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During the complete county census of 2008 the total of 13,459 rook nests was recorded. Thus, in the five years since 2003, there has been a 25% decline in nest numbers. This continues to confirm the 5% per annum rate of decline extrapolated from the parti

The Truckell Prize is awarded by the Society for the purposes of both commemorating the late A. E. Truckell and his outstanding contribution to local studies in Dumfries and Galloway, and of forging closer links with the Universities of Glasgow and of the West of Scotland on the Crichton Campus, Dumfries. The Prize is awarded annually for the best original research paper by an undergraduate or postgraduate student from the Crichton Campus on a human or natural history topic relating to the geographical area covered by the three former counties of Dumfriesshire, Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire. In 2011, the Truckell Prize was won by Jacky Card for this paper.

In its editorial on 14 December 1963 the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser declared, ‘The fact must be faced, Liberalism in Dumfriesshire is on its deathbed and nothing short of a miracle will revive it.’ The evidence for such a statement was strong. In the by-election occasioned by the elevation to the peerage of the sitting member, Niall Macpherson, and whose result had just been declared, the Liberal party, fielding a candidate in the constituency for the first time since the General Election of 1945, had secured a derisory 4,491 votes and forfeited its deposit. This figure, suggested the Standard, was ‘amazingly small’. ‘No juggling of the figures can produce a single crumb of comfort for the Liberals.’ The party’s candidate, Charles Abernethy, and his supporters had ‘put everything they had into the campaign, but however strong Liberalism in Dumfriesshire may have been in the past the by-election figures show that the new generation of voters are thinking along different lines’. A week later, following the publication of two critical letters in its correspondence columns, the newspaper felt it necessary to defend itself against the charge that it had itself contributed to the Liberal party’s predicament because ‘it did not throw its whole weight behind the Party, as in the old days’. A newspaper’s primary function, the Standard argued, is ‘to give a fair and unbiased account of the news, particularly in the controversial field of politics’. If, then, the Dumfriesshire Liberals were looking for a scapegoat for the result of the poll, ‘they must look elsewhere. We have no intention of accepting the role.’