British Birds references to Shropshire.

1. Introduction.
In relation to this Shropshire-oriented ‘Historical’ website British Birds is a primary source because of its papers on rare breeding birds and national rarities. Both topics are the subject of committees publishing definitive annual reports which include occasional references to Shropshire. Further, from time to time papers appear which relate specifically to Shropshire or include references to the birds of the county. All meaningful BB references to birds in Shropshire are presented here and indexed in the Species Index. The following explains how they are indexed.

2.1 British Birds references to 2007:
British Birds began publication in 1907 and the first 100 years, to 2007, are freely available onl
ine on the BB website; see below for how to access them. Access to particular material on the BB website is possible via the volume and pages numbers of the paper involved (plus the page number of the specific mention) and these data are provided in the Species Index to this website. Thus this website makes Shropshire references in BB, available by providing that key information

For example Black-eared Wheatear. In Historical’s Species Index, in the ‘Reference’ column, appears “1989: BB 82(11):505-563”, sufficient to locate the paper on the BB website (volume 82, pages 505-563). In the ‘Notes’ column of the Species Index appears “p.562. Chelmarsh 23-24.5 REJECTED”, taking you to the relevant page in the paper and adding a brief note. In this case the entire Index entry is in red drawing attention to the fact that the record was rejected by the Rarities Committee.

2.2 British Birds references 2008 onwards:
BB material from 2008 onwards appears below based on individual years. Progressing, placing the cursor over the blue, Link button the relevant, indexed Shropshire pages appear in order.

Full papers relating to the county, eg. “Magnificent Frigatebird in Shropshire - new to Britain” appear chronologically as individual items within ‘All historical documents’ but not until two years after their publication, at the request of BB. For these you will have to consult an original paper copy.

Access to the indexed British Birds material, via the BB website, is as follows

1. Register at the BB website; it is free and you need to do this only once.

Go to the BB website

Click on ‘Register’ top right and you will see the registration page.

You do not have to be a subscriber to BB in order to register so you may leave part 3 blank and just complete parts 1 and 2. Remember your password, tick Terms and Conditions and click on ‘Register’ at the bottom of the form

2. Species Index entries to BB materials are given as in this example for Red-backed Shrike:

1990: BB 83(9):353-390 and in the Notes field ‘See p.385’

giving the Year: BB Volume(Issue):page-range.

Make a note of the Volume and page-range, here 83 and 353 to 390 and the page of the Red-backed Shrike reference, here 385.

To access the reference by search of the BB site:

3. To initiate a search

Search for the exemplar Red-backed Shrike above go to BB’s home page and click on ‘Article archive search’, top right, and it will take you to an Article Search form.

At the bottom of the form you need only enter only the Volume and page-range data, namely 83, 353 and 390 and click on ‘Search’ to bring up the article.

Double-click on the article title to bring up the page offering ‘Click here to download the full article’. Then click on ‘Click here to download the full article’ for the PDF. Now scroll down to page 385 for the Red-backed Shrike data.

4. To search the article for other data within it

Hold down the CRTL key and type an ‘F’ to open the PDF ‘find’ window (top right) and enter your search text into that window and click on ‘Done’. You can then use the left and right arrows to scroll through the pages found with your search text.

5. It is possible to print pages

Copy and paste’ sections and to word-search the document (using the CTRL with ‘F’, or CMD with ‘F’ on the Mac) as required.

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012