Mammal Society Annual General Meeting - 18 April 2021
Stephanie Wray – proposer Dave Lewns, seconder Adam Grogan
Sally Haynes – proposer Ed Wells, seconder Johnny Birks
Tim Hounsome – Robbie McDonald, seconder Paul Chanin
Stephanie Wray is also nominated by Dave Lewns, seconded by Adam Grogan, to be elected as Chair of of the Society.
If members would like to nominate anyone else to stand for election they are very welcome to do so. Nominations should be made in writing to the Hon Sec, Merryl Gelling, 99 Poplar Grove, Kennington, Oxford, OX1 5QR or merryl@spiresecology.com, by 4 April 2021.
The current draft statutory accounts, still subject to completion of the independent review, can now be found here.
Nominees
Sally Hayns
Sally Hayns is Chief Executive Officer of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM), the leading professional body for ecologists and environmental managers in the UK and Ireland. In addition to overseeing the running of the Institute she currently leads on the CIEEM’s professional standards and professional development work and is actively involved in policy engagement and outreach work.
Prior to taking on this role in 2010, she had worked for a number of environmental charities including the Field Studies Council, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and a local Wildlife Trust. She also spent 6 years working for the City of London Corporation at Epping Forest, which was a particular pleasure as that had been her playground as a child growing up in north east London.
Sally has a Masters degree in Ecology from UCNW, Bangor as well as a Masters degree in Voluntary Sector Management from City University. She is perhaps most proud, however, of her Waltham Forest Downy Duckling certificate for learning to swim a width when she was 5 years old.
As well as being a member of CIEEM and a Chartered Ecologist, Sally is also a member of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising.
Tim Hounsome
Although primarily an Ornithologist Tim has spent much of his career accidentally working on a variety of mammals in the UK and abroad. His earliest memory of mammal fieldwork was as an eight-year-old boy fetching Longworth traps from the undergrowth in Woodchester Park for the late Derek Yalden. In a quirk of fate, and after a stint of chasing mink around Cheshire for his BSc and MRes dissertations*, Tim returned to Woodchester Park 16 years later but this time to work with Chris Cheeseman’s team at the badger research unit. He spent ten years here during which time he completed his PhD on the effects of badgers and livestock on ground nesting birds. This was part of a wider project that was looking at the interactions of many UK mammals in relation to badgers. As a result, this “ornithologist” spent most of his time designing and carrying out monitoring programmes of many UK mammals.
Over the intervening years Tim has occasionally been lucky enough to be asked to work abroad, largely putting into practice skills learnt working on mammals in the UK. For example, designing the monitoring protocol for the endangered giant jumping rat in Madagascar or the narrow-striped mongoose. His experience working with mink was useful when he was asked to explore the swamps of Lac Alaotra to find what was thought at the time to be a new species of semi-aquatic carnivore Durrell’s vontsira. In 2018 Tim was part of an expedition to Mount Lico in Mozambique where the objective was to identify new species of many different taxa including small mammals.
In 2008 Tim set up Biocensus (now known as RSK Biocensus), an ecological consultancy that Tim has taken from a sole trader company to a team of more than 120 people. Despite all this, Tim still thinks he’s an Ornithologist.
*the results of which were presented to the Mammal Society conference where he was pipped to the student prize by some bloke called Robbie McDonald!
Stephanie Wray
Steph Wray is an ecologist and has been a Director of Biocensus since 2011 and founded the specialist consultancy Nature Positive in 2020 where she specialises in business impacts on biodiversity, natural capital and ecosystem services. Prior to joining Biocensus, Steph was Global Environment Director for Hyder Consulting, now Arcadis. She has also held a number of executive, non-executive, and consulting roles at organisations including Stantec, Atkins, National Grid, and ERM. Perhaps unusually among ecologists, Steph has an Master’s degree in Business Administration, and a strong interest in marketing and business development. A past President of the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM), Steph is chair of CIEEM’s Strategic Policy Panel which co-ordinates the Institute’s policy activities, and is regularly called on to provide advice on environmental matters to Ministers, select committees and government departments.
Although she identifies as an ecologist and management consultant, if you scratch beneath the surface Steph is still a mammologist, having carried out a PhD on brown hares in Stephen Harris’ team at the University of Bristol in the 1990s. She carried on working with protected mammal species throughout her career in consultancy, developing best practice in survey and mitigation for a range of species, for which she was awarded the Mammal Society medal in 2011. Since a post-doc project on Livingstone’s bat in the Comores, Steph has had a particular interest in bats and is a member of Natural England’s Bat Expert Panel. Her earliest memory of the Mammal Society is the Easter Conference in Southampton in 1989 where she met many great mammal enthusiasts and the esteemed ‘grey beards’ of the Society. Whilst it is alarming to be considered old or august enough, she is honoured now to be nominated to join their ranks.