Merseyside Naturalists' Association

Abstract

THE third war-time portfolio of the Merseyside Naturalists' Association, an attractively bound volume of two hundred and fifty pages comprising sixty-five pages of photographs and coloured plates and forty-three original articles, has been edited by Miss J. Linaker. It includes detailed accounts of regional bird-life at Mold, North Wales, by J. Lord and C. Swaine; Wigan and Leigh flashes, by G. Brown and T. Edmondson; Hoghton, by G. C. Miller; a Mersey shore pool, by F. J. Hartley; St. Andrews, the Midlands and war areas of Italy and North Africa; the president, Philip Ashcroft, describes his researches into the history of Martin Mere, the lake of 3,000 acres that once covered west Lancashire; Eric Hardy has a detailed account of the extinct and earliest known fauna of the north-west of England; and Mrs. E. G. Hardy describes how nestling hedge-sparrows were killed by a colony of brown ants. There is much that is of more than local interest. The raven is increasing its nesting range on the North Wales border, the cirl-bunting has definitely been established as a nesting bird in west Lancashire, while the colliery subsidence waters of south Lancashire are now known to be an important passage haunt of several rarer ducks, waders and wild swans.