A recent edition of the excellent Birdwatch magazine had a remarkable piece on a historic ornithological scandal that is known as the 'Hastings Rarities' fraud. At the centre of it all was an East Sussex taxidermist named George Bristow, who seems to have been tempted by the financial gain to be had from selling on rare birds that had supposedly been shot in Britain. It got me thinking about local press coverage of this and other bird-related matters (local press coverage that is, as it is truth universally acknowledged that the real value of newspapers as a historical source lies there and not with the national press). There followed the inevitable visit to the online British Newspaper Archive, quite possibly the single most valuable historical source currently available - it really is addictive.
And although there is nothing about the scandal, there Mr Bristow, taxidermist and gunsmith, most certainly is; quite the regular in the pages of the Hastings and St Leonards Observer in fact, until his death in April 1947. But as is the way with the BNA, one search led to another and before I knew where I was I had found literally 100s of historic reports about rare birds turning up in Britain - all needless to say promptly blasted to kingdom come by people who had nothing better to do. Somebody should collate these reports and match them against existing records of natural history societies and so forth; bird-watchers are a methodical lot, what with all their lists, and I'd be willing to bet that a sustained trawl of the BNA would turn up some new records. Just as a taster, how about this, from the Weymouth Telegram, 8 June 1865:
The correspondent of a Wiltshire paper states that a hoopoe has just been shot near Swanage, in Dorset; that an osprey has been seen in that neighbourhood for several days; and that a pair of peregrine falcons are now breeding on a solitary rock on the Swanage coast.
Of course quite how you'd verify this and other records I can't say, but they are surely worthy of note.
