DRB Nats March Meeting There was excitement at the DRB Nats when over 90 people arrived to hear Professor Ken McNamara talk about plant fossils. He had worked as a palaeontologist at the WA Museum for over 30 years and been the Director of the world’s oldest geological museum, the ...

DRB Nats Excursion All Photographs by Frankie Wallace It was the second year that the DRB Nats attended the Blue Sky Festival in Mundaring—and it was an even bigger hit than last year. The DRB stall was constantly attended by a stream of visitors and the nature walks run by ...

DRB Meeting February Speaker Tony Hodge, is a zoologist and bat care volunteer at Kanyana Wildlife. Tony began by telling the audience that bats were originally thought to be rodents or primates but amazingly, their closest living relatives are horses and rhinoceroses! There are two main types of bat: fruit ...

DRB Report on November Workshop There are over 2000 species of native bees in Australia and at least 800 of them are in Western Australia, yet many people confuse our native bees with the introduced European honeybee (Apis mellifera). However, those attending Dr Terry Houston’s native bee workshop learnt to ...

– at the DRB Nats. Simon Nevill took us on a pictorial adventure tour of the five Western Deserts as his way of bringing nature photography to life at the DRB Nats December meeting. During 2018 he travelled alone for 15,000 km along the tracks of all five deserts: the ...

DRB November 2018 Meeting Report This was the first of the DRB’s special talks honouring the DRB elders. Kevn Griffiths, the DRB Co-founder, has presented talks over many years, but this was his debut using digital technology at the wonderful age of (almost) 90. Kevn documented the founding of the ...

DR Branch October 2018 Meeting Laura Skates, a botanist and final year PhD candidate at UWA, captivated her audience at the DRB in October 2018. She started her talk by exploring popular cultures and the wonder or horror of carnivorous plants. From the Venus fly trap, known all over the ...

DRB September 2018 Excursion Overall more than 100 flowers were identified in two hours, when 26 members and visitors went on a flora walk, beginning from the new subdivision ‘Conti Gardens’ in Walliston, which is west of the Alan Anderson car park (currently closed for renovation.) It was a great ...

DRB September Meeting Report Eric McCrum OAM (below) has presented talks to the DRB Nats and elsewhere for many years, but this was his debut using digital technology—at the age of 84 years, no less! Eric began by introducing us to the history of the term ‘butterfly’. Apparently, it originated ...

DARLING RANGE BRANCH JULY MEETING REPORT. Our speaker was Andrew Moore, drone pilot and scientist. As a child, Andrew was obsessed with seeing things from an aerial perspective and was also fascinated with nature. His passion for drones has stemmed from these childhood interests, combined with his father’s involvement with ...