Siren conservation education

Core Team

Sasha Norris

Sasha Norris worked with her mother, Lynn and sister, Katharine to found Siren in 2000.

Sasha’s own expertise is very much in line with Siren’s aims. She graduated from the University of Bristol with first class Honours and the Rose Bracher prize for Zoology in 1993, and went on to do a D.Phil at New College, Oxford, looking at what male birds are saying with their colourful feathers. In 1998, She took a lectureship at Pembroke College Oxford, teaching Ecology and Environmental Science.

As a freelance writer Sasha has worked for the Discovery Channel, BBC Wildlife, and The Guardian. At the end of 1999 she wrote her first article for the RSPB’s Birds magazine – an overview of the organisation – and then she wrote for each issue of the magazine until June 2003. In 2000 she co-edited ‘The Encyclopaedia of Mammals’ for Oxford University Press, which involved the work of 200 scientists. Sasha wrote “Superkids, 200 ways for kids to save the world” with Think Publishing in 2003.

Sasha also works on television presenting programmes about nature, countryside issues and conservation. Between 2000 and 2004 Sasha produced and presented a weekly thirty minute wildlife show, ‘Wild’ on Oxford’s Six TV, for which she was nominated ‘Best New Talent’ by the Royal Television Society. In 2006 she was one of the presenters of Channel Four’s ‘Wild Thing, I Love You’, nominated for a Panda Award at Wildscreen in Bristol, and in 2013, she worked with Chris Packham on the BBC series The Burrowers: Animals Underground. She is currently producing a series of programmes called ‘Wild Lives’, focusing on what impassions people to become involved in conservation.

Sasha has had a lifelong love affair with the natural world and if she could have one wish it would be for people to be as excited about conservation as they are about the World Cup.

Sasha co-led the Darwin Initiative Project working with wild dogs in Zimbabwe, and wrote the PACE project book ‘Africa Our Home’ for Siren. She steered the charity through the purchase of the reserve in Tarifa, Spain in 2002 and has worked voluntarily with local naturalists to promote conservation in this area. Sasha is the creative force behind Siren, generating ideas, formulating projects as well as with Nancy determining Siren’s long term vision. She is Chair of the Trustees and oversees Siren’s financial future, which has included purchasing and managing rental property in the UK.

Inspired by Sasha Norris’ book of the same name in prep, listen here to UK band Stornoway’s song Battery Humans – “We were born to be free range”.

Trustees and Advisers

Robert Wickham - MA (CANTAB) M Phil (TP) PrD FRICS MRTPI

A Trevelyan Scholar at Cambridge University and prizeman of the RICS, Robert Wickham has had over 30 years professional experience in planning and compensation including local government service and lecturing. He specialises in the presentation of cases in the role as advocate at planning and associated inquiries. His main interests include strategic analysis for medium and long term site identification purposes, ecclesiastical matters, housing policy, the politics and history of planning, comparative compensation and planning systems and the theory of land ownership. He is concerned about environmental and humanitarian matters, and the relationship between humans and nature, particularly in connection to Africa. Robert is a current Siren trustee.

Sean Morris

Sean Morris is one of the founding directors and shareholders of Oxford Scientific Films. From modest beginings in 1967, the company quickly became established worldwide for its innovating approach to wildlife film-making, and for its pioneering work in photographic special effects. Along with his colleagues in OSF, Sean became a world-renowned specialist wildlife cameraman, director and producer. His credits include several award-winning classics; Deathtrap; Sexual Encounters of the Floral Kind; The Forbidden Fruit, The Ghosts of Ruby; The Eagle and The Snake; Sonora, A Violent Eden (A Special for National Geographic which won Sean an Emmy for Cinematography) and many more. Sean has travelled extensively, keeps bees, rowed for Oxford in the Boat Race, is a World Championship winning veteran oarsman, and now works as a freelance producer and consultant, having left OSF in April 03. Sean is a former trustee.

Charlie Mayhew MBE

Charlie Mayhew is Chief Executive of Tusk, a dynamic organisation with 20 years of experience initiating and funding conservation and community development programmes across Africa. Since its formation in 1990 by Charles Mayhew MBE and Sir Timothy Ackroyd Bt., Tusk has earned a reputation for being non-bureaucratic and for maximising donor funds (on average 80% of net funds) reaching the field. The charity has supported more than 100 projects and invested over £16 million into the field. Siren works closely with Tusk on the Pan African Conservation Education project.

The diversity of plant and animal life on Earth is necessary for human physical and mental well-being. Meeting the material needs of people is undermined through loss of wildlife. People will, when all their material needs are met, still want, and indeed need, to be able to experience nature.

The conservation of species diversity is critical to maintaining natural life-support systems, including water cleansing, pollination of food crops, and soil formation and is essential for our economic and social development.

Siren believes in the welfare of animals. Protecting the lives of individual animals is important, except where this conflicts with the preservation of another wild species’ existence.

Protecting nature does not have to conflict with human rights to adequate food, water and shelter, and to basic care and protection. We respect and aim to facilitate the work of humanitarian organizations such as Oxfam. Often, the goals of such organizations are served through nature conservation.

However, acting to protect nature will entail compromise, since the material demands of over six billion humans, especially those in the developed world, are often in conflict with those of plant and animal species.

The existence of cultures and local traditions is important and that this diversity also requires protection. We aim to be supportive of these except where they interfere with our first principles of preventing extinctions and looking after the welfare of human and other living creatures.

It is our moral duty to prevent human-driven extinctions of other creatures on this planet.

Nature conservation for intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual purposes is necessary for maintenance of cultural diversity and preservation of the human spirit

We can make a difference. Siren works within the guidelines of the Charity Commission to generate as much output as possible with as little institutional bureaucracy as possible.

We believe in partnership and not in the promotion of one organization over another, and in particular not in the promotion of individuals over action.

We place a high value on individual commitment, co-operation, compassion, openness, respect, fairness, integrity and humour both in our working practices and in life in general