SEVENTEEN members attended the January meeting of Dinton WI held in Dinton Village Hall.

The president Sue Taylor welcomed everyone to the meeting. Sue informed members that it was Julia Vining’s birthday this month, and that Margaret Collins had been in hospital with pneumonia.

Discussions of a variety of events taking place in the future followed, including a WI Centenary Celebration to be held in Tidworth in April, when the WI Centenary Baton will be passed to representatives of all Wiltshire WIs.

Speaker Steve Oakes, a representative of the RSBP, gave a talk entitled The Magic of Bird Migration.

Steve’s presentation was accompanied by some excellent computer-generated photographs.

Steve told of a most amazing example of bird migration, that of the Arctic Tern.

These birds spend the summer in the Arctic and then make their long migratory passage to winter in the Antarctic.

He also suggested to members that the absence of large numbers of house martins in our area could be due to climate warming and the lack of potential food in the south of England.

Steve explained that the first records of bird migration actually being written down were in the Bible, in Jeremiah and the Book of Solomon, when larger birds such as honey buzzards were observed using thermals to follow a migration path.

In addition, Aristotle had made records of the movement of some of the smaller birds which were less easy to observe.

But by the mid-19th century, a more scientific approach to the monitoring of bird migration had evolved.

In 1899, a Dutchman Hans Christian Martinson introduced the ringing of birds for identification purposes using aluminium rings.

Barbara Crow gave a warm vote of thanks to Steve for his most interesting talk.

The next meeting will be the annual meeting, to be held on Wednesday, February 11, when the committee for 2015 will be elected and the president and officers will be appointed.