YESTERDAY’S Daily Express carried pictures of hundreds of men in anoraks with expensive cameras slung around their necks, queueing outside an Oxfordshire semi. They were paying £5 a time for a glimpse through the kitchen window of the ultra-rare Oriental Turtle Dove that has taken up residence in the back garden of the house.
The bird is of such interest because it normally spends the summer in Russia and migrates in the winter to Pakistan, India and south-east Asia. It has been spotted in Britain only twice before. But the dove itself might be just as intrigued by the strange breed of human – known as the “twitcher” – that was prepared to go to such lengths just to be able to tick it off their lists.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
THE earliest recorded use of the word twitcher, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in Birds magazine in 1977. It describes a bird watcher whose main aim is to collect sightings of rare birds and it is said to derive from enthusiasts getting “twitchy” when the wind blows from a certain direction and the habitats start to bristle with feathered visitors.
A twitcher should not be confused with a birder, which can be anyone of varying degrees of seriousness who enjoys watching birds in their natural habitat, irrespective of whether they have seen the species before.
TWITCH AND TELL
WHEN a rare bird is sighted twitchers descend en masse with their lenses at the ready. That’s because there’s an unwritten code of ethics in the twitching world: fair play if you are the first to spot a bird (and it will enhance your reputation within the twitching world) but it’s bad form to keep the sighting to yourself.
This is not just a matter of community spirit. For your sighting to count on your list it must be verified by the British Rare Birds Committee so you have to let someone know. Once upon a time the news would seep out to a fairly select group of people and you had to earn your spurs as a serious watcher to get in on the network but technology has changed all that.
For the past 20 years the Rare Bird Alert service has supplied bird news via pager and anyone can subscribe – to the disapproval of some old-school twitchers.
THE KIT
THE most vital equipment is a good pair of binoculars, or “bins” as they’re known in the birding world. There are even binoculars that deliver more light to your eye to improve visibility when the light is low or if you are observing a bird perched in the shadows. Expect to spend at least £500 on a decent pair by Zeiss or Leica. A top-of-the-range pair by Swarovski (yes, the same people who make bling jewellery) will set you back £1,500.
A good telescope or “scope” is essential for viewing birds that are far away or in water. The latest Zeiss Diascope is reckoned to be the most powerful birding scope on the market and costs about £2,000. You will also need a tripod. The average carbon-fibre one costs £200.
Digital technology has given rise to digi-twitching whereby a digital camera can be attached to a scope to give pin-sharp close-up photographs taken from a distance.
As bird watchers spend so much time outdoors in all weathers a good jacket is vital. It must have lots of pockets in which you can house your field guide (though there are now apps for iPhones), your bins, a video or digital camera for recording your sightings, your phone and your pager so you can receive bird alerts. The twitchers’ favourite is made of Ventile, a cotton fabric that was developed during the Second World War for pilots’ use. It is waterproof and windproof and – very important for bird watchers – virtually noiseless. Jackets cost about £350.
TWITCH SPEAK
AS with all niche interests, twitching has its own lexicon. If you see a bird you are said to “connect”. If you don’t see a bird which is known to be in the vicinity you have “dipped”. If a fellow twitcher connects and you dip, the other chap has “gripped” you. Some twitchers refer to the more common species as “trash birds”.
RARITY VALUE
TWITCHERS live to “connect” with rare birds and the world’s rarest is thought to be the kakapo, a New Zealand native which is flightless and looks like a cross between a parrot and an owl. It lost the ability to fly because it had no predators until man arrived bringing rats, stoats and cats. There are now thought to be only 124 individual birds left.
WHEN & WHERE TO GO
TOP spots in Britain are the Isles of Scilly, North Norfolk, Fair Isle and Minsmere in Suffolk. There is a theory that the reason Orkney and Shetland get so many birds is because they are situated exactly opposite the flight path which migrating birds take between south Asia and Siberia, so if a migrating bird’s in-built navigation system goes wrong, sending him left instead of right, it is likely to end up over the North Sea above Scotland.
The best times are October in the Scillies and spring everywhere. Birds are very regular in their habits so any enthusiast knows which part of the country to be in at which time to spot which bird. Top bird watching destinations abroad include Costa Rica and Colombia.
SUPER TWITCHERS
IN 2006 Ruth Miller and her partner Alan Davies gave up their jobs and sold their house in Llandudno, North Wales, to travel the globe in order to see whether they could beat the world record for the number of bird species seen in one year. The record stood then at 3,662. It took 18 months of planning and cost ÂŁ100,000 but they smashed that tally, racking up 4,341 species. On their return they wrote a book about it called The Biggest Twitch.
After she was diagnosed with terminal skin cancer in 1981 American heiress Phoebe Snetsinger spent her inheritance on bird watching trips round the world. It was a perilous endeavour. She was attacked and raped in New Guinea and died in Madagascar in 1999 when her vehicle overturned.
By the time of her death she had recorded sightings of more than 8,400 species of bird.
In 2002, twitcher Adrian Riley gave up his job as a government scientist and spent his retirement lump sum on a quest to become the UK’s champion “year lister” (the bird watcher who sees the most species in a calendar year) beating his rival Lee Evans, “king of the birdwatchers”. It soon turned into a war of attrition which cost him his marriage, his health and very nearly his sanity.
Riley claims he was threatened by a fellow twitcher who warned him his name “would be mud” if he challenged Evans. Five months into the challenge Evans allegedly rang Riley to tell him he was always aware of his whereabouts and which birds he was seeing. Riley also claims that Evans tried to put him off following up sightings of birds reported by the Rare Bird Alert.
Riley’s quest caused him to drive 400 miles through the night from Norfolk to Cornwall to make the Scillies by dawn to see the paddyfield warbler. He was back home less than 48 hours later, soaked and frozen – and without having seen the bird.
He won the challenge – by one bird: he had listed 380 species to Evans’s 379 but it came at great cost. In 2003 he suffered a stroke and his wife divorced him.
CELEBRITY SPOTTERS
THE godfather of birding is the comedian-turned-wildlife presenter Bill Oddie but TV panellist Rory McGrath is another famous obsessive whose party trick is to give the Latin name of any British bird species (and there are more than 500 of them). Cabinet minister Ken Clarke once took time out from Westminster to twitch (unsuccessfully) a rare cedar waxwing that had turned up in his constituency.
Gavin And Stacey star Alison Steadman is a keen birder who has tried her hand at twitching – she saw the first pair of purple herons ever to nest in the UK – while Prince Philip also went through a twitching phase of sorts. He published a book of photographs of rare birds taken all over the world from the deck of the royal yacht Britannia.
CONFESSIONS OF A TWITCHER
THERE is a Latin phrase, amicus verus est rara avis, which basically translates as “a true friend is a rare bird”.
Only those who have marvelled at the sight of a crimson-winged wallcreeper or driven through the night to see the elusive Pallas’s sandgrouse will truly know that a rare bird is much, much more than a mere friend. It is the reason for life itself.
Strange as it may seem, many top rarity chasers believe they are fulfilling some driving biological imperative when they wake before dawn, motor 200 miles, wait for six hours in the freezing cold and finally “connect” with some windblown waif from Siberia for a millisecond.
I know. I have done it. I blame my genes. The modern birdwatcher who sets off with a telescope and binoculars, his bird book and digital camera in his pocket is re-enacting the age-old pageant of the hunter-gatherer as he heads into the wilds of Norfolk to claim his prey, his trophy.
Of course the modern twitcher does not have to feed his family on the small bundle of feathers parading in front of him. A simple tick on his checklist satisfies his hunger. For to have seen and held communion with a long-distance wanderer from foreign climes satisfies all the primordial urges that still exist deep in our chromosomes.
Cynics may think this poppycock but what other reason can explain a man who will put family life at risk, a career on hold or stretch the patience of the most understanding of bank managers simply to get his bird?
I have dragged my children up mountains to see the magnificent black vulture and have incurred my wife’s wrath by cancelling dinner dates at a moment’s notice to keep a rendezvous with a wayward warbler or a forlorn falcon.
Yet I am an amateur when it comes to abandoning my responsibilities for the thrill of the chase. I know people who have given up good jobs to satisfy their craving to twitch rare birds or have turned to the divorce courts because they did not want their spouse to get between them and a sighting.
One can only speculate how many twitchers avoided the cameras in Oxfordshire because they did not want their bosses to see them pictured as the crowds queued to see the rare Oriental Turtle Dove.
Not so much a duvet day as a dove day.
Twitchers' main aim is to collect sightings of rare birds
express.co.uk
