LET’S ENCOURAGE LOCAL NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETIES

These days there are fewer local natural history clubs than once there were, and they have fewer members, especially younger members. That is a shame.  I am not talking here about the bigger County Trusts and large national Societies like the RSPB – they are in a different league and of great importance and value in their own right, often crusading politically for wildlife conservation and the protection of our environment. In these times of government environmental staff raids for Brexit (see http://bit.ly/2F8dqb0), local wildlife and natural history societies play a vital community and educational role to keep the fires of nature conservation and popular biodiversity science burning. 

In the Victorian era, almost every county had its Naturalists’ Club and, without today’s distractions of television, home video, the internet and our generally busy lives, these Clubs organised a plethora of walks, talks and other events. They recorded what they saw in their Transactions, wrote longer papers and made collections, often in collaboration with local museums.  Some of the collecting was rather too enthusiastic and depleted species (birds’ eggs, butterflies) as individuals competed with each other.  This ultimately had to be controlled by law, although I doubt it can have been anything like as destructive as over-development, government indifference and intensive farming are today.

In Worcestershire, we still have a local natural history society, the Worcestershire Naturalists’ Club.  It was founded by Edwin Lees in 1847. We have fewer than 100 members these days, but we still organise field meetings throughout the year, as well as evening talks and events in winter. We visit places off the beaten track, where fragments of old, wonderfully biodiverse habitats still exist; we record what we see and publish records and short articles in our annual Transactions, of which I am Honorary Editor. The Transactions go to all members as well as the main county and national libraries. One hundred and eighty-five years of records is a valuable resource!

You can find out more about the Club at www.wnc.org.uk.

We still make discoveries, too. A couple of weeks ago on our annual fungus foray in one of Worcestershire’s woods, we found a rare little fungus in a beech plantation which turned out to be a first record for the county.

Betts Ecology support local Clubs like the Worcestershire Naturalists of which Betts are corporate members. Several of our staff are also members in their own right and give talks.