Hen Harrier Action is run entirely by volunteers . We thank everyone who supports our work, especially the organisers of local events.
Here are the team:
Joanne Hodges
Joanne is a retired senior civil servant with a PhD in physics and an MBA. Her Civil Service career was mainly spent in science policy, including working on climate change in the late 1990s, which sparked her interest in the environment. Before moving to Edinburgh, she was the self-appointed “hen harrier correspondent” for her local RSPB group, writing articles for the newsletter. She is somewhat obsessed with reducing her environmental impact, from transitioning to veganism to wildlife gardening and cutting out plastic. Her other interests include learning to paint, politics, reading voraciously and the Tour de France.
Andrea Hudspeth
Andrea runs Aquila Ecology, based in the beautiful Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park and offering walks and tours as well as ecological services. Andrea has always loved nature and all animals but worked first in the service sector and then in adult and further education before taking a degree in Wildlife and Countryside Conservation which included a dissertation on moorland management and hen harriers. She has since worked for the RSPB, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust and others, and volunteered in raptor protection camps on Malta and Sicily. She completes yearly monitoring of breeding raptor species with Tayside Raptor Study Group. Andrea has organised three Hen Harrier Days in Scotland to date.
Indy Kiemel Greene
Indy is a 16-year-old naturalist and goshawk lover from Nottinghamshire. He is lucky enough to live a stone’s throw from Sherwood Forest and has been fascinated by wildlife from an early age. He is a member of the RSPB's Youth Council and is well-known from appearances on Springwatch, online Hen Harrier Days and elsewhere. He believes we should encourage engagement with nature through all the avenues available. He sees real importance not only in sharing the joyous encounters, but also highlighting the threat species and habitats are facing.
Adrian Rowe
Originally from Guernsey in the Channel Islands, Adrian has lived in West Yorkshire for over 40 years and works in a marketing agency based in Manchester. A passionate birder, in his spare time he can often be found at one of the many nature reserves in and around Yorkshire. He has participated in national turtle dove and breeding wader surveys. With a lifetime’s experience in online and offline marketing, he hopes to help raise the profile of Hen Harrier Action through its website, newsletters and by expanding its digital reach.
Paul Samuels
Paul is a wildlife and documentary film maker who lives in N.E. London. He has produced material for WWT and RSPB together with items for Hen Harrier Day in 2017, 2018 and 2020. His early career was as a professional violinist but now he works exclusively in the world of film making and his output includes social documentaries on housing and support for the homeless, as well as events like the Great River Race, London. Recording the natural world has been a lifelong interest, beginning with stills photography in his teens and developing into video in the last 10 years.
Cathleen Thomas
With over a decade of experience in conservation, Dr Cathleen Thomas is an award-winning ecologist. She led the RSPB's Hen Harrier LIFE project and coordinated the UK's largest hen harrier tagging programme. Her focus is now on landscape-scale restoration, protecting native habitats and wildlife alongside communities. She also carries out wildlife surveys in her free time. Cathleen joined the board in 2021, to help raise awareness of the plight of hen harriers, bringing expertise in preventing wildlife crime, education, engagement and advocacy.
Dirk Todd
Dirk is a Chartered Accountant and has led finance functions in international organisations in the travel, entertainment and fashion sectors. He has a law degree and MSc in charity management, and held senior finance positions at Save the Children UK. He was treasurer and meetings organiser for a RSPB local group. His interest in wildlife has seen him volunteering with small mammals – on the Vole Patrol – in the UK, and with echidnas in Australia. When he’s not doing anything else, he’s probably thinking about either travel or tennis.
Advisors
Bob Elliot
Bob was a founder Trustee of Hen Harrier Action and is Director of OneKind, a respected and evidence-led welfare organisation helping to make a difference for animals in Scotland, exposing the cruelty and persecution so often encountered by our domestic, farmed and wild animals. His previous work, over nearly 25 years in nature conservation, included posts at the National Trust for Scotland, Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park and latterly as the Head of Investigations for the RSPB, managing and overseeing the detection and investigation of serious wildlife crime cases. When not at work Bob can be found leading nature tours, watching wildlife and sea kayaking.
Andrea Goddard
Andrea is a passionate conservationist living in the beautiful Highlands of Scotland. Volunteering at the RSPB's Tollie red kite centre from 2011, she graduated in 2019 with a degree in Environmental Science at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her dissertation focused on the roosting behaviour of Eurasian treecreepers, which led to a feature on the subject on BBC's Winterwatch in 2020. Now working for SCOTLAND:The Big Picture managing a project to reintroduce common cranes to the Cairngorms, her spare time is taken up by managing the online wildlife crime campaign group Mad for Wildlife, pressing for a ban on rodent glue traps in Scotland and monitoring raptor nesting for the Highland Raptor Study Group.
Harry Huyton
Harry was a founder Trustee of Hen Harrier Action, and is the Director of Strategy for the Scottish Green Party. He was previously Director of OneKind and earlier, at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Development, he managed the UK Corporate Leaders Programme. Before that, as Head of Climate Change Policy and Campaigns for the RSPB, Harry played a key role in the ban on fracking in national parks in England and Wales and was a steering group member of the Climate Coalition. Harry has an MSc in Environmental Technology and a BSc in Natural Sciences.