Review of Birds in the Channel Islands, 1951-80 Roger Long
Review of birds in the Channel Islands, 1951-80 Roger Long ecords and observations on the flora and fauna in the Channel Islands Rare treated with confusing arbitrariness by British naturalists in the various branches of natural history. Botanists include the islands as part of the British Isles, mammalogists do not, and several subdivisions of entomo• logists adopt differing treatments. The BOU lists and records have always excluded the Channel Islands, but The Atlas of Breeding Birds in Britain and Ireland (1976) included them, as do all the other distribution mapping schemes currently being prepared by the Biological Records Centre at Monks Wood Experimental Station, Huntingdon. The most notable occurrences of rarities have been published in British Birds, and this review has been compiled so that the other, less spectacular—but possibly more significant—observations are available as a complement to the British and Irish records. The late Roderick Dobson, an English naturalist resident in Jersey between 1935 and 1948 and from 1958 to his death in 1979, was the author of the invaluable Birds of the Channel Islands (1952). In this, he brought together the results of his meticulous fieldwork in all the islands, and his critical interpretation of every record—published or private—that he was able to unearth, fortunately just before the turmoil of the years of German Occupation (1940-45) dispersed much of the material, perhaps for ever. I concern myself here chiefly with the changes recorded during the approxi• mately 30 years since Dobson's record closed. Species considered to have shown little change in status over those years are not listed.
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