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The North East of Scotland is situated on the North Sea coast of Scotland and is in a prime location for receiving rare migrants from continental Europe and occasionally from North America. The region boasts a bird species list of about 340 and an active birding community, making it the best region in mainland Scotland for seeing rare birds. So what services are available for the rarity hunter in the region?
This is a fairly new system designed to make it easy for rarity finders to release information quickly about rare and scarce birds in the region, and evolved from the North East Scotland Rare Bird Telephone Grapevine. It delivers information to mobile phones via SMS text message but can also send messages to email addresses and pagers. It requires users to subscribe to the service, but because it’s operated on a non-profit basis, is much less costly for local birders than commercial services. For more information see the ABZ-Text pages on this web site. Telephone grapevineAn informal telephone grapevine evolved to a formalised contact list in about 1987 and was designed to encourage local birders to see local rare and scarce birds in North East Scotland. At its peak, it had about 50 members and could boast impressive efficiency, especially when a message concerned a new species for the region. It was arranged so that a finder of a rarity would contact the head of one of seven groups, each containing about six or seven members. They would then arrange to contact all of the remaining groups and ensure the message was then relayed down each group. Times change, and the system could no longer be relied upon to work, even for impressive rarities. The reasons for this are many: more birders were acquiring more telephones making it more difficult to phone the information out; established birders were less interested in hearing about and phoning out the commoner rarities; more birders were signing up to commercial services which highlighted the inefficiencies of a system based on human chains. Consequently, in October 2004 it was decided to no longer use it for sub-rarities and to establish the SMS text system ABZ-Text. No new members are being accepted to the telephone grapevine, and users who do not re-new their membership are removed from the list. The Wildlife WebThis web site contains a mine of information about rare birds in the former Grampian region of Scotland and also about other wildlife. It was set up by Paul Doyle, and was one of the first web sites about birds at the start of the internet revolution. The local rare bird news pages allow users to read postings and also to post their own rare bird news. As might be expected from such a system, it is dependent on people posting information, which tends to happen less at weekends when people would rather be out birding than sitting at their computer. The site provides a valuable archive of rare bird sightings in the region. Bird news posted to this site is automatically posted to the Yahoo Group ABZ-Rare-Birds, or it would if Yahoo Groups didn’t prevent this link from working in the case of some posters of information (and of course deny any responsibility for this). Click here to visit the Wildlife Web. ABZ-Rare-BirdsThis is an email group for anyone who wants to subscribe and is hosted by Yahoo. It is a closed group (i.e. only members may post messages), but there is no bar on bona fide membership applications (it became a closed group because spammers were causing offence). ABZ-Rare-Birds has an erratic, but mostly functioning link from The Wildlife Web, so members of the email group can receive messages posted on the Wildlife Web local bird news page. The system is hosted by Yahoo who make their money from adverts that appear on all messages. Like the Wildlife Web, it tends to fall down a bit at weekends when people would rather not be at their computers. A number of commercial rare bird services subscribe to this service so they can sometimes update their members quite quickly. You can subscribe to ABZ-Rare-Birds by clicking on the button below.
If you would prefer to find out a bit more about this group, click here This is an impressive magazine, richly illustrated with colour photographs for people interested in rare birds and birding in Scotland. It is designed to give a Scottish perspective on a wide range of subjects involving rare birds. Because the editors live in North East Scotland, it tends to have a bit of a North East slant. To visit the Birding Scotland web site click here. This is a commercial service operated as a franchise of Birdline. You phone a premium rate number for regularly updated bird news. At the time of writing, this is charged at 60 pence per minute. The number for hearing bird news is 09068 700234 and the number for phoning in bird news is 01292 611994 There are probably more commercial services than I’ve been able to dig out here, but the most important ones are: Rare Bird Alert - a pager service in which the user can set different levels of service for different regions of Britain. Birdnet - as above Birdguides - operates a text alert system for sending SMS messages to mobile phones. It is customisable via their web site. Its a bit quirky if you ask for first reports for a particular species in an area, and sometimes subject to delays, but is a lot cheaper than the pagers.
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