Twitchers are named after one nervous British birdwatcher from the 1950s
Serious rare-bird chasers in Britain are called twitchers, a word coined in the 1950s for the jittery behaviour of a birdwatcher named Howard Medhurst. Their world has its own slang: miss the bird and you have dipped out. When a North American golden-winged warbler turned up in Kent, roughly 2,500 people travelled to see it.
Birdwatching, or birding, means observing birds for pleasure or as citizen science, whether by eye, through binoculars and telescopes, by ear, or via webcams and camera-equipped feeders. Unlike ornithologists, who study birds with formal scientific methods, most participants do it for recreation or company. The word birdwatcher was first recorded in 1712, used by William Oldsworth, while birding once meant hunting birds with guns, as in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Labels carry weight. Many North Americans who call themselves birders see the difference from birdwatchers as a matter of dedication, claiming deeper knowledge of identification by sight and sound, moult, migration timing and habitat. A 1969 glossary in Birding magazine even warned that bird-watcher was too vague a term to describe the serious hobbyist. Some prefer birding because it includes listening.
Twitching, called chasing in North America, is the hunt for a rare bird someone else has already found, mainly to add it to a list. Earlier names for the same urge included pot-hunter and tick-hunter. It flourishes in compact countries such as Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, where travel is quick. If others see a bird you missed, you may feel gripped off, and keeping a sighting secret is known as suppression. Many birders keep a life list of every species they have seen, and some add country, county, yard or year lists; the American Birding Association has rules for submitted lists, though personal criteria vary, for instance on whether heard-only birds count.
Appreciating birds for beauty rather than food took hold in the late 18th century through writers such as Gilbert White and John Clare. Victorian naturalists mostly collected eggs and skins, with wealthy collectors using colonial contacts to gather specimens worldwide. Watching living birds rose only in the late 19th century, alongside conservation: the Audubon Society formed to fight the feather trade in America, while in Britain the RSPB took up the same cause.
Source: Birdwatching
