Updated: 12th April 2010

Before you send in your bird news, please take a few moments to read our guidelines. The Latest Bird News page and Twitter feed are intended to alert birders to rare and scarce species in the county. Records of common species, birds in gardens etc should be submitted via LROS Recorder or on paper record slips (see the Bird Recording page for details), and are summarised in the monthly Field Notes in The Grebe.

If you haven't got time to read all of this page, please at least bear in mind a few points:

1. Red Kites are now resident and widespread in the county following reintroduction programs over the last few years. Although commoner in Rutland, they can be seen almost anywhere at any time throughout the year, and will not be mentioned on the Latest Bird News page.

2. Ospreys originating from the Rutland Water introduction scheme will not be mentioned on the Latest Bird News page. Birds away from Rutland considered to be passage migrants will be mentioned.

3. Rare and scarce breeding birds will not be mentioned on the Latest Bird News page. This includes all Schedule 1 species at potential breeding sites; in Leicestershire this mainly concerns the following species: Cetti's Warbler, Barn Owl, Hobby, Little Ringed Plover, Peregrine and Crossbill, although withholding news of other species may be deemed necessary from time to time. Please note that some of these species remain in their breeding areas all year round, so will not be mentioned at any time of year.

E-mailing news

• Please give your e-mail a relevant subject line (e.g. 'bird news', 'bird reports', 'Rutland Water 3rd April' etc).
• Please remember to include the DATE of your sightings in the body of the e-mail.
• Please give as much detail as you can on the exact location of interesting birds at larger sites: for instance, "Firecrest at Cossington Meadows" may leave other potential observers frustrated!

Species to report

In general, anything which is listed as 'scarce' or rarer on the County checklist (Excel file) will probably be of interest, and other species may be of interest in context - e.g. early or late migrants, and counts of commoner species such as waders.

It is not possible to give a definitive list of what is or isn't 'newsworthy', as this changes from season to season. Also, some species (such as commoner waders) may not be particularly interesting on their own, but may be added to a list of other species at a site to give an overall feel of 'what's around'.

Some examples of species that regularly get reported to us which aren't of great interest as 'news' to most people include Goosander, Goldeneye, Mandarin, Shelduck, Buzzard (now officially the commonest raptor in Britain!), Red Kite, Peregrine, Water Rail, Oystercatcher, Snipe, Woodcock, Barn Owl, Little Owl, Kingfisher, Stonechat, Raven (hugely increased in numbers recently), Siskin, Lesser Redpoll, and common migrants once they have arrived in numbers (summer or winter). It is of great importance that these and other 'common' species are properly recorded, but they should be submitted to the Society via the electronic recording form or on record slips. Please see the Bird Recording page for further details.

Escaped/feral species (including Ruddy Shelduck) and hybrids will not be reported on the website unless there is a possibility that they might be wild - e.g. White-headed Duck, Red-crested Pochard etc, or if there is a genuine risk of confusion with a (rare) wild species.

Scarce breeding birds will not normally be reported on the website.

Photos

Digital photos are always welcome; images of rare and scarce birds in the County will be used on the Latest Bird News page, whilst good quality photos of commoner species will be uploaded straight into the Photo Gallery (although please note that the Gallery is currently out of action for uploading!).

With the ever-improving standard of digital SLRs and lenses, it is unlikely that many 'digiscoped' photos will be used on the website in future, unless they are a) of a rare or scarce bird for which no better quality images are available, or b) of sufficiently high quality and sharpness, comparable to or approaching that of a good DSLR image.

• Photos should be saved as jpegs and 'web optimized' *
• Photos should ideally be cropped to 800 x 600 pixels.
• If you are unsure how to resize and optimize your images, send the photo at a larger size and we will crop it and optimize it for you.

* Web optimizing is not the same as simply saving the picture as a low quality jpeg. A jpeg saved 'normally' at 20KB will be obviously inferior to one properly optimized at that size.