Last week Charles Cresswell accused of RSPB of running a campaign to protect the hen harrier as part of a 'recruitment campaign' and of being hostile to farmers and landowners.

Here, Andy Bunten, North of England Regional Director for the RSPB, responds.

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In expressing his personal "Agenda" in last week's Journal (Thursday, March 18), Charles Cresswell made many misinformed comments about the RSPB. The prime objective of the RSPB is the conservation of wild birds and their habitats.

Our work is based on sound science - the result of research and survey work, which is carried out in cooperation with statutory or other voluntary bodies. This in turn produces a nationally agreed system of assessing priorities and leads to the implementation of detailed action plans. The RSPB is working hard across Northern England in a multitude of partnerships with landowners, shooting estates and farmers to help them help wildlife. A few examples of the work that the RSPB is involved in include:

* We are a partner in the North Pennines Black Grouse Recovery Project, which has worked successfully over the last seven years to help many estate owners, managers and farmers take positive action for the rare black grouse.

* We have just completed three years' work with the farming community in Cumbria, helping large numbers of farmers take action for farmland birds like tree sparrows and grey partridge. Foot-and-mouth affected many farming businesses we have worked with. This project has been instrumental in directing £7m on to Cumbrian farms in the form of wildlife-friendly farming scheme grant aid.

* RSPB volunteers have completed 180 free bird surveys for farmers in Northern England over the last two years. These surveys help to increase farmers' knowledge about wildlife on their farms and can encourage conservation action.

* Many of our nature reserves are farm businesses themselves, including Geltsdale and Campfield Marsh in northern England

* The Yorkshire Red Kite Project is a successful and popular project, and we readily acknowledge the invaluable assistance of gamekeepers and landowners in bringing about the return of this bird of prey. A similar multi-partnership project will be underway in the North-East later this year.

Many of these projects can help provide new business directions for land managers. The success of these projects demonstrates the interest that land managers have in working with the RSPB, and we are always delighted to acknowledge this positive action and celebrate these successes.

There is a myth that we "blame" farmers for declines in countryside bird populations; this untruth must be dispelled. The challenges for land managers and conservation bodies alike in reversing the declines in countryside wildlife (and not just birds) lie at the national and international policy level. It is this that has driven recent changes in our countryside. There is more work to do in getting our aims and work better understood by land managers in the UK but, even so, the majority of farmers polled in a recent survey held a favourable opinion of the society.

"Operation Artemis" launched earlier this year to combat illegal persecution of hen harriers is a police initiative and not some calculating exercise on the part of the RSPB, as Mr Cresswell suggests. By launching this initiative, police forces across Britain have responded to the fact that illegal killing is the principal reason why hen harriers are absent from many of our upland moors.

This was the unequivocal conclusion of the UK Raptor Working Group, which includes the Game Conservancy Trust, Scottish Landowners Federation and the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. It is a national disgrace that northern England can currently muster only 22 pairs of hen harriers, of which just eight successfully fledged young in 2003. The Game Conservancy Trust believes that there should be 10 times as many nesting harriers in England than at present.

Since 1997, hen harriers have rarely fledged young on driven grouse moors in England, and even then usually only with the aid of intensive protection from the RSPB, English Nature and others. At our own Geltsdale nature reserve in the North Pennines, we have had to witness a catalogue of crimes against wildlife going back many years.

We now have to maintain a round-the-clock guard on any harriers nesting on the reserve to safeguard them from interference. In Scotland, hen harriers nesting on moors managed for grouse suffered a failure rate three times higher than those on moors not managed for driven shooting. The objective observer might suggest a pattern is emerging.

Some people claim that the lack of prosecutions is evidence of innocence. But it takes only seconds to kill a bird of prey in a remote place away from the public gaze, and for the police to prove a link between an individual and a dead bird of prey is often impossible. Nevertheless, the facts speak for themselves. Of the 82 people convicted by UK courts for trapping or killing birds of prey since 1985, 69 (more than 84pc) were associated with game shooting. In 2002, a gamekeeper in Scotland was convicted and fined £2,000 for killing a hen harrier. Last year, 14 red kites were found dead because of poisoning.

The RSPB has more than one million members, including 140,000 in our junior section, Wildlife Explorers, and our annual income is around £50m, which we spend on our conservation mission.

Unlike most other large charities, our cash reserves are very small. If we stopped receiving funds tomorrow, our financial reserves would only last three months. Maintaining and improving biodiversity should concern us all. Mr Cresswell may not think that this is important, but we do.

The birds in our gardens, for instance, are just as important as those of our moorlands and mountains, our marshes and sea coasts. With the backing of our supporters, we will continue to campaign for a countryside that is rich in birds and other wildlife and which helps to create a better world for us all.