A long long time ago in galaxy far far away I was a twitcher. I wasn't as bad as my mate Ken who won't be reading this because his round the world cruise ship has just left Darwin in Australia on route to Indonesia and he's too tight to pay the onboard internet fees so I'm safe. When we went on a twitch back in the 70's and 80's he would get extremely twitchy when we were near the rarity location, he was the epitome of a twitcher, nervously shaking in the hope that the bird was still there and suicidal if we had dipped (twitching term for missed it). In those days, way before the internet and pagers we relied on word of mouth and phone calls affectionally known as the 'Grapevine'. These were usually late on a Friday night or a call to the nerve center of rare birds in those days which was Nancy's Cafe in Cley, Norfolk. Nancy's was a little cafe in a row of cottages in the little coastal village of Cley which was a reserve with a fantastic history of rare birds. In the cafe was always a log book near the telephone and whoever was in there would answer and copy the message down in the log book or relay the recent sightings to the caller from the entries in the book. Often there were marvelous sketches that the more talented artistic birders would draw while waiting for their tea and bread pudding or beans on toast. When we did go hurtling off early on a Saturday morning hoping to see a new bird for our list we were often working on vague location instructions and sightings that may be days old. We didn't do too bad at all in hindsight. One twitch in the mid 70's for a Ross's Gull at Scalby Mills near Scarborough also produced Mediterranean Gull which was rare in those days, Wryneck and a couple of other new ticks that I can't remember. I think the furthest twitch I ever made was for a drake King Eider, Surf Scoter and Snow Goose near Loch Fleet in North East Scotland. This was a 500 plus mile drive, which compared to shooting off to the Shetlands to see a Sandhill Crane or down to the Isles of Scilly for a Tree Swallow that I know Ken made was a minor twitch in comparison. When I left the UK my bird list was around 465 species I think, with lumps (minus) and splits (plus) both of which could mean a reduction as a lump means what were considered separate species are now classified as one and splits where a single species has been classified as two or more species means I don't know for example if the Bonelli's Warblers I saw back then were Eastern or Western but who cares, I'm an ex-twitcher and quite happy to photograph the birds in the yard and an occasional trip to the coast. I did go on a bit of a twitch last year to see a Red-flanked Bluetail in New Jersey. I was heading over to Barnegat Lighthouse for the wintering Harlequin Ducks anyway and the RFB was only a short distance off my route. It was well worth seeing it in the US having seen the one in Winspit in Dorset back in 1993 and one in South Korea in 1978 or 79 (I can't remember). As I haven't been out to the coast so far this year for a multitude of reasons and I haven't added a blog post for weeks I thought I'd better write an historical post instead. I am thinking of heading down to Delaware on Monday to Bombay Hook and on to Cambridge in Maryland for the huge numbers of Ducks on the Choptank River. Watch this space as they say.
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| Red-flanked Bluetail |
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| Red-flanked Bluetail |
