Headline news

The next GNS Indoor Meeting is due to take place on Friday 12^th February – At Cirencester Branch, takes place at Watermoor Church Hall, Watermoor Lane, Cirencester GL7 1JR, 7pm for a 7.30 start

An illustrated talk by Helen Mugridge ARPS, renowned wildlife photographer, entitled Wildlife Photography at Home and Abroad – for a taste of what might be seen have a look at the web-site – Promises to be a feast of very fine photographs and interesting dialogue.

http://willridgeimages.co.uk/.

Field Meeting – The Awre Peninsula

And the next field meeting on Sunday 14^th February Awre Peninsula, Estuary Birds and Wildlife to be led by Mike Smart (01452 421131). Meet at the centre of Awre village at SO 705 084 – leave the A48 and follow the signs to Awre. 11am to 2pm. Binoculars or Telescope a distinct advantage and please dress appropriately, it may be cold, wet and muddy but will be interesting.

Gloucestershire Naturalists’ Society will publish a special edition of “The Gloucestershire Naturalist” (TGN 28) in April 2016: Dragonflies & Damselflies of Gloucestershire by Ingrid Twissell, the Gloucestershire Odonata Recorder.

The result of a long and careful campaign of fieldwork and recording, this publication is an important addition to Gloucestershire fauna reference works and contains much useful information about dragonflies & damselflies in the county complete with distribution maps, flight times, sites guide etc. It is lavishly illustrated with photographs of both species and habitats.

GNS members will receive an invitation to reserve a copy by mail together with their copy of TGN 27 which is due to be published shortly.

Non-members may apply to reserve a copy at a cost of £15 + £2.50 post and packing by e-mailing the membership secretary, at gnsmembership@btinternet.com or by writing to GNS Membership Secretary, 50 Kingsmead, Abbeymead, Gloucester, GL4 5DY.

A Live Animal Event for February half-term week 2016

Gloucestershire Raptor Monitoring Group is presenting “Breeding Honey-buzzards in the UK”, an illustrated talk with Steve Roberts on Tuesday January 26th 2016 at Ribston Hall High School, Stroud Rd, Gloucester (GL1 5LE) – doors open 7pm for a 7.30 start. Refreshments available at a small charge.

Steve will talk about this enigmatic and hard-to-find species.  He has been studying breeding birds all his life and Honey-buzzards for the past 25 years, which has resulted in him having two major papers published in British Birds as well as other papers elsewhere. Steve is well respected in birding circles, and is an excellent speaker.

This event is ticket-only, available online via the GRMG shop at http://glosraptors.co.uk/shop/. Bookings will be confirmed by e-mail, please bring proof of booking with you on the night – a printed copy of the e-mail will do.  

GRMG doesn’t have members paying subscriptions, so needs to make a charge to cover the costs of these talks.  Any surplus made on ticket sales will be used by the group for raptor conservation in Gloucestershire.

GRMG is just a little over one year old, but brings together a number of members of GNS and other groups, all of whom have a special interest in birds of prey and owls and has been supported by GNS with grant aid funding enabling the construction and siting of Owl nest boxes. Monitoring, recording and ringing of other birds of prey is carried out by some members of the group, other activities in support of raptors is planned for the future including a special survey of Little Owls beginning in 2016. More information can be found at www.glosraptors.co.uk.

Many members of the GNS will already be subscribers to British Birds or may have taken up trial offers. Whether or not, you may like to receive their free e-newsletter every month. This offers a flavour of what has been published recently and what is in the pipeline in areas such as book of the month, news and comment, the rarities section and special offers.

This is a new initiative from one of Britain’s leading birding publications. It covers the UK and Western Palearctic and has been the birdwatchers’ journal of record since 1907. It is read and recommended by many amateur and professional ornithologists, writers and photographers with Simon King stating that ‘British Birds is the gold standard of ornithological literature in the UK’.

To receive the newsletters, just go to www.britishbirds.co.uk and enter your email address on the right of the page.

Changes to the Rules of the Society were proposed and approved by the membership at a Special General Meeting on 27^th March 2015, subject to the final approval of the Charity Commissioners.

The requirement for Charity Commission approval is enshrined in rule 18 which requires that “No amendment to Rule 2 (Objects of the Society), Rule 17 (Dissolution) or Rule 18 (Alteration to Rules) shall take effect without the written consent of the Charity Commissioners thereto”.

In essence, by updating Rule 2, the “Objects of the Society”, rule 18 came into play; however, the Charity Commission now has quite specific guidelines that govern what can be both an “Object” and be considered to be “wholly charitable”. As a result, some re-drafting of the proposed objects was necessary before the Charity Commission gave final approval to the change in writing, in an e-mail, to the Membership Secretary, on 12^th December 2015.

The Society now has a fully approved, new set of rules, copies of which are available to read or download as a .pdf file below, or as a hard copy by post from the Membership Secretary upon request.

GNS Rules of The Society 2015 CC Approved

Ponds, Newts and Adders

Dear All,

Thank you for being interested in my projects which form part of the Foresters’ Forest Landscape Partnership project. I would like to give you some information on how these projects are shaping up. Some aspects are still a bit fluid but this is how I see things developing.

Pond Habitat Surveys

There are at least 150 ponds on the public forest estate and more besides on farm land and in people’s gardens. These need to be mapped and catalogued so that we have an overall picture of the pond network. Having such a network of ponds is very valuable for many species of wildlife. We will be better informed on how to manage the pond network where necessary and probably more importantly, where to create new ponds. We also need this information to help us plan for the next step in the Foresters’ Forest project (the ‘Delivery Phase’) and to make the case for receiving additional money from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

As luck would have it an organisation called Freshwater Habitats Trust is starting to create a national database of ponds and we should be able to utilise the facilities they have just set up.

This part of the project will involve visiting each pond with a standard form and recording all the relevant information about the pond. It will include things like the location, size, depth, the type of habitat surrounding it, etc. Also, testing the water for nitrates and phosphates, looking out for alien plant species and taking photos. The form comes with clear instructions and is quite easy to complete. There will be no need to enter the water or put yourself at risk. The next step is to take the form home and enter the data into the national pond database, including entering your photos.

Key Date: Saturday, 23^rd January, 2016 at 10:00am until 12:00. Although this is all very easy to do, there will be a short training course at the Forestry Commission offices in Bank House, Coleford to run through it all. We will then drive over to the pond at the RSPB Nags Head reserve near Parkend to see how this would work in practice. This will involve some transfer time but parking will be available at both venues and a lift can be provided. Families and older children are welcome but very young children might find it a bit too challenging. No dogs though.

Please let me know if you think you may come just to ensure that the venue will cope with the numbers.

Additional training dates may be available if required.

Pond Invertebrate Families

This part of the project will aim to look a bit deeper into a selection of the ponds to see what lives in them. Depending on how many people are able to take part and their skills, we will survey up to about 20 of our ponds to see what families of invertebrates live in them. Invertebrates include such things as dragonfly larvae and water beetles and the number of different ones which can be found is a key indicator of the health and value of a pond. This will involve doing pond dipping and requires a higher level of knowledge. I’m hoping to organise some training for this and for my own benefit also!

This part will not start properly until April when things have warmed up a bit.

More ponds will be included during the Delivery Phase of the project after 2016.

Pond Botany

The objectives for this project are similar to the pond invertebrates except obviously will involve surveying plants. This is certainly not my area of expertise and requires fairly specialised knowledge.

Newts

I am hoping to survey most of the 150 ponds plus any others which come to light to see what newts can be found. I have covered many of these ponds over the last 5 years but would like some other people to repeat this work to see how good my results were! It is also jolly interesting.

The surveys will be done using the ‘Dewsbury Box Trap’ which catches quite a lot of newts and is quite easy to use. It will involve visiting the pond (or several ponds) towards the end of the day to deploy about 3 traps and returning the following morning to record the newts which have been captured and release them unharmed. This type of trap is much safer than the traditional bottle traps and I have not had a single casualty caused by my trap having caught well over 5,000 newts.

All three species of newt can be found in many Forest ponds and I am applying for a project newt licence from Natural England to cover any legal requirements. There are many aspects to this and I will train some key individuals who I hope will accept responsibility for ensuring that their groups of people will comply with the requirements. Hopefully we will have several groups who will cover agreed areas. I would also like to make some of these events open to the public so that they may join in and see some newts.

Adders

The adder may not be everyone’s favourite animal but I think, in many ways, this is Britain’s least understood and most threatened reptile. If we can help the adder to thrive in the Forest then it will help the other 3 species of reptile also.

I would really like to find out where some of our adders hibernate because this will help to ensure that these places are known and can be protected when normal forestry operations and other potentially disruptive activities take place. An adder hibernaculum typically is used by several animals who all return to this safe haven to spend the winter protected from severe frost, flooding and other perils. The male adders emerge at any time from mid-February to bask in the sun to get themselves into breeding condition. They tend to remain here until early April when they shed their skins and then take themselves off in their shiny new skin to find a mate.

Hence, we have a window from mid-February until about mid-April (depending on the warmth of the season) to find them. We will also find other reptiles at the same time. What I would like to try is going out in small groups on sunny days to explore suitable open habitat. I will endeavour to make a list of suitable habitat which I know of including all the places where adders have been recorded in the past. We will then attempt to draw up a schedule for visits. (You may well know of other places.)The tricky part is that we cannot forecast the weather. We need sunny days, especially earlier in the season so groups will need to be fairly flexible to take opportunities as they arise. We can look at the Met Office forecast the day before but as they will admit, they don’t always get it right! So people with a flexible life-style would be particularly welcome.

As part of the Delivery Phase after 2016 we may be able to run a project which will involve tracking some adders to find out more about their movements. We need the new adder locations to help us plan this project as well as possible. The new knowledge will also help us to plan where new open habitat might best be created throughout the Forest.

General Timescale.

January onwards: Pond Habitat surveys.

Mid-Feb to mid-April adder surveys

Mid-March to early June: newt surveys

April onwards: pond invertebrate families and plants

Safety

The most important requirement for these projects is safety. Whilst small accidents can always happen by chance there are ways of anticipating the dangers and advice will be provided. However, two key rules which should be adhered to are that no-one enters any pond almost without exception and that there are at least two people so that help is always at hand.

Please feel free to ask any further questions and don’t assume I’ve thought of everything! Hope we can meet sometime at a pond near you.

David Dewsbury.

07/12/2015

david.dewsbury@btinternet.com

The next GNS Field Meeting is due to take place on Sunday 1st November – Birds of the Estuary at Aylburton Warth on the high tide.

Meet at 11.00am – Woolaston Level Crossing at Plusterwine, ST 601 991 (turn off the A48 just south-west of Woolaston onto Station Road and follow the lane to the end at the railway crossing). To be led by Mike Smart, 01452 421131.

Weather is supposed to be cloudy but fair with a temperature around 13^oC but it will be wet and muddy under foot and breezy so do dress appropriately, binoculars or telescope would be a distinct advantage.