SIR- Charles Baker Cresswell (Daily Telegraph, Aug. 28) describes the RSPB as a single-issue society. If only!

Having joined many years ago to help preserve bird species and their habitat, I despair at the increasingly political stance of the society, most of which has little to do directly with avian protection and owes much to the faddish townie green element that seems to be in control of policy.

Take the RSPB energy scheme. Members are encouraged to sign up for domestic electricity supply from "renewable" forms of generation. So, when the next highland valley is flooded, or some unspoilt view in mid-Wales is buried beneath wind farms, will the RSPB take the accolade?

Then there is the GM issue. Without waiting for the growing evidence of benefits, including the development of crop strains requiring reduced energy inputs, the RSPB has set its face against genetic modification in agriculture.

In doing so, it has overlooked the beneficial pay-offs, such as the potential for increasing set-aside as yields improve.

Yet the RSPB is quite happy to accept sponsorship from a company such as Land Rover, which aggressively promotes for the leisure motoring market a product which is the antithesis of everything the wider conservation movement stands for. Mr Baker Cresswell is quite right to challenge the RSPB's representation on the farming and food policy commission. A committee charged with such a complex task is hobbled from the outset when one of its participants is driven by such muddled and misguided opportunism.

Steve Haynes, Chichester, W. Sussex

SIR -I agree with Charles Baker Cresswell that the RSPB sacrifices intellectual integrity for membership gain through the endless release of one-sided alarmist stories. His observations raise another question. Is charitable status appropriate for single-issue organisations whose public agenda is arguably political in the widest sense?

We should bear in mind that one charity's tax break is another person's tax hike, thanks to the erosion of the tax base through their exemption. We all pay towards the tax relief enjoyed by charitable bodies with which we might not see eye to eye. Is this sensible, when so many of them are awash with funds anyway?

Lord Vinson, London SW7

SIR- One of the RSPB's areas of interest is the decline in the population of small birds. Among others, the farming community is blamed for this by its use of pesticides and lack of sympathy for habitat. But one of the greatest threats facing small birds is the increasing number and variety of birds of prey, or "raptors". It should not have escaped the attention of the RSPB that most raptors prey on small birds, or that where the raptor populations have increased, so the small bird populations have severely declined.

Yet the society actively encourages the reintroduction of raptors to places that they have not inhabited for decades and, in some cases, a century or more. Regrettably, there is neither glamour nor cash in sparrows and larks. Red kites and sea eagles are a different matter.