Updated: 23rd February 2008

Everyone's bird news is welcome for the Latest Bird News page, but please bear in mind a few points before sending it in.

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) is always 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.

Some examples of common species that regularly get reported to us which aren't of great interest as 'news' to most people include Goldeneye, Buzzard, Red Kite, Peregrine, Golden Plover, Snipe, Little Owl, Kingfisher, Tree Sparrow, Green and Great Spotted Woodpeckers, Grey Wagtail, Stonechat, Redwing, Fieldfare, Blackcap, 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 species 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.

• Photos should be saved as jpegs and 'web optimized' *
• Photos should ideally be cropped to 700 x 500 or 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.