Our Recording Area

In the initial paragraph of the first annual report for 1953 Dr John Stafford, the lead founder of the society, wrote ‘I and a few others felt that Shoreham needed a Society to allow like-minded persons to meet and talk about birds and to pass on information.’ The same first report listed a number of observations from sites in and around Shoreham. Subsequent annual reports produced accounts of the birds seen by members and gradually, as the membership grew with more living in towns and villages away from Shoreham, the reports regularly contained records from sites such as Ferring Rife, the upper Adur Levels and Brighton’s marina and Wild Park. In 1981 the Society changed its name to the Shoreham District Ornithological Society (SDOS) acknowledging the wider geographical spread of members and interest. Soon after it was felt the Society, like other local and county bird clubs, should set boundaries from which observations were collected, stored and published in the annual report. At the time the boundaries were set pragmatically and based on the regular birding haunts of the 1980s membership. The map of the recording area first appeared in the 1985 SDOS report with a larger, and more detailed map, with a number of keenly watched areas labelled, in the society’s 1988 The Birds of Shoreham. 

This, or an equivalent figure, was published in each of the annual reports until the last covering 2012.

The area was selected as a block of 390 1km national grid squares, several of which were offshore. The western boundary was the TQ08 easting which then included regularly watched sites such as Ferring Rife, Highdown Hill, Michelgrove and Harrow Hill and the eastern boundary TQ34 which included Brighton Marina, the University of Sussex, Stanmer Down and Ditchling Beacon. The northern boundary was set at TQ15 thus just excluding the homesteads of Ditchling, Keymer, Hassocks, Hurstpierpoint , Henfield and Ashington.

Although the boundaries were set by the Ordnance Survey grid reference in practice most of the records submitted to the society were based on site names and any records from sites which had a part in the designated area were included in the annual reports. During 1989, in conjunction with a database designer from Bristol, I set up a county database for the Sussex Ornithological Society so county observations could not only be stored but retrieved with ease. A key feature of this database allows sites to be easily labelled as falling in the SDOS and other recording areas so it is fairly easy to retrieve records covering either local sites or all of the SDOS recording area. Being able to create searches on a given set recording area makes any analysis of the local data, particularly year on year comparisons, more valid. This feature in the county database clearly has become very important since SDOS ceased collecting records and publishing an annual report in 2012.

John Newnham August 2025.

Birdwatching Sites in Our Local Area

The locations identified on the map and listed in the key below are those that, over the years, have been places visited by members for observing and recording birds. Before the days when observation records could be logged on-line using eBird and BirdTrack, records were maintained by SDOS and these contributed to the County records. This map shows what is defined as the ‘SDOS Recording Area’ for this purpose, and the names of the locations will still often be used in User Group posts.

Key to Site Codes:

(CP) after the location name indicates Car Park.