Thank you to all our members who came along to our Autumn meeting in Llangain on Saturday. We had quite a few new members join at the event – and that, of course, is happy news. If any of our new members are reading this post, if you have the time to email me to say how you got to hear of us/the meeting that would be really helpful. It’s useful to know what publicity works – or if its down to word of mouth.

It was a good turnout – and we had a great variety of speakers and views being expressed. Thank you to Barry Stewart and Emma Douglas for the time and effort put in to preparing a talk and visuals. We looked a variety of invertebrates found in grassland environments as well as how cattle can help you manage your land.

The meeting also touched on how members land might be able to connect up with the Beelines project (Clare Dinham of Buglife); reminded us to look out for and report sitings of Oil Beetles (Buglife) and heard from Clare Flynn about the new post created by Plantlife. This new role will include hopefully creating more meadows groups in South Wales.

I raised whether we, as a group, wanted a forum for discussion – one attached/linked to the website. From a rough count up from a show of hands, it looked as if about 50% of attendees use our Facebook Page, and this does serve as a useful forum in itself. My impression was that there was no great appetite for further expenditure on upgrading the website support to host a forum as well. If anyone disagrees with me – please do let me know. For those that are not Facebook group users, I think it would be worth repeating that the blog posts are open to all for queries, photos of things found and general comment. Send me material and photos – at website@carmarthshiremeadowsgroup.com

Just to repeat, if you comment on a post and its doesn’t appear in 24 hours please also email me. We have an occasionally overzealous spam catcher – and if your comments get in there the system doesn’t tell me.

Finally – don’t forget to email with suggestions on future talks. I would really like a session on grassland spiders.

Rachel