As Ian has already written in the county notice board, the taxonomic sub-committee of the BOURC (catchy name!) has recommended that both Caspian and American Herring Gull should now be treated as full species split from bog standard old Herring Gull. The BOURC will no doubt now follow these recommendations and add them both to the British list as full species in category A shortly. Basically, if you've seen them then you get two extra British birdspotting ticks, which makes you a better birdspotter by a factor of two! And if you haven;t seen them then you now have to try doubly hard to do so now that they're proper birds.

The full paper is linked below:

BOURC TSC recommendations



-- Edited by Tom McKinney at 23:25, 2007-10-09