Pre 1950 Records

Many counties are undertaking reviews of their avifauna and examining records of rarities from the pre-1950 era. Some of the records have been found wanting and both BBRC and BOURC have been asked to review some. Unfortunately neither body has the resources to carry out this work for all such records. It falls outside the scope of BOURC, whose remit is to examine records of ‘firsts’ for Britain and BBRC has no expertise in researching local natural history archives yet, in pre-1950 records, this is usually as important as the description.
Following the recent AGMs of both BOURC and BBRC the two committees have agreed on the following and hope that counties will find it acceptable.

• BOURC will consider any pre-1950 record if it constitutes one of the first five records of the species for Britain.
• For other records we ask counties to make the decisions themselves
• We ask counties to notify both BBRC and BOURC on any changes made as a result of such reviews, so that we can update our statistics.

Colin Bradshaw on behalf of both BOURC & BBRC.

Contact can be made with BBRC statistician@bbrc.org.uk  to see if we are already aware of the record and whether it falls into the first five category.