The RSPB has spent 15 years spreading disease, yet still thinks it knows best

This week the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds issued new guidance on garden bird feeding. From 1 May, it says, people should take their feeders down. Flat bird tables should be retired permanently. Water should be changed daily. Feeders should be cleaned weekly and moved regularly to prevent contaminated debris accumulating beneath them.

It is, on the face of it, sensible advice. The problem is that the RSPB has known it should be giving this advice for more than fifteen years and chose not to.

During that time, a disease called trichomonosis spread with devastating effect through Britain's garden bird populations. Transmitted through contaminated food sources at precisely the kind of busy, crowded feeders the RSPB has always promoted, the disease has been catastrophic for greenfinches and chaffinches. Two million greenfinches have been lost from British gardens. The species is now red listed. The RSPB's own Big Garden Birdwatch data tells the story plainly: greenfinches ranked seventh in 1979 when the survey began. By 2025, they ranked eighteenth.

These are not abstract numbers. They represent a real and significant collapse in a once-familiar species, occurring on the RSPB's watch, accelerated in part by practices the charity was actively encouraging.

The RSPB is not merely a conservation charity. It is also a retailer. It sells bird food and bird feeders — including products bearing its own logo — through its shops and online store. The UK bird food market is worth an estimated £380 million annually, and the RSPB has been a willing participant in it throughout the period during which trichomonosis was spreading.

It has now said it will stop selling bird feeders and food during the warmer months. It has also, finally, stopped selling flat feeders, the surface type it describes as posing the highest risk of disease transmission. That decision was taken at the beginning of last year.

The RSPB says the new guidance was developed with scientists from the British Trust for Ornithology and the Institute of Zoology, and is based on a thorough review of the evidence. Its spokesman says the charity is "well aware that things won't change overnight" and that behaviour change "will take years, if not decades."

What he did not say was why it took the best part of two decades to reach this point, or how the charity reconciles its commercial interests with its conservation obligations. Critics are entitled to ask.

If this were an isolated failure, it might be treated as such. But it sits within a longer pattern of behaviour that those of us who work in moorland management and upland conservation have observed for many years.

The RSPB positions itself as the national authority on bird conservation. It lobbies government. It funds legal challenges. It campaigns against the management practices of private landowners. It has told moorland managers, repeatedly and without qualification, that driven grouse shooting and the predator control that supports it are incompatible with conservation objectives. It has done so with considerable political force and considerable public funding behind it.

But the evidence from the ground tells a different story. The curlew, one of Britain's most threatened wading birds, and a species the RSPB has made central to its upland campaigns, continues to collapse across unmanaged and RSPB-managed land alike. On managed grouse moors, where intensive predator control creates the conditions ground-nesting birds need to raise chicks successfully, curlew are still breeding in numbers that bear no comparison to what is being achieved on RSPB reserves.

The same pattern holds for lapwing, golden plover, and black grouse. Species after species demonstrates that professionally managed moorland, operated by gamekeepers with generational knowledge of the upland environment, is delivering conservation outcomes that the RSPB, for all its resources, all its land holdings, and all its scientific credentials, has consistently struggled to replicate.

The RSPB's reserves at Geltsdale in Cumbria and Abernethy in Strathspey are large, well-funded, and staffed by qualified ecologists. The breeding results for red-listed ground-nesting birds on those reserves have, to put it charitably, not matched the rhetoric.

When private landowners and moorland managers are criticised by the RSPB, they are not offered the benefit of the doubt. The charity does not acknowledge that managing a working landscape is complex, that evidence evolves, or that those with deep practical knowledge of the uplands might have something to contribute to the debate. It campaigns, it litigates, and it briefed politicians.

It does not apply the same standard to itself. Two million greenfinches are gone. The RSPB knew the risks for fifteen years. It has now issued guidance that effectively acknowledges its previous advice was wrong, while declining to account clearly for the commercial interests that may have delayed that moment of reckoning.

Those of us who manage Britain's moorlands have spent years being lectured on conservation by an organisation that spent those same years selling flat bird tables.

The RSPB's credibility on upland bird conservation deserves exactly the same scrutiny it applies to everyone else