Guidelines for submitting records

These are intended as guidelines and no more, certainly not rules. Adopting them will hopefully ensure that the society receives useful records and observers’ time is not wasted reporting records that are difficult to use.

The accompanying chart lists the types of records that are required, species by species. It does not include national rarities, nor birds not yet recorded in the counties: obviously all records of both these categories are needed. Some terms may need explaining:

‘Monthly site maxima’ are the highest counts that you record at regularly watched sites during a month. You could well report maximum counts from several different sites during a month. If you do a regular walk around a site then the highest count for the relevant species each month is perfectly adequate unless there is a marked change in numbers. Garden bird records might often be best treated in this way.

‘Breeding records’ indicates that all behaviour indicating breeding is of interest. It would be useful to say whether the breeding is confirmed. When reporting young birds it is best if unfledged birds such as ducklings are not counted in the main number: two Shelducks with ten small young should be reported as two rather than 12, with the number of young in the Notes section.

‘Passage counts’ is intended to encourage reports of records that show the changing numbers of migrant species.

‘3 obs’ in the Description column indicates that a description is only normally required if less than three observers see and report the bird(s) in question. LROS indicates that a description is required however many observers report the bird(s).

F/L indicates first and last dates for the year required.

One final point is that there is often no need to include anything more than your name, the date, the site, the species and the count. Additional comments that are sometimes useful could concern age, sex, brood size, time of observations, direction of flight, whether you were the finder, etc. Comments on weather are of little use unless birds are affected by it. Any comments should be concise and to the point, especially on record slips.