Abstract
FOR the third time the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne has published a catalogue of the birds of the district—P. J. Selby in 1831, John Hancock in 1874, and now, as a worthy successor, appears George Bolam's list of 1932. It appears as a special part (vol. 8) of the Transactions of the Society, and in order to avoid undue repetition, it takes as its datum line Mr. Bolam's own list of 1912, in his “Birds of Northumberland and the Eastern Borders”. Hancock's catalogue included 255 birds for Northumberland, by 1912 the number had risen to 282, now the number well exceeds 300, and this largely because of the finer analysis of species and racial forms. Of course quite a considerable number of the birds in this or any other local list are no more than accidental visitors, the presence of which really means very little from a local point of view. Here, for example, the smew, with four records, takes more space than the swallow, martin, and sand-martin all added together; and yet fluctuations in the numbers of these summer visitors would be more worth recording than the odd occurrences of the winter duck. From a scientific point of view, the day of usefulness of the county list, unless it becomes an intimate and detailed chronicle of local changes and fluctuations, is past, and we venture to think that the third Northumberland catalogue of birds will be the last, notwithstanding its particular value and appeal to the people of the county itself.
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Birds of Northumberland. Nature 130, 841 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130841c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130841c0