UK 250 Club

If you listened to the last episode of Birders Twitter - S2E17 - you will have heard us chatting about the UK 250 Club with our guest Mr. Paul French.

Well, after the show I only went and tracked down a founding member of said club and got their blessing to reinvigorate it! Yep, your #BirdersTwitter hosts are now responsible for the UK 250 Club!

With great power comes great responsibility -which we intend to abuse!

We already have a purpose url courtesy of the absolute legends at Bubo Listing, so go to https://bubo.org/uk250 to upload your self found list!

We are going to honour the original rules as set out by the founders Ben and Co. and updated by the Punk Birders Self Found Rules.

Sadly, the Punk Birders aren't actually real punks that I'd meet at an Exploited or Discharge show and I am pretty certain they've never sniffed glue. Sad really.

Anyway, here's the basic rules. Now go forth and self-find...

The UK 250 Club is a club for people who have found at least 250 bird species in Great Britain and Ireland (GB & I). The Club aims to promote the skill of finding birds in the UK. It is intended as a fun and different way of looking at lists, and must not be seen as excessively competitive. UK 250 Club supports nature conservation by promoting the submission of bird records to local bird recorders.

There are many definitions of what constitutes a find. The purpose of these rules is to remove inconsistencies between these definitions and allow comparison between find lists. Inevitably, the situations in which people find birds are complex. Therefore the UK 250 Club must work on the principles of honesty and genuine surprise.

In order to become a member of the UK 250 Club, you need to submit the total number of bird species found by the rules listed below. The UK 250 Club Committee will request full lists from members in order to carry out an initial check. These full lists will be made available to any other UK 250 Club member who might request it. The UK 250 Club Committee will adjudicate in the event of disputed finds.

1. The geographical limits all bird finds will be those of the Great Britain and Ireland (GB & I). These are the political entities of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the Isle of Man. The boundary extends offshore to 200 nautical miles, or if closer, the median line between adjacent countries.

2. All bird species found, must be on categories A or C of the British List as determined by the British Ornithologists Union.

3. All birds, if applicable, must have been accepted by the records committee appropriate to the rarity and location of the find. This may require a description of the bird to be submitted to the local records committee, the Irish Rarities Committee, the NI Rarities Committee, the Scottish Birds Records Committee, the Welsh Rarities Committee, the British Birds Rarities Committee or the British Ornithologists Union Records Committee. It is not sufficient to be named as an observer in the relevant rarity report to count a species as a find.

4. The discovery of a bird must be a genuine surprise. Therefore, if your find doesn't constitute an original observation, you must prove that you were completely ignorant of the bird being present at that site. For example, if you find a bird at a particular site, but learn later that someone else had already found the bird there beforehand, you must be able establish that you did not receive any information of the bird's presence there.

5. A re-find must come as a genuine surprise. A re-find will invariably involve a local or national rarity. If there is a sufficient gap in time or place, such that the appropriate rarity report cites the observation complete with the re-finders' names, then it can be counted as a find.

6. All species which breed commonly in GB & I (i.e. not on Schedule 1 of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act) can be classed as found without the principle of "genuine surprise" applying (Rules 4 & 5). All other rules of the UK 250 Club still apply; in other words, these species must still have been found and identified by yourself. A list of rare breeding birds on Schedule 1 which can also be counted in this way is given in Appendix 1 at the end of the rules. This is due to these species being so sedentary and restricted in their geographical range and habitat that finding them away from their well known breeding areas would be virtually impossible. All other Schedule 1 species have to be found away from known breeding areas by the normal finding rules of the UK 250 Club.

7. Under normal circumstances, the person who finds a bird will have discovered it and correctly identified it. However, more than one person can find a particular bird if any of the conditions in Rules 8, 9 or, 10 are met.

8. If the person who discovers the bird does not identify the bird to the correct species, he or she must have ruled out all but the principal confusion species to count it as a find. The person (or persons - see Rule 10) who, having seen the bird, first correctly identifies it may also count it as a find.

9. More than one person can claim to have identified a bird if they vocalise or otherwise indicate that they have arrived at the correct identification more or less simultaneously. Honesty is paramount when deciding if the utterance given in the excitement of a find constitutes a correct identification.

10. More than one person, but no more than three, can claim to have identified a bird if the identification evolves over a period of time. In these cases, the persons claiming this record as a find must all fully contribute to the identification of the bird.

Appendix 1 Species on Schedule 1 of the W & C Act (1981) which can be found without the principles of genuine surprise applying (see Rule 6).

Capercaillie

Ptarmigan

Dartford Warbler

Crested Tit

Chough

Scottish Crossbill

Cirl Bunting

Rules devised by Andy Webb, Ben Miller and Phil Hansboro

UK 250 Club Rules 21/11/97

Copyright (c) UK 250 Club