Mitigation Meet Up 2025

Every year, mitigation professionals from around the country gather together to share learning and experiences.

These get-togethers, or ‘Mitigation Meet Ups’, bring together experts dedicated to encouraging wildlife-friendly behaviour among countryside and coastal visitors.

Here’s Anna Parry, our Partnership Manager, with her account of this year’s event which was organised by Bird Aware Solent and took place in Havant on 16 May.

Working within the recreational mitigation sector might be considered somewhat of a niche role, but with new mitigation partnerships regularly springing up around the country, how do we build a wider network of colleagues and peers and share learning? Well, the answer is with an annual Mitigation Meet Up, and this year it was the turn of Bird Aware Solent to host this national event.

The Mitigation Meet Up is the biggest event on our sector’s calendar. It all started 8 years ago when a Devon-based wildlife ranger invited mitigation colleagues to spend a day discussing lessons learned, sharing breakthrough moments and talking about ways of solving current challenges. Since then it’s gone from strength to strength with organisations from Surrey, Essex and Kent running their own Mitigation Meet Ups over the years.

And last week, it was our pleasure to host more than 120 delegates for another day of shared learning.

Delegates gather to hear our keynote speaker, Dr Tony Juniper CBE, Chair of Natural England

Planning the workshops

The event took a long time to plan. Our team was keen to make sure the workshops and networking sessions gave everyone the best opportunity of creating stronger connections and a chance to agree actions that could create meaningful mitigation improvements.

We started planning the day by looking at our team specialisms and at who else within our network was also doing exciting work in these areas.

Dog initiatives

First on this list was our dog initiatives work and Shona Jenkins, our Dog Initiatives Officer, worked tirelessly to host 3 workshops with Natalie Light from PACT Dogs, focusing on engaging with the dog walking community.

With both Shona and Natalie being experienced dog trainers, they were able to offer very dog-centric advice to the delegates, focusing on safe and engaging dog walking that works well for dog owners, but importantly protects wildlife too.

Natalie Light, PACT Dogs

Shona Jenkins, Coast and Country Canines

Refining the data

Tom Marceau, our Senior Monitoring Officer was joined by Dr Durwyn Liley, Director at Footprint Ecology, to discuss the monitoring data we collect and how we use it, with an ultimate goal of creating a level of consistency in data collection across all the partnerships.

Durwyn was central in the original studies that led to the creation of Bird Aware and it’s great that he’s still so involved with and supportive of the Partnership.

Durwyn Liley, Footprint Ecology, and Thomas Marceau, Bird Aware Solent, lead a discussion on data collection.

Talking watersports

Rich Ainger, our Senior Ranger with responsibility for creating wildlife aware guides, teamed up with colleagues from the Bird and Recreation Initiative (BARI) in Poole to talk about our outreach approach to working with watersports enthusiasts and to seek fresh ideas from others working within this space.

Engaging with the watersports community is a growing area for us, with this spring seeing us relaunch our watersports map which now covers the entirety of our operational area.

We’ve also recruited another member of the team to work on this project and are looking forward to them joining us next month.

Education, education, education

Tony Knox, our Education Officer worked with Michael Jones, the Education Officer from the Thames Basin Heaths Partnership, to lead a workshop discussing education strategies and effective ways to get noticed by and invited into educational settings.

Before joining our team, Tony has previously worked as a deputy head teacher in a primary school and is very adept at sharing engaging educational messages with a variety audiences. His workshop had participants regularly laughing together, a true signal that learning can be fun when it’s led in the right way.

Reaching out

Bird Aware’s Senior Ranger Charlotte Goswell joined up with our Team Manager Natalie Hands to work with Eddie Lovell from Bird Wise North Kent to lead a workshop exploring how different techniques are used to maximise outreach work and to optimise the use of ranger time. We are aware that for issues like this, we’ll never have all the answers, but through exploring the challenges with others working in this sector, we can share best practice and keep learning from each other.

Alongside these workshops, we opted to have a few others based around topics that we thought the whole sector would benefit from being better informed.

Planning for change

Changes to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill are a concern to many of us currently working within the environment sector. This is a fast-evolving issue, and we were delighted to be able to include a workshop led by Marc Turner a Senior Advisor from Natural England, and Jason Reeves, Head of Policy from CIEEM (the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management), to bring us up to speed on the changes and what they might mean for us in the future.

Dr Tony Juniper talks to delegates at this year’s Mitigation Meet Up

Getting social

Joshua Edwards, Social Media Manager at RSPB (the man who signed off their groundbreaking Bird of the Week TikTok initiative) was joined Dr Kerry Traynor from University of Liverpool to talk about practical hints and tips to help us reach new audiences through effective social media campaigns. Kate Price McCarthy from our Bird Aware team leads on this area of work for us and facilitated the Q&A session within this workshop.

Championing positive behaviour

The most popular workshop of the day was hosted by Becky Fisher from the Somerset Wildlife Trust. Becky is a specialist in behaviour change science and was sharing practical ways in which we can all incorporate the latest research in this area into our work to help our messages be more meaningful to our audiences and have greater impact.

Turning Moment

A very important workshop was run by Dave and Rebecca Barrett from Turning Moment, who led the group through a series of strategies and tips to help deescalate situations of conflict that rangers occasionally experience when dealing with the public.

Dave and Rebecca shared decades of experience and learning in this area, giving their audience a wealth of insights into how to read body language and avoid confrontation. They were so good we’ll be booking them to come and do a full training session with the whole team later in the year.

Keynote speaker

One of the highlights of the day was a keynote speech given by Dr Tony Juniper CBE, Chair of Natural England. As a highly respected and passionate environmentalist, Tony Juniper spoke to an engaged audience of vocational staff who all want to see improvements for nature. His talk touched on many issues pertinent to our sector and gave us hope for what the future could look like if we all keep up the momentum of change for the better.

Dr Tony Juniper CBE, Chair of Natural England

Getting connected

Alongside that packed agenda, we offered a couple of networking sessions: a chance for introductions to be made and new connections to be formed. Sometimes it seems that these sessions are where the real magic of the day takes place – chance conversations lead to shared learning and best practice and people leave the day with a wider network of peers to call on for advice when needed.

Keeping these connections ‘real’ and ‘alive’ takes work and confidence, and these annual Meet Ups really do help us achieve that. Through these sessions, we’re able to create a greater network of people all aspiring to achieve environmental gains and help us with resources and fresh ideas when we need them.

Looking to the future

It was a big task to be the hosts of this year’s event, but the whole team pitched in with ideas and offers of help, making the day run very smoothly. We all felt we learned a lot from the workshops, speakers and other delegates. So much so that we’re already looking forward to being guests at the next Mitigation Meet Up.

The Bird Aware Solent team with Dr Tony Juniper CBE, Chair of Natural England (centre)