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NEWS FOR NATURALISTS. ' W h i l e on earth, H u m a n Heart, forget not that, If earth is loved and lovely, heaven must be lovelier still.' —Grace Aguilar's Martyr, cap. xxii. BEFORE founding the Bury St. Edmunds Naturalists' Society, its originators were so good as to consult our views upon the subject; and we replied that the more such bodies our County possessed, the greater would become public sympathy in the preservation of its Natural Beauty and the knowledge of its Biology. So, on 20 April last it came into being, alongside Mildenhall, Lowestoft, Stowmarket and Ipswich. Its objects and propaganda are obviously taken from our own. Major Guy Aylmer, is president, Mr. Cyril Grange chairman, Miss Williams of Stanningfield is honorary secretary and Mr. Nesling of Bury honorary treasurer. We can recall no other British county boasting five such Societies, and hope that ere long Sudbury will resume and Beccles follow suit. Newmarket, in this respect, at present appears hopeless.— The value of such distributional societies was well exemplified this year when, but for the vigilance of the Lowestoft Field Club, a couple of Little Buntings Emberiza pusilla, Pall., a vagrant mainly to our northern isles, would have gone unrecorded in that district on 11 February and two more at Reydon on 13th. It is NEW to Suffolk. We have received a circular announcing the issue of a quarterly " Entomologist's Gazette " to be edited by M M . E. W. Classey and R. L. E. Ford, and published by Watkins & Doncaster, the well-known dealers of 36 Strand, at a sov. per annum, each of the four Parts to contain fully fifty-two pages, illustrated. Is there room for such a magazine, devoted to " especially the Lepidoptera, Collecting Methods, Technique, Literature and History," thus continuing to deal with the already most fully worked branch of Insect-life ? A " large green stone," on the beach at Treyarnon Bay southwest of Padstow in Cornwall late in December 1949, resolved itself into a Loggerhead Turtle of some two years' growth : a very rare species in British waters. It had come a couple of thousand miles across the Atlantic in the Gulf Stream from Mexico ; and was identified by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (London Paper). This is a quite different and much larger species than the Dermatochelys coriacea, L. (Trans, ii, 210), recorded from Suffolk.
Now that the details of our Avocets' return to breed in Britain have been given in the public press, need for Ornithological Secretiveness upon the subject is obviously past. Ticehurst's Suffolk notes about 1840 seem to represent the latest indigenous breedings, so fully a Century elapsed ere its next nesting, which