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REPORT ON THE FIELD MEETINGS OF THE NATURAL 

 HISTORY SOCIETY FOR 1912. 



Read March 19TH, 1913, by the Rev. J. M. Hick, M.A., 

 Chairman of the Field Meetings Committee in 19 12. 



On approaching the termination of my term of office as 

 President of the Field Section of the Natural History Society, 

 to which you so kindly elected me last year, it becomes my 

 duty to give you a resume of the Field Meetings held during 

 the past year. Although we cannot claim that any very great 

 scientific work was done, yet I think that much pleasurable 

 intercourse and exchange of ideas was promoted by them. 

 In a season chiefly remarkable by its inclemency, we were, 

 I think, most highly favoured by the weather, no excursion 

 being marred by storm and tempest. 



Our First Field Day was held at Stocksfield on Saturday, 

 May nth. The number who joined in it was eighteen, and 

 the party left the Central Station at 1.22 p.m. The course 

 planned was, by kind permission of Lord Allendale, through 

 the woods to Riding Mill, not a long journey but a very 

 pleasant one. No great discoveries were made, but many 

 of the harbingers of spring were noted. Remarks were made 

 on the dryness of the woods, and it was difficult to realize 

 that so short a time had elapsed since we all were remark- 

 ing on the constant rain and the remarkable succession of 

 wet Sundays — eighteen wet Sundays having occurred without 

 a break. The parching winds were doubtless accountable for 

 the extreme dryness. This also may have accounted for the 

 scarcity of bird life seen. The curlew, landrail, cuckoo, 

 willow-wren, chiff-chaff, whitethroat, swallow, martin and pied 

 wagtail practically completed the list, and these were not seen 

 in any number. The entomologists, owing to the same cause 

 and the cold and blustering wind, had little success ; a few 

 micro-lepidoptera and a single specimen of the green-veined 

 white (Pieris napi) were all that were seen. The botanists had 

 a better time, not in discovering novelties but in renewing their 



