Siren was founded by Dr Sasha Norris with a bequest from the estate of her father, Dr Ken Norris. Ken was a champion of wildlife in all its forms. He grew up in Hereford where egg collecting and trainspotting were two of his favourite pastimes. He won the scholarship to the Hereford Cathedral School where he excelled and went onto study Natural Sciences at Cambridge followed by research into plasma membranes of cancer cell walls for his PhD at Surrey University.

After his PhD, Ken went to work for Vickers’ Medical but when the company decided to relocate to the US in 1973, Ken took his research equipment and set up on his own in a garage in Basingstoke. Within six months he made a breakthrough. He became managing director of his company, producing and marketing a reagent to test carbon dioxide levels in blood. When Ken was 42, this company, Norris Biomedical, with two fulltime employees, became the smallest ever to win the Queen’s Award for Export Achievement.

No longer an egg collector, but a keen naturalist and bird watcher, Ken brought up his daughters to love and respect wildlife, taking them everyday on long walks across the countryside, through brambles and ditches searching for clouded yellows, natterjack toads or Dartford warblers. Sasha turned his hobby into her profession. Ken went with Sasha to Ecuador and Zimbabwe, and travelled himself extensively to see Orang Utans in Malaysia, Chimpanzees in Cameroon and Gorillas in Rwanda.

At the age of 45, Ken was diagnosed with manic depression. Seven years of severe mood swings followed, involving paralysing depression during which Ken gradually lost faith in his ability to recover. One of the things Ken regretted most about his illness was his inability to travel to see the wilderness he loved. He died tragically in 1996.

After his death, Ken’s daughters, Sasha and Katharine, and his former wife Lynn, used a considerable part of their inheritance to fund the start up of Siren, which was in accordance with Ken’s last wishes. Illness can have devastating effects on families, and mental illness particularly so. Siren’s aims and objectives with respect to conservation are wholly based on biological understanding. Siren’s origins however, belie another of its principles: to turn difficult situations to good and, like the carolling thrush in Thomas Hardy’s poem, to bring hope where none is apparent.