We have a variety of locations for our Field Trips this summer with mostly local sites and a couple further afield near Street and the New Forest. Please view the listing and mark them in your diary. There is also a link to a document with details about where to meet, what to bring etc on the Field Trips page.

If you know which trips you want to go on, please email us and we'll add you to the lists.
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Field Trips are free for members and guests can join them for £4 each, unless we publish that there is a restriction on numbers for a particular trip. At the moment we know that there is a limit of 10 Tisbury & District Natural History Society spaces for our joint field trip with the Salisbury NHS, on Tues 19 May for the Duke of Burgundy hunt.

We encourage car sharing wherever possible, to reduce the environmental footprint and certainly some locations have small parking areas so it makes sense to band together.

On Thursday 14th May, we have an additional indoor meeting (the last of the season) starting at 7.30 pm at the Victoria Hall. Our speaker is Inés López-Dóriga presenting ‘Antarctica on a tall ship’, a report on the wildlife and landscape characteristics of Antarctica, as encountered during a recent trip sailing through the Drake Passage from Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

The talk will illustrate the unusual wildlife (micro and macrofauna
and, incredibly, flora) that can be found on the white continent and
the ocean around it, as well as the landscape characteristics
of geography, sea currents, ice, icebergs and volcanoes that make it so special.

​As always, doors and bar will be open from 7pm, free for members and people under 21 years of age and £4 for guests. ​​

Please view the details of each field trip by clicking the link to the document that's been loaded onto the Field Trips page. We may need to update this document during the summer, but we'll always notify you here in the Blog or by email.

In the long hot summer of ’76, I was working on the gunnery ranges at Lulworth. I seemed to get home every night either white with chalk-dust thrown up from the parched tracks or black with soot from fighting fires on the heath. At the time it felt like a never to be repeated heat and drought but now we are growing accustomed to annual, albeit shorter, heatwaves. Looking at things positively, it was believed that the heath fires across Purbeck weren’t entirely a bad thing as encroaching scrub was burned off helping heath habitat to recolonise. Now though, such fires are so frequent, some less mobile species are wiped out without time to re-establish.

At the other extreme, we have all been talking about the wretchedly wet winter we have just endured but surprisingly it wasn’t a record breaker. Martinstown in Dorset still holds the UK record for the highest rainfall in one day (July 1955: 11 in) but this was far exceeded more recently for any 24hr period at the Honister Pass in Cumbria (Dec 4/5:13.4in). These torrential downpours are becoming more common as warmer air can absorb more water before depositing it and if the storm cell is slow moving that can cause flash flooding.

If we are asking ourselves what is going on with the weather, imagine what it must be like for wildlife. Their life cycles, feeding habits and preferences are geared to less variable seasons so rapid changes or extreme conditions can have a severe impact. Even healthy, sound looking trees which have grown up over decades with their form and roots adapted to a prevailing south-westerly wind can be uprooted by a “freak” storm from another wind direction. 

There are species which CAN cope, and they are the ones which can flourish in these new circumstances. Species of birds, insects and plants are colonising from the continent, and some are extending their ranges northward as the climate warms. At the same time, global trade has allowed the introduction of species from afar, although all too often these to become pest species when they flourish without their native predators.

Many of these are attractive and exciting additions to our fauna, but unfortunately, over the last 50 years, our native biodiversity has in general declined. It is only by visiting sites of my youth and remembering what they looked like then, what birds and butterflies could be seen and in what numbers, can I recognise that I too am subject to the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’. This is where we either are unaware of, or forget what things were like before and accept the current situation as normal when in fact it is diminished. Rewilding projects show how wildlife can recolonise and flourish given the right conditions but on their own these will never be enough. Much needs to be done to ensure that the decline in biodiversity since 1976 does not continue for the next 50 years.

​Andrew Graham

There has been a change to the programme for our April meeting which will now hear from local resident, Nick Radford.

Nick, whose home is in Sutton Mandeville, has more than a decade’s experience working on conservation in Africa, where he spends a large portion of every year. For his employer, the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, he is the Markets & Conservation Finance Lead for Central Africa & the Gulf of Guinea. His work involves finding ways to deploy private sector investment that can simultaneously mobilise capital and deliver nature-positive outcomes.

In his talk, titled ‘Conservation at a Crossroads: The Future of the Congo Basin in One of the World’s Most Overlooked Regions’ Nick will explain what he does, and reflect on how conservation in Central Africa is changing, and on the growing role of investment, markets, and private sector partnerships in supporting conservation. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in the region, he will discuss how sustainable finance, tourism, and responsible supply chains are helping to fund conservation, while pressures on forests and wildlife continue to grow.

As always, doors and bar will be open from 7pm, free for members and people under 21 years of age and £4 for guests. ​We look forward to seeing you then.

Please make a note that we have cancelled the Fernhill Farm trip which had been listed for 3rd June and there is now an updated programme for the Society accessible on the Field Trips page. As Peter mentioned at our last talk, Fernhill do run their own events from time to time and perhaps you may wish to attend one of those in the future. 

We now have the Constitution and the Safeguarding Policy available for download from a new page under Home. Please locate them at Documents & Policies

Our indoor meeting this month is a talk on Thursday March 12th at 7.30pm by Gareth Harris talking about Wiltshire bats. Gareth is the Wiltshire Recorder for Wiltshire Bat Group and Wiltshire Mammal Group.

This talk will highlight the importance of dark skies for these amazing mammals.
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As always, doors and bar will be open from 7pm, free for members and people under 21 years of age and £4 for guests. 

Just a note to say that the Field Trips now appear on the Field Trips page as a list. We're finalising the details of times and meeting points so bear with us until then. It should give you an idea of which ones you want to pencil in your diaries!