The next meeting of the Club will be held on Monday 25 March at 6.30pm (doors open at 6pm) upstairs in the Barley Mow, 104 Horseferry Road, London SW1P 2EE. Laura Vaughan-Hirsh will talk on The White Stork nesting in Sussex.
The landscape in a small but expanding part the Low Weald in Sussex has changed for the better over the last decade. Laura Vaughan-Hirsch's talk will explain how White Storks Ciconia ciconia are part of this change, with optimism for biodiversity rather than the gloom so commonplace. On the Knepp Estate a bold transition from arable and dairy farming to a new landscape with a mosaic of unfenced fields grazed of Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and native deer. What has not changed is the Sussex marl and flood waters that come with heavy rains, a constant reminder that this was never going to be agricultural land with larger fields of well-drained loamy soil. Research suggests that the ecological requirements for White Storks seem to be the same everywhere, namely open, little wooded and somewhat wet land such as valleys of rivers and streams, cultivated fields, pastures and meadows, provided that they are not too dry or too much drained. On the Knepp Estate there is an aim to promote greater engagement between the public and wildlife in the countryside, so the highly visible and charismatic White Stork, with its history of nesting in close association with man, was an obvious first-choice addition. The talk will address the life cycle of the species in Sussex and the challenges faced by the birds and their fledglings.
Laura Vaughan-Hirsch is the project officer managing the White Stork Project at Knepp Estate, West Sussex. After reading biology at Royal Holloway University, she worked as a science teacher at a secondary school in Horsham. She has always had a keen interest in animal behaviour, and particularly British birds.
At the start of 2024, we were pleased to welcome two new Associate Editors.
Juan Freile is an Ecuadorian ornithologist, who authored the Birds of Ecuador (Helm Field Guides, 2018) and Birds of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands (Helm Wildlife Guides, 2023). He is Senior Editor of the journals Cotinga and Revista Ecuatoriana de Ornitología, and an Associate Editor of Ornitología Neotropical. Juan is currently also Chairman of the Committee for Ecuadorian Records in Ornithology; he collaborates with the South American Classification Committee in revising and updating individual South American country lists, and serves as a technical advisor on the continent's vagrant and hypothetical species. He is the author of a number of papers on the distribution, natural history, taxonomy and conservation of Andean birds (including in Bull. Brit. Orn. Cl.).
Flavia Montaño-Centellas is a Bolivian ecologist, with broad interests in Neotropical bird ecology and conservation, especially Andean birds. She is an Associate Professor at Louisiana State University, as well as serving as an Associate Editor for the journals Ornitología Neotropical and Acta Zoológica Lilloana. Her own research focuses mostly on disentangling the causes behind avian diversity patterns and the role of environmental gradients in shaping avifaunas. More broadly, she is committed to making academia more inclusive.
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