Hi Tweets,

Bill Smith writes:

(snip)
> The BOU rarely adds birds to Category D any more, preferring to keep
>a report 'in circulation' until the situation is reasonably clear one
>way or the other. If a report cannot be placed into one of the
>other categories, it tends not to be listed at all.

My espousal of the BOU List stems from a personal reaction against the
frustrating straitjacket of the pass-only/fail-only nature of voting in the
two committees to which I belong(ed). Some reports aren't sufficiently
definitive to accept but clearly have too much to reject; but under
committee rules (and my experience is that it's easier and quicker to revise
any three of the Ten Commandments than to change rarities committees'
rules), anything which is not an outright acceptance is an outright
rejection. Very frustrating. Being limited to one or the other when
intuition and experience demanded at least a third, less-limiting category
into which such records could be held pending the evolution of a vagrancy
pattern (or its absence), or further evidence of human transport mechanisms,
even after several decades, made me look longingly at the Brits' list, where
not only did such categories exist, but the degree of discrimination
residing in the categories illustrated that *someone* was thinking hard and
long about these things. And these things could be adapted to our present
purposes; why reinvent this particular wheel and take years doing it?

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net