And who cares that Garry Bagnell has seen 553 hen species in Britain and Eire (which places him approach behind Steve Gantlett on an estimated 590 species)? Years ago, British boys used to spend their childhoods collecting birds' eggs – now you wouldn't dream of doing such a thing," said Brian Egan, manager of the Rare Bird Alert. Just before Christmas, Garry Bagnell published Twitching by numbers: Twenty-four years of chasing rare birds around Britain and Ireland. GREAT YARMOUTH, England — Garry Bagnell is cruising down an English country road when his beeper lights up with a bulletin. From the title the reader might assume that the author is capable of putting into words details which would make an interesting narrative.

Twitching by numbers: Twenty-four years of chasing rare…

Credit it to GB also, for his determination and enterprise in publishing the title at his own risk without the comfort of an advance payment or the prospect of royalties from an established publishing house.In America, birdwatching is still mostly a pastime," said Evans, who is on his fourth marriage and blames his divorces partly on his obsession with twitching. Once notified of a sighting, the service issues urgent messages to its 21,000 subscribers via pay-by-the-month pagers and smartphone apps. This one can’t be blamed on twitchers, but there have also been cases where high profile birds have been shot – a red footed falcon in Shropshire and a little bustard in Norfolk – the latter was found on a road verge where it was highly visible. In one of dozens of similar scenes of “twitcher madness” here, local police were forced to cordon off streets after hundreds of desperate bird-watchers descended on a suburban home in Hampshire last year when a rare Spanish sparrow fluttered into somebody’s garden. In the United States, book-turned-Hollywood-film The Big Year chronicled the quest of three men vying in long-held American competitions to spot the most species in a single year.

Washington Post In Britain, bird-watching gone wild - The Washington Post

Within the world of twitching, there are countless rankings — lifetime lists, annual lists, semiofficial lists, slightly more official lists.The level of commitment to see a bird in the shetlands, Scilly’s and everywhere in between shows no limits.

Twitching – British birdwatching goes bad as spotters ramp up

But instead of seeing something that’s wandered on to your local patch you travel hundreds of miles to see it then I feel that the experience is a bit devalued. For those who ever needed to grasp what twitching is, then this detailed account can be place to begin.Fluttering somewhere between sport and passion, it can leave in its path a grim tableau of ruined marriages, traffic chaos and pride, both wounded and stoked. He had lined up a plane to take him to a sighting on a remote island only to find that a group of rival birders had stuffed the palm of his pilot “with a few extra quid” to take them instead. Unfortunately, this edition (and I have read every word, excruciating sentence, non-sentence and nonsense-sentence) is a car crash of narrative style.