If you’ve done something really, really bad and you wish to atone for your sins there are several things you can do: you could wear a hair shirt for a month, you could walk naked through Canterbury on a market day whilst self-flagellating and proclaiming your sins or you could read this book. In retrospect I think I would have preferred to have suffered the walk of shame, at least that would have been a more interesting way to spend my time. I’m still bemused that the author felt compelled to water down/ delete certain sections just because a single magazine columnist condemned the book having identified what she deemed to be ‘sexism’.

Book review: Twitching by Numbers by Garry Bagnell - Mark Avery

I read the book and it was very interesting. The author has a lot of anger in him and some people might find it offensive, but I thought it was great. He talks about things that people might not see as important and makes a point of what he thinks is important.

The most unfortunate twitchers race many kilometres to spot a bird only to find that their flighty subjects have flown off – a bummer known in the twitching world as a "dip". One of the most infamous dips came as Webb pursued a long-tailed shrike in the Outer Hebrides off mainland Scotland. The boat he and 12 others had hired died in choppy waters, forcing a daring rescue by Her Majesty's Coastguard. "We were worried for our lives for a bit, but we were more worried about not seeing this bird," he said. But mostly, and overwhelmingly, this is a book about twitching – the fieldsport of rushing around trying to see rare birds to add to your lifelong list of wild birds seen in Britain and Ireland. Like most sports, twitching will seem entirely pointless to the vast majority of people. Who cares that Scotland beat England at rugby recently? Quite a few, including me. And who cares that Garry Bagnell has seen 553 bird species in Britain and Ireland (which puts him way behind Steve Gantlett on an estimated 590 species)? Quite a few people and they are mostly men. Do I care? Not deeply, but I am certainly interested in this book because it is a very clear description of the fieldsport of twitching from the viewpoint of a keen exponent. The cover? Gives a good idea of what the book contains. The book is illustrated by the author and, although infinitely better than I could do myself, the illustrations are all quite good, but not tip top. The Ovenbird gives a fair idea of the quality of illustrations. I’d give it 6/10. Hats off to him, too, for self-publishing (and marketing) the book at his own expense rather than hawking it around mainstream publishers. As a newb birder I very much enjoyed the whole read from start to finish. I found it interesting and enjoyed how Garry took you along on every twitch.

Garry Richard Bagnell books and biography | Waterstones

A term coined in the 1960s to describe the jaw-rattling sound of chasing after rare birds on rumbling motorbikes, "twitchers" are narrowly defined as bird-watchers willing to drop everything to chase a sighting. More broadly, it includes those who see a bird within a few days of an urgent bulletin.Twitching by Numbers’ by Garry Bagnell, a memoir of his anecdotes about birdwatching, published in this very year 2022. Insert joke about tits here, but seriously this is why women still feel so unwelcome in the birding community.

Garry Bagnell – Mark Avery Twitching by Numbers by Garry Bagnell – Mark Avery

Any author who deviates from what is considered decorous and appropriate enjoys no licence - he (or she) risks being singled out and pilloried with opprobrium. Encountering rare birds is amazing, I’ll never forget coming across a grounded little auk in a public park and if I ever look out at my mum’s bird table and see a rose coloured starling I’d probably be at serious risk of cardiac arrest from excitement. 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. All the same twitching is a far less damaging way to be obsessive about birds than standing in a butt and try to shoot as many as possible that have been driven towards you by a bored teenager looking for beer money. KEEN birder Gary Bagnell has pledged to rewrite sections of his first book after it came under fire on social media.In other countries, the world of birdwatching may be a largely gentle place ruled by calm, binocular-toting souls who patiently wait for their reward. But in Britain, it can be a truly savage domain, a nest of intrigue, fierce rivalries and legal disputes. 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. Though most twitchers are bird-lovers, the sport is mostly about the chase. Bagnell, for instance, drove 90 minutes and searched the ground for a half-hour before he spotted the coy shorelark in beach scrub. He eyed it for a few moments before tweeting his find, then moved on. "I've got another bird to get three hours away," he said. 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. "But in Britain, birdwatching can be bitter. It can be real nasty business."

The Wryneck: Hurricane in a teacup? Twitcher on back foot

To be honest, there are a handful of very interesting, well-written recollections of specific twitches which are, to a birder like myself, informative and eminently readable, noted for their style and appreciation of the well-written word. Alas, NONE of these pieces have been written by the author.I had by no means heard of a foam get together till I learn this e-book – perhaps I ought to get out extra, or perhaps not. He hasn’t wasted a second of his life because he is also an authority on aircraft and a county standard chess player A shame as there are lots of bird watchers who’d be interested in his bird watching activities, certainly not in his misogynistic and homophobic views, failed marriages and bigoted comments, these views aren’t acceptable in today’s multicultural, multiethnic and equal society. But sections of soon came under the notice of feminist Lucy McRobert who, like him, is both a birder and a writer - but on a different wavelength and at the primmer end of the literary spectrum.