Some Notes on the History of World Bird Twitching

by John Wall

Reading the post by Aileen Lotz on the World Birding Discussion Board requesting information about the earliest female bird listers led me to think about the history of world bird twitching without regard to gender. I'm not aware of any publication that has sought to trace the development of world birding, although there have been some books and articles about the beginnings of bird watching in the U.S. in the early 20th Century, including a biography of Ludlow Griscom, the first celebrated expert in the art of field identification.

Once decent binoculars became available (at least 1931, judging by the late Bob Arbib's Zeiss 10x50 bins -- the kind Rommel must have used in North Africa), anyone who could afford a pair would have been able to see birds nearly as well as we can today, though without such conveniences as long eye relief and close focusing. For most (or all) of the world, there were no competent field guides, as John Yrizarry, an expert on the history of field guides, can attest. Transportation was a problem, since commercial aviation didn't take off until after WWII. When Bob Arbib spent a summer vacation from college watching birds in the Panama Canal Zone in about 1931, he traveled down and back by steamer. In 1947, John Yrizarry and Steve Russell hitchhiked to the Florida Keys, then took a fishing boat to Cuba, where they had quite an adventure, including a horseback trip in the Trinidad Mountains.

The first instance of foreign travel to tick a specific bird that has come to my attention is a report about a birder who wanted to see Imperial Woodpecker, Campephilus imperialis (the real "Treasure of the Sierra Madre"), and who realized that it was likely to become extinct. He is said to have traveled to the highlands of northwest Mexico in the early 1950s, where he readily saw the great woodpecker. I don't know his name or any of the details of his trip and would be much appreciative if anyone could furnish further information about that historic but apparently undocumented birding trip.

Russ Mason organized some of the earliest tours to watch birds in foreign countries, perhaps in the 1950s.  The first example of foreign birding "gen" - a trip report with maps and bird lists for a variety of sites - of which I am aware was Peter Alden's Finding the Birds in Western Mexico, which I purchased upon its publication in 1969 and used on my first foreign birding trip, during spring break from Stanford in 1970.

Extended, multi-country trips such as the one just completed by Barry Wright, seem to be a more recent phenomenon. The earliest that I know about was the journey on a motorbike across Europe and Asia undertaken by Alan Greensmith and the late Ron Brown in the 1970s. While on professional assignment to survey Neotropical parrot populations, Bob Ridgely made the first great birding expedition around Central and South America in 1976-77.

Stuart Keith may have been the first person to set out to see all of the birds of the world. Until the recent proliferation of birding tours, and the single-minded dedication to bird listing by independent "maniacs", many birders wondered whether Stuart's world tally could ever be exceeded. Some of the birds he has seen and tape recorded, such as the singing male Bachman's Warbler in northern Virginia in 1954, are unlikely to show up on future lists due to extinction.

Meanwhile, around the world, local residents, ex-pats and visiting scientists were sorting out identification problems on their own, without the benefit of field guides, color plates, or tape recordings. Some of their publications hold up well even today. Madoc's introduction to the birds of Malaya, written on toilet tissue in a Japanese POW camp, remains an important reference for identifying the birds found (or at least which used to be found) around Kuala Lumpur. James Chapin was quite a modern birder as well as a collecting ornithologist during his years in the Belgian Congo in the teens and 1920s, and his four-volume Birds of the Belgian Congo remains an interesting and valuable reference.

The verb "to twitch" came into usage in the UK and only spread to America after publication of Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book, the first publication that told the truth about bird watching. Bill Oddie's book defined three categories - twitchers, birders, and dudes - and provided drawings, descriptions and questions to help one determine into which he or she would best fit. Most determinative, I thought, was the test of ranking the following three items in order of importance: (1) world peace, (2) food, and (3) a Lanceolated Warbler. Furthermore, Bill's drawing and unprintable vocabulary of a representative twitcher reminded me of more than one of my birding friends.

I realize that real bird twitchers won't have reached this point, since my historical remarks can't possibly contribute to their lists, but I would ask anyone who has to send me additions and corrections to the previously unrecorded history of world twitching.

Recent books of interest:

Stephen Moss. A Bird in the Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching. 320 pages. Aurum Press 2004. UK | DE | FR