Naturalists

le working as an intelligence officer during the d World War she met Tom Russell Goddard, the ator of what was then the Hancock Museum. trigued by his stories of the Farne Islands, she rst visited them in 1940. Grace Hickling went on to become the public of the islands and played a key role in ensuring ey were recognised nationally for their imporor seals and seabirds. directed the ringing of 187,600 birds on the Islands, and her ground-breaking fieldwork ls expanded knowledge of the islands’ seal ation and the effect of culling. became the society’s first woman sole secred editor of its journal. helped to achieve Lindisfarne national reserve status, and set up the original g that led to the society’s management of th Park Nature Reserve. Catherine Hodgkin was the first woman to be elected to the council of the natural history society in 1937. She was an active member of the society for over 40 years and was noted for her bird ringing on the Farne Islands. Kittiwake gulls reared on the Farne Islands and ringed by Catherine were the first to be found on the west side of the Atlantic, showing the vast distances these birds travel. In a time when photography was in its infancy, Margaret’s outstanding artwork captured specimens, such as corncockle, that are now extinct in Northumberland. She was the daughter of William Ogle Dickinson, a tobacco manufacturer in Newcastle. Travelling widely, possibly using the expanding steam railway network, she discovered the then rare rosebay willowherb, a plant now considered to be a weed that grows along the verges of the very rail tracks she might have used. She assembled a collection of over 1,000 British plant specimens, including watercolours of more than 450 wild flowers. Her paintings can be viewed on the NHSN online gallery. She lived in Norham, Northumberland, where she died at the age of 98, having bequeathed her collection of plants and watercolour drawings to the Natural History Society of Northumbria. An expert on crustaceans, molluscs and planktons, her books and research papers are still used by scientists and students today. She first published about molluscs and their parasites in 1900. She continued her investigations of parasites as a zoology student at Durham University. One of her earliest papers was titled ‘The Mussel beds of Northumberland.”