Hastings Rarities
Ornithological fraud / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Hastings Rarities affair is a case of statistically demonstrated ornithological fraud that misled the bird world for decades in the 20th 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.