British Birds is a journal for everyone interested in the birds of the Western Palearctic. Published monthly since 1907, the journal contains a range of material on behaviour, conservation, distribution, ecology, identification, movements, status and taxonomy, as well as the latest news items and book reviews.British Birds is regarded as the British birdwatcher’s journal of record, with regular reports on rare and scarce migrants, and rare breeding birds. All the main contributions are peer-reviewed, and the journal aims to interpret scientific research in an easily accessible way.

BB – how it works

BB 2000 Ltd, the company that owns and publishes British Birds, is run by a board of directors, all of whom are volunteers. The company employs two full time staff – Stephen Menzie is the journal’s editor while Hazel Jenner manages subscriptions and administration – and three part-time design/editorial staff.

The company is wholly owned by The British Birds Charitable Trust (BBCT, registered charity no. 1089422). Neither the company directors nor the trustees are paid for their services, providing their time and enthusiasm because they passionately believe in the value of BB. The Company is managed with a view to making a small profit that can be donated to the Trust to help fund its charitable work. More details about the Trust, how to apply for grants or donate can be found at https://britishbirds.co.uk/content/british-birds-charitable-trust.

Subscribing

With a subscription to British Birds, you can choose to recieve the journal in printed form, online, or both. To see subscription rates, click here.

Subscriptions made online and paid for through PayPal are set to autorenew. To stop the payment from autorenewing, go to 'my account' in PayPal and select cancel. Note your subscription will continue to run until it is due to expire.

BB online

Registering, subscribing and logging in

Non-registered users are free to view a restricted amount of material on BB Online. Users can gain access to more material by registering. However, to access all of the British Birds main papers, short papers, notes and letters, you must subscribe. If you are a registered user or a subscriber, you can log in to BB Online using the link on the top right of every page.

Accessing papers

Your BB Online subscription gives you access to the full back catalogue of British Birds papers, from Volume 1 to the current volume.

Papers from the latest issue can be accessed directly from the top of the homepage, while papers from more recent issues can be found by scrolling down the page a little.

Alternatively, you may wish to go directly to an issue within a volume. To do so, click Browse Issues in the menu header, then click Browse by Volume. This takes you to a list of all volumes in reverse-chronological order. Find the volume you wish to view then, within the volume, click on the issue you wish to read. Papers within that issue are displayed, ordered by page number.

Searching

The BB Online website contains a smart search function, which allows you to search all papers from the British Birds archive. To do so, click in the search bar in the menu header bar and type the search term you are looking for. This could be a species name, the name of an author, or the title of a paper.

We’ve worked hard to make search results relevant but without being so narrow as to exclude possible results. A paper whose title matches your search term will appear high in the search results, followed by papers that contain that search term. To narrow down the results further without affecting the search criteria, a series of filters is presented on the right-hand side of the search results page. These include species, authors, and volumes/issues. Clicking on one of more of these will narrow down the results further. For example, a search term for warbler will bring up a host of results but selecting Dartford Warbler from the side menu will filter the results to show only those articles principally concerned with that species. Currently, larger reports – such as the BBRC’s Report on Rare Birds in Great Britain – are not tagged with the individual species contained within each report.

Accessing account information

You can access information regarding your account by click on Your Account in the top right of the page. This allows you to change personal details, amend subscriptions, and gives information on, for example, how much longer your subscription will run for.

Stay at the forefront of British birding by taking out a subscription to British Birds.

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