Your Forum

Thanks Mike. It is a shame that more people (including members!) do not use this forum to record their latest finds or to post queries and discuss ideas, especially after all Peter's hard work to put the website in place. Perhaps part of the problem is that in the modern age every special interest group, whether it be birds, moths, dragonflies or whatever, all have their own websites, many of whose members have little interest in other natural history disciplines. I would not necessarily knock this as they often do great work but do not see why it should preclude them from being aligned to an umbrella group such as the Field Club and to contribute to a forum such as this. The trouble from my point of view is that if your interests are more wide ranging you need to access each of them in order to find out the latest news. My own interest in natural history started in toddler-hood and over the years I have become reasonably knowledgeable in a number of subjects. Others I know little about but am always interested in learning more. One such is geology, a subject on which I am a little better informed than previously thanks to articles by Peter Allen and Gerald Lucy in the Essex Naturalist, a journal I always read from cover to cover, even articles on the statistical analysis of weather dependence in Stag Beetles in NE Essex. Maths and statistics were always of profound mystery to me!