This report is to keep you up to date with what’s happening in the Society and what changes have been made. As you know up to last year when I became President I used to compile two newsletters a year which typically contained short reports of meetings illustrated with photographs taken by attendees to give you some idea what you might find should you decide at a later date to join us should we revisit that location or indeed if you choose to go there yourself.

Since Les Coe set up our new website on which we have a section dedicated to reports of meetings, I felt it was no longer necessary to write Newsletters in the same vein and so the last so called Newsletter 35 from me in the Summer of 2020 represented the bridge between myself as the person who complied meeting reports and myself as President.

So going back to the website, I’m sure Les won’t mind if I explain one or two things about how the website works. My apologies to to those who don’t need any explanations!

Starting with “Meeting reports 2021” on the Home page. If you hover over the heading you will only see reports for this year. However, if you click on the heading you will see a drop down menu where you will find archived reports for 2019 and 2020. This could be useful if you volunteer to write a report of a meeting and you want to look at the format others have used (more on this later). Obviously there are omissions for February and March of this year due to Covid restrictions but since the rule of 6 was reinstated on March 29th we have had three meetings in April and a short resume for the first at Wentbridge on April 15th can be found on the website.

It’s very pleasing to see that some members have taken the time to submit some of their photos to the website. In viewing them I see that there are some excellent photographs and the locations serves as a reminder of some past Nats visits and possibly some places to visit in the future. Talking about adding the location to your photographs, please don’t let it stop you from submitting an interesting photograph if you haven’t got a record of the exact location. Les has indicated that as long as the photograph was taken within a days drive from Doncaster it will be accepted. I realise from my own experience that you may only have recorded the name of the subject and may not remember exactly where it was taken but can make a good guess whether it fits Les’s criteria for addition to the website!

May I also add that should you write an article for the website which includes photographs or graphs please give each of them a separate title so that Les can assign a title to them because they might be randomly selected by the website program to appear in the Gallery or slideshow.

You may also have noticed that increasingly there have been more members contributing to the Society by writing reports for Outdoor meetings. The intention is to encourage members attending outdoor meetings to offer to write a report either on their own or in conjunction with the Leader so that the work load of the Society is spread amongst the members. Apart from that reason I think it’s good to have different perspectives on the meetings. So thank you to Colin for the numerous reports he wrote for last year’s meetings, Anna Thirlwell for her memories and photographs of the meeting at John Scott’s Farm, Louise and Mick Townsend for the report on the Newting night and Louise for the report on the Dawn Chorus.

One of my friend’s recently asked me if I was taking part in “No Mow May” which I later discovered is a project organised by Plant Life. If you don’t already know, the challenge is to leave your lawn to grow without mowing throughout May to encourage more wild flowers to grow in your garden, thereby increasing the amount of nectar available to pollinators. In the past I have intentionally avoided mowing part of my lawn where Self Heal has started growing in profusion but having read about No Mow May, I intend to take part in the challenge and leave al of it. At the end of May then you select a random quadrat, count the number of different flower species and submit the result to Plant Life. I realise May has already started but if you haven’t mown your lawn in the last 5 days you can still take part. Take a look at Plant Life’s website if you are interested in knowing more.

Finally our next committee meeting is scheduled for July 1st at which time we will look at possibilities for a Winter program and trust we will by then know whether we are still able to use Parklands. If you have any thoughts about possible speakers please let Joyce know. Her e mail address is on the Summer program.

Despite the unseasonal cooler weather the spring flowers and blossoming trees are once again magnificent and so I trust you are taking time to admire them.
Hope to see you at one of our events.
Best Wishes
Nora