Founds list rules

These are the draft rules for determining the London Founds List.

1. All birds must be within the London Area as used by the LNHS.

2. All bird species found, must be on categories A or C of the British List as determined by the British Ornithologists Union.

3. All scarce/rare birds must have been accepted by the British Birds Rarities Committee or the LNHS Rarities Committee. It is not sufficient to be named as an observer in the relevant rarity report to count a species as a find.

4. The discovery of a bird must be a genuine surprise. Therefore, if your find doesn't constitute an original observation, you must prove that you were completely ignorant of the bird being present at that site. For example, if you find a bird at a particular site, but learn later that someone else had already found the bird there beforehand, you must be able establish that you did not receive any information of the bird's presence there.

5. A re-find must come as a genuine surprise. A re-find will invariably involve a local or national rarity. If there is a sufficient gap in time or place, such that the appropriate rarity report cites the observation complete with the re-finders' names, then it can be counted as a find.

6. All species which breed commonly in the UK (i.e. not on Schedule 1 of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act) can be classed as found without the principle of "genuine surprise" applying (Rules 4 & 5). All other rules still apply; in other words, these species must still have been found and identified by yourself. All Schedule 1 species have to be found away from known breeding areas by the normal finding rules.

7. Under normal circumstances, the person who finds a bird will have discovered it and correctly identified it. However, more than one person can find a particular bird if any of the conditions in Rules 8, 9 or, 10 are met.

8. If the person who discovers the bird does not identify the bird to the correct species, he or she must have ruled out all but the principal confusion species to count it as a find. The person (or persons - see Rule 10) who, having seen the bird, first correctly identifies it may also count it as a find.

9. More than one person can claim to have identified a bird if they vocalise or otherwise indicate that they have arrived at the correct identification more or less simultaneously. Honesty is paramount when deciding if the utterance given in the excitement of a find constitutes a correct identification.

10. More than one person, but no more than three, can claim to have identified a bird if the identification evolves over a period of time. In these cases, the persons claiming this record as a find must all fully contribute to the identification of the bird.

Rules devised by the London Bird Club and are based on the UK 250 Club Rules 21/11/97.