsMembership, conservation, branding;

  • Sabap 2, regional fora, PR;

  • Regional fora, conservation league, corporate membership;

  • Youth, member diversification, sustained funding;

  • Marketing, bequests, bird routes;

  • Black membership, funding, partnerships with government and NGOs; communication with birders and BLSA, getting IBAs declared protected areas, RAMSAR site legislative protection;

  • Profile, new birds routes in Gauteng and Northwest, guide training changes; branding, membership, funding;

  • Legacy, profile and fundraising.

Your Executive Director, Prof Gerhard Verdoorn, the chief executive of BirdLife SA, is required to tell Council what his current priorities are. He has so much on his plate and manages to do so much it is important to us to establish his current focus. His five at this October meeting:

  • Fundraising, 

  • invasive alien species, 

  • misuse of pesticides, 

  • the Africa CAP meeting in Nairobi (where SA played the leading role), and international lobbying.

  • Besides those he added the attention he wished to give to getting the “Big Six” acronyms in conservation working together as a powerful team – BLSA, EWT, WESSA, WWF, Wilderness Foundation, BotSoc. Teamwork achieves so much more, just ask the Springboks.

Among the ideas I’d like to see implemented in the next few years before the Soccer World Cup is upon us in 2010 is to have billboards at each IBA explaining its importance and detailing interesting information about the birds for which it has been declared an IBA; I’d like us to get R1 for every swallow that returns to the Mount Moreland site from airlines, the airport and travelers who use that new airport; a “welcome to the migrants” march in every town throughout South Africa on the same day, perhaps the middle weekend in October; more black members so our current membership’s incredible knowledge, expertise and wisdom about birds and birding is preserved and developed; to get BirdLife working well with the scientists; to get a co-coordinated image of BirdLife developed and marketed by an advertising agency, hopefully paid for by a major corporate donor as we could not justify using core funding to sing our own praises; to develop a photo database with free-to-use pictures of each of our species; and of course to get adequate funding from corporates, bequests and members so that we concentrate on tasks we do well for the next three years instead of devoting time struggling to get funds. I’d like us to get 100 shares donated from 100 companies to establish a trust from which we only draw dividends.

We have one more Council meeting before the end of the year and before our strategy sessions in February. We are doing all we can to make our projects SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. Dr Verdoorn has produced a “wish list” or menu for funders. It is both frightening and exhilarating. It is attached so you can see some things your organisation is tackling. Makes the Springbok scrum look like girls.

Regards
Peter Sullivan
Chairman

                          

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