British Ornithologists’ Union: Janet Kear Union Medal

Abstract

Societies are all about people. People join them to meet other people with shared interests. Some people go on to help run the society, to help deliver the activities and services that members want. And some people embed themselves within a society, quite often going unnoticed, becoming part of the fabric that gives a society their place, their identity. The Janet Kear Union Medal celebrates such people.

If you look back through BOU annual reports from the mid-2000s onwards, one of the most frequently mentioned and thanked members is Dr Helen Baker. Already an engaged member and conference attendee, Helen began her 14-year stay on BOU committees and Council when she joined the Meetings Committee in 2008. This was an ideal starting point for Helen to operate from ‘within’ the BOU, having already contributed to various conference scientific committees and working groups, by putting her first-hand event experience to great use and delivering an important science and conservation policy angle to many conferences.

In 2013 Helen was elected as an Ordinary member of Council as the pre-cursor to being elected Honorary Secretary in 2014, a position she served for two terms until 2022. As ‘Hon Sec’ Helen joined the BOU's Management Group and took a hands-on role in managing and supporting the Union's two permanent staff. She helped to further develop and undertake the annual staff reviews, ensuring that staff were fully supported in their roles in delivering across all BOU activities, a contribution which also enabled her to have critical oversight of all that the Union delivered. During this time, she built a strong relationship with Chief Operations Officer, Steve Dudley, and with both being Peterborough-based, Helen was able to provide Steve with much-needed face-to-face mentoring and support in his key role of running the BOU as a remote worker.

On arriving on Council in 2013, Helen championed the BOU's recent take-up of social media, particularly Twitter, to not just promote and drive BOU activities, but to be a unifying voice for ornithology and the drive to build an actively engaged online community. More than many at the time, Helen recognized that for a small society with a global membership, social media overcame a previous inability to engage with both members and the wider ornithological community much more regularly and effectively. Such a strong voice of support was not just critical around the Council table but more importantly it helped to drive the BOU's aim of establishing the Union as a truly global society both on- and off-line.

Helen was also a staunch supporter of the BOU widening its equality and diversity commitments, taking the Union's work beyond gender issues by making the BOU a welcoming society for all those working in ornithology, including giving LBGTQ+ ornithologists a louder presence and voice via the BOU Rainbow Blog, the establishment of the BOU's Equality and Diversity Working Group and the development of a code of conduct for BOU events.

Her multiple contributions to BOU have been informed both by Helen's early considerable field research experience and latterly her role as an ornithological advisor (in several different formal positions) within the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), and which has involved inputs to the work of many organizations including country conservation agencies, governments within the UK, and international organizations including – amongst many – the European Commission and the African-Eurasian Waterbird Agreement.

Her early fieldwork included survey and ringing experience on Fair Isle; a PhD on the until then largely unstudied Crested Tit Lophophanes cristatus population of Abernethy in the Scottish Highlands; and several years spent on multiple ornithological studies on Pacific islands. This included work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service on Hawaii, becoming involved not only with the Nene Branta sandvicensis re-establishment programme but also gaining expertise on multiple Hawaiian endemics (leading to several species accounts in Birds of North America) and motivated by research into the spread of avian malaria Plasmodium spp. across the Pacific islands. Still more geographically remote were personally significant studies of the albatrosses of Midway Atoll.

Joining JNCC in 2000, Helen's first task was to take responsibility for the production of the second review of the UK network of Special Protection Areas (SPA) in 2001, a massive exercise that had taken 8 years to complete. In the years that followed she had a critical role as Secretary to the SPA and Ramsar Scientific Working Group – a multi-stakeholder advisory group that progressively tackled many of the issues unaddressed by the 2001 review. These included diverse challenges, but especially significant was thinking through the role for bird conservation of the management of various cropped habitats, both within and beyond UK protected areas. Her quiet diplomacy within that group gradually developed consensus thinking on multiple problems and laid the groundwork for the third SPA review which was submitted to Ministers in 2016.

The role of an advisor within government is to provide, often at short notice, best quality advice to colleagues on issues that arise, sometimes unexpectedly. One such issue that emerged in the mid-2000s – seemingly from nowhere – was the potential spread to the UK of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 of Asian origin. Up to that point, in the UK, infectious disease had not been of central importance within conservation agency programmes, but Helen helped develop approaches and thinking not only in the 2000s – when it turned out that population scale impacts for wild birds were few – but in more recent years as HPAI H5N1 has evolved to cause very significant mortality of seabird populations in particular.

Within JNCC Helen moved from species advice to a broader role within the organization, taking responsibility for more formal science policy thinking. This included inputting JNCC's advice to relevant national research funding bodies as well as developing organizational evidence quality standards.

From 2018, she took over the role of JNCC's representative on the Rare Breeding Birds Panel – a position which, as in everything JNCC does, is undertaken on behalf of the country conservation agencies and thus involves considerable liaison with colleagues in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

More recently she moved to Scotland to take responsibility, as co-leader of JNCC's Marine Species Team, for multiple aspects of UK seabird conservation. In that position her recent life has been dominated by overseeing the development and production of Seabirds Count – the recently published results of the fourth census of Britain and Ireland's internationally important populations of breeding seabirds.

The diversity of Helen's knowledge and experience, and her organizational competency and personal style, has meant that she has long been the ‘go to’ person for professional colleagues even on issues outside her formal brief.

For services to the Union, to ornithology and our wider community, Dr Helen Baker is the epitome of this award and so is a worthy and fitting recipient of the Janet Kear Union Medal.