Reading & District Natural History Society

Between 25th and 30th August the parkland and house will host a range of family friendly activities supported by members of the Reading and District Natural History Society. Come and join the fun at no additional charge.

Download the list of activities here.

Download the latest RDNHS newsletter here: June 2010 Newsletter

by James Wearn

The Reading and District Natural History Society has forged an agreement with the Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.  The pact is based upon the transfer of copies of the society’s journals, past, present and future (numbering 60 issues so far), to Kew.  This significant step will endow mutual benefit by giving the long-standing efforts of society members a much wider audience, while the provision of important biological records from Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire will aid research by visitors and staff at Kew.

I thank our President Graham Saunders for approval to go ahead with my plan, Malcolm Storey for his trojan efforts as editor of the journal, Jan Haseler for help with aquisition of back issues and various other queries, and Fiona Ainsworth (Collections Manager in the Library, Art and Archives section at RBG Kew) for agreeing to take our journal into the prestigious collections at RBG Kew.

I hope you like the new-look website - it has been a bit of a labour of love for me and so far it has been getting some very nice compliments. The reasons for changing were numerous but primarily the old website was all manually edited by myself, and it was getting a bit long in the tooth, from a technical standpoint.

The new site has been built using a modern blogging and content-management system called Wordpress, which means that it will be much much easier for myself and the other contributors to update, while at the same time (hopefully) being more pleasing on the eye and generally easier to read.

If you have any comments I would be very interested to read them - just use the contact box on the Contact us page.

Reading and District Natural History Society are proud to announce that they have been awarded a National Lottery ‘Awards for All’ grant of £5475. The money will be used to buy a digital projector and lamp, a laptop with suitable software, a stand for the projector and laptop, display boards and an electrically-operated wall screen, which will be installed in Pangbourne Village Hall, where the Society holds its winter meetings.

Until now, the Society has only owned an aged slide projector and a rather small folding screen which has had to be balanced precariously on top of a table. But nowadays, most of our speakers have PowerPoint presentations which require digital projection equipment. Thanks to the ‘Awards for All’ grant, our winter talks will now be presented at the highest quality on a large screen.

We have put together a stimulating programme of wildlife talks for the Winter 2008-2009 season, which we look forward to seeing on our new equipment. The first talk of the winter season will be at 19:45 on Tuesday 7th October in Pangbourne Village Hall, when President Jan Haseler will talk about monitoring butterflies in Mid-Berkshire.

You can view our Awards for all certificate here.