Take note! This year our venue for the Annual General Meeting is the Athenaeum, Angel Hill, Bury St Edmunds. We meet at 7.30 p.m. Our guest speaker is Yvonne Leonard, recorder of rare plants. Yvonne will be talking about the Rare Plants of Breckland.
Business proceedings will include brief reports from the Society's Officers, election of Chairman and two Council members.
The importance of the SNS's presence at the Suffolk Show was discussed at a Council meeting on September 15th 1999. Membership recruitment at this event has recently been low. We realise that the Society's presence at the Show is important for other reasons but it was decided that we should have a break and reconsider in one or two years time.
Playing God or Gardening?
Is there a case for re-introductions?
Saturday 21st October
9.OOa.m. - 5.OOp.m.
Ipswich School Conference Centre.
Book early to ensure a place.
E-Mail for details
The recently published edition of Suffolk Birds (Vol 48), the annual review of the county's ornithological records, has been judged to be the best county bird report in Britain. It achieved the highest score ever recorded.
Congratulations to editor Gary Lowe, and thanks to Area Recorders and all contributors.
The Suffolk Biological Records Centre, under threat as a result of a cost-cutting review carried out by Ipswich Borough Council, has been rescued by Suffolk County Council. The County Council is to put in £10,000 a year for the next three years and hopes to develop the Centre with support from and in conjunction with district councils, government agencies and conservation groups.
The collection and monitoring of wildlife records is crucial to servicing conservation initiatives required by the Suffolk Biodiversity Action Plans.
Examples of data collected can be found on the SBRC website:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uki~sbrc
In 1942, at the age of II, our speaker, Alasdair Aston was invited to join the Suffolk Naturalists' Society by none other than our Founder, Claude Morley. Through their mutual interest in natural history, especially entomology, Alasdair
came to know Claude well and was a regular visitor to his house and garden at Monks' Soham. It was fitting, therefore, that Alasdair should speak at the Society's 70th Jubilee Members' Evening about the origins of the SNS and more particularly about the Society's Founder.
'He (Morley) was what is now called a "one-off", an eccentric with a hatred of modem progress', Alasdair told us. 'He would have no truck with wireless, telephone, electricity or summer-time, which he called "lying-in time."' (But) 'it would he all too easy in recalling Morley's eccentricities and whims to forget his distinction,' Alasdair said. 'He began contributing to The Entomologist in 1893, when he was nineteen. He was elected to the Entomological Society of London at twenty-one. He published separate catalogues of the Suffolk Coleoptera, Herniptera and Hymenoptera. His great work, apart from founding our Society, was his five-volume Ichneumons of Great Britain, 1903-1914, but he had also worked on the staff of the British Museum Natural History), where he catalogued their Chalcididae and Ichneumonidae. In addition he found time to contribute to surveys of South African and Indian Parasitica. He could, it was said by knowledgeable contemporaries, identify any British insect on sight; those facts are just some indication of his talents.'
Alasdair's fascinating account (only touched upon here) will be published in tull in Transactions. The Society thanks him for the considerable research he undertook to prepare the ground for such a memorable occasion.
The meeting was well-attended and after a brief break for refreshments members were invited to participate in what has become a regular event - the Natural History Quiz. Once again Jon Nicholls managed to stump many of us with his interesting array of questions. Congratulations are due to Neil Sherman who outdid everyone else present. To him goes a years free subscription to British Wildlife.
Council member Neil Sherman studied conservation management at Otley College, Suffolk and is currently employed by Ipswich Golf Club, Purdis Heath. His duties include restoration and preservation of the heathland areas of the golf course, as well as maintaining the general wildlife interest of the site. He is a regular volunteer for the Suffolk Wildlife Trust and assistant warden of Little Blakenham chalk pit reserve. Neil is also an active member of the Suffolk Moth Group and he serves on the Suffolk Moth panel which verifies all records. Moths are his specialism but his interest extends to other insects, particularly butterflies, dragonflies and grasshoppers. Natural history, conservation, gardening and photography take up most of his spare time.
Alan Stubbs, reporting in British Wildlife (December 1999 p.137), highlights the sighting in 1999 of the large saproxylic hoverfly Callicera spinolae at one of its old sites in Suffolk. A few years ago it had seemingly declined to a single population near Cambridge.
In an article for White Admiral 44(p:3) I credited Howard Mendel with the first Suffolk record of Long-winged cone-head. I must give my apologies, however, to Arthur Watchman, as the honour of recording the first specimen actually goes to him. (David Lampard.)