Hastings Rarities

The Hastings Rarities affair is a case of statistically demonstrated ornithological fraud that misled the bird world for decades in the twentieth century. The discovery of the long-running hoax shocked ornithologists.

The Hastings Rarities were a series of records of rare birds added to the British list on the basis of hundreds of reports, supported by preserved specimens, from George Bristow (1863–1947), a taxidermist and gunsmith of St Leonards-on-Sea, a town on the south coast of England. His reports were made between 1892 and 1930.

In August 1962, the statistician John Nelder published an analysis in the journal British Birds, demonstrating that the records were unlikely to be genuine. This was supported by an editorial in the same issue. 29 bird species or subspecies were dropped from the British List. On the basis of later records from elsewhere in Britain, most have subsequently been readmitted.

Two articles in the August 1962 issue of the journal British Birds, one a statistical examination by John Nelder, the other an editorial by Max Nicholson and James Ferguson-Lees, made a case using several statistical measures that a series of records of birds collected within a 20-mile (32 km) radius of Hastings, in Kent and Sussex, south-east England, between 1892 and 1930, should be treated with suspicion. As a result, 29 bird species or subspecies were dropped from the British List (though most of these have subsequent acceptable records from elsewhere in Britain) and 550 records, relating to 80–90 species, were rejected. Although some of these rejected records were undoubtedly good ones, there was no easy way of distinguishing them.

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