Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

Type	Conservation charity
Founded	1889 (1889), Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden, Manchester
Headquarters	The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire, England 2 Lochside View, Edinburgh, Scotland
Area served	United Kingdom
Key people	Steve Ormerod (Chairman) Miranda Krestovnikoff (President) Dr Mike Clarke (Chief Executive)
Revenue	£88.28 million GBP (2006)
Operating income	£69.7 million GBP (2006)
Net income	£3.68 million GBP (2006)
Number of employees	1,545 paid staff 18,750 volunteers
Website	www.rspb.org.uk

Bird Notes  

Cover of Autumn 1946 issue of Bird Notes, Vol. 23, No. 3
Discipline	Ornithology
Language	English
Publication details
Publisher	RSPB (United Kingdom)
Publication history	1903 (1903)-1966
Indexing
ISSN	0406-3392

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is a charitable organisation registered in England and Wales and in Scotland. It was founded as the Plumage League in 1889 by Emily Williamson. It works to promote conservation and protection of birds and the wider environment through public awareness campaigns, petitions and through the operation of nature reserves throughout the United Kingdom.

The RSPB has over 1300 employees, 18,000 volunteers and more than 1 million members (including 195,000 youth members), making it the largest wildlife conservation charity in Europe. The RSPB has many local groups and maintains 200 nature reserves.

The Plumage League was founded in 1889 by Emily Williamson at her house in Didsbury, Manchester, (now in Fletcher Moss Botanical Garden), as a protest group campaigning against the use of great crested grebe and kittiwake skins and feathers in fur clothing. The group gained popularity and eventually amalgamated with the Fur and Feather League in Croydon to form the Society for the Protection of Birds. The Society gained its Royal Charter in 1904.

The original members of the RSPB were all women who campaigned against the fashion of the time for women to wear exotic feathers in hats, and to this end the Society had two simple rules:

At the time of founding, the trade in plumage for use in hats was very large: in the first quarter of 1884, almost 7,000 bird-of-paradise skins were being imported to Britain, along with 0.4 million birds from West India and Brazil, and 0.36 million birds from East India.