TO BE APPROVED AT 2017 AGM (29 November 2017)
LONDON NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY
LONDON BIRD CLUB
Minutes of the Annual General Meeting 2016 of the London Bird Club held on Thursday November 24th at
Burgh House, NW3 1LT, at 6.30pm.
ChairmanGehan de Silva
Committee SecretaryAngela Linnell
There were 22 members and one non-member present.
Our Chairman, Gehan de Silva, welcomed everyone and thanked them for coming and explained that Kat Duke sent her apologies for her unavoidable absence at the meeting.
1)Apologies for Absence
Apologies had been received fromHelen Baker, Jan Dobbie, Kat Duke, Andrew Selfand Bob Watts.
2)The Minutes of the 2015 AGM. The Minutes of the last AGM were proposed by Pete Lambert, seconded by Ian Ferguson, approved nem con and signed by Gehan de Silva.
a)Report on LBC activities July 2015 – June 2016
b) Gehan thanked all of the London Bird Club Committee members, whose hard work makes the LBC an active section of the LNHS and those on the committees of the other sections the LNHS Council and other role holders and volunteers. He also thanked the members who support the activities through their participation. He outlined the key events during the year. Access to the Queen Mary Reservoir for LNHS members had been implemented and Gehan thanked Ian Crump and his colleagues at Thames Water, Pete Lambert and Andrew Self who initiated the discussions on access. It was agreed that the London Bird Atlas will be a joint publication with John Beaufoy Publishing, a specialist Natural History Publisher. The LNHS will benefit because this publisher is able to handle all of the logistics, from design and production to marketing, storage, distribution and sales. The LNHS is committed to a funding cost of £10,000 and in order to recover this, the LNHS Council has agreed to take some advertising. The LBC played a key role in supporting the re-design of the new LNHS website. We would like to record our thanks to the LNHS Webmaster, Malcolm Kendall, for his hard work. The LBC also played a key part in supporting the development of LNHS Learning posters on the LNHS website, which will help disseminate the expertise of the LNHS and also to improve its public engagement. A comprehensive discussion paper on the Bird Recording Portal has been circulated to the committee. Gehan welcomed to the committee Lee Dingainas Twitter Master and Shalmali Patterson as the incoming Field Meetings Secretary. He also paid tribute to Pete Lambert as the outgoing Field Meetings Secretary. Gehan also thanked Angela Linnell, who has held the role of Secretary of the London Bird Club for over twentyyears and would now like to step down.
b)Section Accounts [Please see the balance sheet on page 5]George Kalli, the Treasurer, had prepared the Section Accounts. “These brief accounts of the financial affairs of the London Bird Club cover the twelve months from 1st July 2015 to June 30th 2016 to coincide with the Society’s financial year. Figures for the previous year are shown on the left-hand side of the page. We began the year with an opening balance of £141.30 and received a grant from the Society’s funds of £450.00, which was based on the estimate of the anticipated expenses for the coming year. The expenses make up the main part of this statement in the bottom half of the page. Lecturers’ fees and expenses came to £225.00 which was covered by entry fees of £226.45. Officers’ expenses were higher than the previous year at £385.68. This covers reimbursement of expenses incurred by the Reading Circle Secretary, which covers subscriptions and postage, and expenses incurred by other Section Committee members. Total expenses came to £610.68 leaving a balance at 30th June 2016 of £293.82 carried forward”. There were no questions.
c)Indoor Meetings
Angela read the report on behalf of Kat Duke.
“Indoor meetings in the financial year remained at the Royal Parks’ venue in Hyde Park. The £2 door charge remained and the total raised from this charge over the course of the last talks programme, from September 2015 to March 2016, was £226.45, almost the same amount as the £220 raised the previous year. While there was an extra talk last year in April, January 2015’s talk was sponsored and therefore carried no door charge. So we are holding steady on income from the door fee. These funds help with the venue costs but, with the Royal Parks Foundation set to raise their fees yet again as of September this year, I have now moved the talks to the lovely new venue of Burgh House in Hampstead. Despite the success of our first sponsored event (from the Speyside Wildlife holiday company in February 2015), the idea that one talk a year could be sponsored was thrown into question during this season by problems with the last sponsor, MINOX (who paid the venue cost for our November AGM but failed to provide a speaker or cover speaker costs), so sponsorship may not be pursued in future.
The 2015/2016 season of talks kicked off in September 2015 with a captivating talk from Dr. Gabrielle Davidson on TheWildWorldOfCorvids: Understanding Animal Behaviour And Cognition. This attracted the season’s highest number of attendees with 38 people, including 6 non-members. October’s talk was from Roger Emmens on 55 Years And Counting: A Long-Term Ringing Study and saw 21 people attend. The November post-AGM talk was delivered by a guest speaker, Dr. Darren Naish (since we still had no Chairman in place until the election of Gehan de Silva that very night), who talked about Dinosaurs And Bird Evolution to 32 people, including an impressive 9 non-members. January’s scheduled speaker pulled out at the last minute so Gehan stepped in and spoke to 16 of us, including 2 non-members, about Why Sri Lanka Is Super-Rich For Wildlife. In February Ken Smith spoke on Tree Sparrow Conservation for 29 attendees, 5 of whom were non-members and, as usual, the programme wrapped up with a talk in our London's Finest Birdwatching Sites series. Held every March, as the talks programme comes to a close and people prepare to go out birdwatching in the Spring and Summer, the series featured Peter Warne this year who talked to us about The Wildlife Of Copped Hall Park.While just 19 people attended this talk, including 3 non-members, overall attendance numbers are holding steady. Due to a lack of interest, there was no Ecology & Entomology talk tacked onto the end of the ornithology talks programme this year. With very similar attendance levels to last year’s season, and the talks attracting a record 25 non-members this year, things are looking good. Publicity efforts included advertising talks online via Yahoo, The Lecture List, the BirdGuides events page, The Royal Parks Foundation website and through other birding groups, such as the Marylebone Birdwatching Society, who also promote our events. The popular LBC Twitter feed, which now has a following of almost 3,200 people under Lee Dingain’s diligent care, also helped in publicising the talks, broadening our audience and spreading the LNHS’s reach. If only half of the non-members who are attracted to our bird talks through these proactive publicity efforts eventually joined us, that would be a satisfactory result. We are always interested to hear what talks would interest you most. For example, would you like more UK orientated talks or more talks on birds and birdwatching around the world? Please let the committee know or email your suggestions directly to .”
d)Outdoor Meetings
i)Coach trips
Angela read the report in the absence of Neil Anderson.
There were coach trips to Holkham, Dungeness, Rutland Water and Strumpshaw Fen during the year but bookings have been falling in recent years, just as they have for local RSPB groups. The Committee would like to thank Neil Anderson, who has done a splendid job organising the LNHS coach trips for about thirty years.
ii) Field TripsPete Lambert reported:“During the period July 2015-June 2016 I organised 33 walks; attendance varied a lot from as little as one to as high as 23 but average attendance is about seven or eight people. There were visits to Cheshunt Gravel Pits, Tooting Common, Greenwich Peninsula and Ecology Park, Alexandra Park, Rainham Marshes, Greenwich Park, Walthamstow Reservoirs, Crossness, Wandsworth Common, Hampstead Heath, Two Tree Island, Ruislip Nature Reserve, Beddington Farmlands, East Tilbury, Bedfont Lakes, Trent Park, Brent Reservoir, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, Amwell Nature Reserve, Fairlop Waters, Stocker’s Lake and Totteridge. Although the walks are as much about seeing and identifying the common birds, scarcer birds seen on some of the walks in London included Serin, Jack Snipe, Black-necked Grebe, Black Tern, Marsh Tit, Wood Sandpiper, Bearded Tit, Tree Sparrow, Little Owl and Smew. The two trips outside London produced a wider range of birds with highlights being Corn Buntings and Little Gull at East Tilbury and Short-eared Owl, Avocets and Greenshank at Two Tree Island. Pete thanked all the walk leaders for their hard work. Any suggestions for places to visit or people who might be interested in leading a walk would be very welcome.
Angela welcomed the new Field Meetings Secretary, Shalmali Paterson. Shalmalijoined the travel industry in 2004 as a cycling and trekking guide. This led her to do solo travel in Bhutan and trek the Shan mountains in Myanmar, (Burma) and to being part of an all-women’s expedition to Mt. Nun. She has guided cultural and cycling trips in Rajasthan, from high altitude cycling expeditions, to treks in the Indian Himalayas and to motorcycle expeditions.She has been in the travel field for the last 13 years. The last three years she has been handling the operations and trip designing for a luxury tailor made travel company in London.
e)Bird Recorder for London
Angela read the report on behalf of Andrew Self: “There was one change to the recording team this year with Roger Payne replacing Joan Thompson for Hertfordshire. The 2014 London Bird Report was published on schedule in May 2016 and work has commenced on the 2015 LBR. We also submitted records to the Rare Breeding Birds Panel for the report in British Birds.”
f)Rarities Committee
Angela read the report on behalf of Bob Watts. “The Rarities Committee has been comprised of six members over the past year, all highly accomplished field ornithologists. I continue to circulate records throughout the year from a variety of sources including blogs, photographs and descriptions. Occasionally the Committee decides upon a moratorium for a species, such as the Yellow-browed Warbler this autumn, whereby we will accept all records without descriptions unless there are severe doubts about provenance.“
g)Library Committee
Gehan reported that the library committee held three meetings. “I was unable to attend in person as entry to the Natural History Museum is required by 5.30pm. It is possible for a representative to contribute suggestions for books by email as I have done. The post is vacant and it would be preferable to find someone who can attend meetings at this time. There is no need for expert knowledge. Just an interest in bird books which you then recommend to the LNHS Library Committee.”
h)Reading Circle
Angela reported that the LBC Reading Circle now has thirteen subscribers who pay a small subscription to receive their choice of the following journals: Ardea, a Dutch journal, British Birds, Dutch Birding, Ibis, Irish Birds and Scottish Birds. I send these out and the recipient passes the journal on to the next person on the circulation list and the journals eventually end up in the LNHS Library at the Angela Marmont Centre at the Natural History Museum. Last year, we only had nine members and as some of these journals increased their prices considerably, the future of the Reading Circle seemed in doubt. However, with 13 members, we can now continue.
i)London Bird Atlas
Angela read the report on behalf of Ian Woodward and Richard Arnold. “They had worked hard on the Atlas all year and had recently sent the Atlas species accounts to reviewers for comments by Christmas and hoped to publish the Atlas in early 2017.”
j)London Bird Report
Pete Lambert reported that,following the publication of LBR 2013 in June 2015, “we published LBR 2014 in May 2016. My thanks to the many people involved in the collection of records, the writing up of accounts and papers and the production team. Any suggestions for improving the report would be very welcome.”
Any Other Business
Vacancies
a)Coach Trips Our coach trip organiser, Neil Anderson, has now been doing this job for over thirty years. However, he feels that, with falling bookings, it is time for someone else to take over. If someone would like to take over the whole job, that would be ideal but he would also consider continuing as leader on the actual trip, if someone would like to take over the administration of coach trips. This basically involves booking the coach, co-ordinating with the nature reserve staff, collecting the money and publicising the trips.
b) Library Committee
As mentioned previously, Gehan would like to resign from this post.“The library committee holds 3 meetings a year but I was unable to attend in person as entry to the Natural History Museum is required by 5.30pm. It is possible for a representative to contribute suggestions for books by email as I have done. The post is vacant and it would be preferable to find someone who can attend meetings at this time.”
c) Committee Secretary
Angela said that the role does not demand an expert knowledge of birds - just the ability to take notes. Shorthand is not necessary. The Minutes are written in Word and are sent out by email. There are only four meetings a year, including the AGM.
d) There are vacancies for at least two non-post holders on the LBC Committee. They involve only three committee meetings a year. You do not need to be an expert on birds but just have some ideas on how to improve things. e.g.: new locations for field trips, new places for coach trips, new ideas for indoor meetings.
Election of Officers and Committee Members for 2017
Position / ElectedChairman / Gehan de Silva
Committee Secretary / Vacant
Treasurer / George Kalli
Indoor Meetings Secretary / Kat Duke
Field Meetings Secretary / Shalmali Paterson
Coach Trips Secretary / Vacant
Reading Circle Secretary / Angela Linnell
Ornithology Section Committee (non-office holders): / Two positions vacant
Representative on Council / Gehan de Silva
Representative on Library Committee / Vacant
Bird Recorder for London / Andrew Self
Chairman of the Rarities Committee:
Members: John Archer, Richard Bonser, Rob Innes, Sean Huggins, Andrew Moon and Andrew Self / Bob Watts
Recorders
Inner London / Richard Bonser
Bucks / Andrew Moon
Essex / Roy Woodward
Herts / Roger Payne
Middx / Sean Huggins
Kent and Lower Thames / John Archer
Surrey and Upper Thames / David Campbell
Ringing Enquiries / Paul Roper
BTO South London Contact / Richard Arnold
BTO North London Contact / Ian Woodward
London Bird Report Editorial Board [This is a matter of record only]
Pete Lambert. Members: John Archer, Jonathan Lethbridge, Roger Payne, Mike Trier, Bob Watts, Gus Wilson.
The Officers were put forward en bloc. They were proposed by Ian Ferguson , seconded by Robin Baker and passed nem con.
The AGM was followed by a talk by our Chairman, Gehan de Silva, on “A Bird Photographer’s London – Should London be promoted as a wildlife destination?”
The meeting closed at about 8.10pm.
London Natural History Society
London Bird Club Accounts
For the year ended 30th June 2016
2014/20152015/16
££
217.21OPENING BALANCE 141.30
INCOME
577.00Deposits 763.20
0.00Interest 0.00
______
794.21 904.50
______
EXPENSES
415.80Lecturers’ fees and expenses 225.00
237.11Officers’ expenses 385.68
______
652.91 610.68
______
141.30Balance carried forward at 293.82
30th June 2016
______
NOTES: Deposits include :- 1) From Central LNHS funds 450.00
Reading Circle receipts 86.75
Entry Fees 226.45
Total deposits 763.20
2) Officers’ expenses include Reading Circle Subs. Payments