[20/01/2018]

One of the main benefits of membership of the Edinburgh Natural History Society is the opportunity to discover what lives in your local area. You can learn to find and identify most kinds of organisms. The Nats are a social group willing to help others in many ways. Traditionally, this was done as a group or one-to-one using field guides and sharing the knowledge of more expert members. Nowadays it's basically the same but with the added bonus of the Internet. The pool of experts has got bigger by using social media via Twitter and Facebook. There is an increasing volume of static information where specialist authors have created websites of a narrow range of organisms, such as British Bugs. In the Nats we do all these things but still enjoy a post-field trip gathering over tea and cakes. Here we can discuss our findings and do forward planning. Not only do we have a shared hobby, we have friendship.