The Biggest Twitch

While I do enjoy birding, twitching (the act of travelling a long distance purely in order to see a particular species of bird) has never been my thing. The closest I’ve ever got was a couple of years ago when reports of Waxwing sightings in Tufnell Park prompted me to go and have a look to see if I could see them; I didn’t, but I did spend an enjoyable couple of hours hanging around a street a couple of blocks from the Tube station (where several of them had been seen the previous day) in the company of several like-minded individuals who I’d never met before, and haven’t seen since. Doesn’t exactly count, really.

Similarly, as far as travelling to watch birds in general goes, I’ll definitely keep an eye out for birds wherever I am but it’s more a case of going somewhere for other reasons (work, holiday, etc) and then checking out the local bird life, not travelling somewhere specifically to see birds. Sure, I have favoured venues in or near to places I go to often (for example, when I’m in Toronto I will at some point go to High Park, and when I’m in Suffolk a visit to Minsmere is more likely than not to be on the cards), but I do my birding at places I go to, as opposed to going to those places purely for the birding. 

So naturally, a recent read was about a couple who travelled around the world purely to see as many birds as they could. 

Alan Davies and Ruth Miller worked for the RSPB — until they decided to quit their jobs and spend a year (and a fair chunk of their savings) trying to break the record for the most birds seen in a year (in fact, their target of 4,000 species was somewhat north of the previous record, and the record they set has since been surpassed). Their odyssey took them to Australia, Peru, Ethiopia, India and many other places. It’s an enjoyable read for the most part; they alternate chapters and their contrasting styles work well together — Ruth more humorous and down-to-earth (and already familiar to me from her articles in Bird Watching magazine), Alan more clinical and descriptive. 

Their birding adventure has its moments but there are points where the story drags somewhat. Travel literature invariably has passages about the protagonist(s) getting sick at some point and this is no different, to the point where it’s impressive that they both made it to the end. Especially Alan, who appears to get seasick every time he so much as looks at a boat. At times it seems like an extended plug for the birding travel company they made extensive use of. And there’s one point — rather early on in the story — in which they speculate on what the book sales will be like, which to me was more jarring than the occasional mentions of Ruth and Alan’s sex life which seems to have annoyed other reviewers. I do wonder, though, about the ethicality of “playback” (the playing of bird calls by the guides from the afore-mentioned birding travel company in order to get the birds whose calls are being played to appear before their clients). 

Sometimes when I read travel lit, I come away wondering (however idly) about how I would go about embarking on such a journey. This was not one of those, although I did get the occasional vicarious thrill about some of their sightings, and their talk of legendary American birder Kenn Kaufman did make me want to check out his book Kingbird Highway. One for another time.