Tag: Wakefield Naturalists

Rambling with the Nats, 1873

naturalists
Artists impression of Victorian naturalists, drawn on Clip Studio Paint (I’m trying out the Lasso filled-shape tool). It would be wonderful if a photograph of the Nats on a ramble in Victorian times ever turned up.

Wakefield Express- 31 May 1873

WAKEFIELD NATURALISTS’ SOCIETY

On Saturday last the members of this Society had a field-day at Nostell, Ryhill, and Wintersett. It was a beautiful day, and nature decked in her spring garb of ever-varying green, displayed that wonderful freshness with which no other part of the year can vie. After several hours’ enjoyment in the woods and lanes, the party met at the Angler’s Arms, Wintersett, where, after tea, the president (Mr Alderman Wainwright, F.L.S.) took the chair and subsequently named the plants about fifty species which had been collected during the afternoon. – Mr Taylor named the conchological specimens, of which fourteen species were exhibited, and Mr Sims named the geological specimens and made some interesting remarks on the geological formations of the neighbourhood. – Messrs. Parkin and Lumb, whose attention had been chiefly directed during the day’s excursion to the observation of the spring migrants, reported they had seen fifteen species of them, and that they had also noticed a Heron and a pair of Common Gull besporting themselves upon the reservoir. Messrs. Fogg and Heald exhibited the larvae of several species of geometae. Returning by way of Hawe Park, the party arrived back at Wakefield as the evening closed in, after spending a most enjoyable and delightful day.

My thanks to Lesley Taylor for spotting this.

Remembering Karen

Naturalists
Wakefield Naturalists’ September field trip to St Aidans.

We’ve been saddened to hear of the untimely death of a member of Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, Karen Nicklin, who also – as in my cartoon – volunteered at the RSPB St Aidan’s reserve.

“As a really keen walker and hiker, Karen spent time planning and undertaking walks that combined nature and the landscape and I remember well the talk she gave recently at our members’ evening when she wowed us with views of the spectacular scenery and wild flowers from a recent trek in the Austrian Alps.”

John Gardner, President, Wakefield Naturalists’ Society, wakefieldnaturalists.org

It’s just three weeks ago that we last saw her on that pre-‘Rule of Six’ Naturalists’ field trip to St Aidan’s. As she served me a socially-distanced shade-grown coffee (shade-grown saves trees) afterwards, I asked her what the news was from the Loch Garten ospreys. She replied that, because of Covid, she’d missed out on volunteering there for the first time since 2004. She told me that she hadn’t even managed to add an osprey on her year list. She was obviously missing them, and we’ll miss her.

Wakefield Naturalists’, 1883

‘Numquam aliud natura, aliud sapentia dicit’

Beneath a shield with the fleur-de-lys of Wakefield at its centre and a daisy, a beetle, a bird and a microscope in the quarters around  it, the  motto of the Wakefield Naturalists’ and Philosophical Society, a quotation from Juvenal’s Satires, translates as:

‘Never does nature say one thing and wisdom say another’

Wisdom wasn’t always the first consideration for the enthusiastic naturalists of the 1880s; at a summer field meeting in 1881, the president of the Society was bitten by an adder as he attempted to pick it up.

Later that year an ambitious Exhibition of Science and Fine Art, intended to be a fundraiser for the Nats and a benefit to the town, was destined to leave an enormous hole in the balance sheet of the Society, as detailed in the Twelfth Annual Report of 1883.

Link

Adder Bite

Adder Bite

A dramatic incident on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society meeting on a summer’s day in 1881:

In an attempt stop the poison spreading the ‘venomed finger, as well as the wrist and arm, were bound round with twine as tightly as possible’.

Messengers were despatched to Pontefract for medical assistance and a Doctor Simpson hurried to the place, and recommended that the sufferer should be removed to Pontefract:

“but Mr. Wainwright decided to be driven to his own residence. On reaching Wakefield about midnight, Dr. Wade, the medical officer for the borough, was called. Notwithstanding that poultices were applied at frequent intervals through the night, the sufferer became delirious, the hand and arm assumed unusual proportions, and Mr. Wainwright had evidently much pain. On Sunday afternoon, on a Wakefield correspondent calling at Springfield House, he was informed that the sufferer was sleeping soundly, and that he appeared to be progressing as favourably as could be expected.”

Fortunately Mr Wainwright survived. He died in Wakefield on the 10th April, 1884.