Steve Piotrowski now completes his history of Suffolk birdwatching by bringing us up to the present day and then delivering a slightly pessimistic vision of the future: Steve Piotrowski
A history of Suffolk birdwatching Part 3 – the near past, the present and the future Twitching and bird information services In the 1950s and 1960s, birdwatchers had no real desire to be immediately aware of rarity occurrences and were happy to read about such events in monthly journals or annual bird reports. The focus was then on the birdwatcher’s own patch, with the more adventurous possibly visiting a bird observatory or field studies centre. Such venues were often at remote localities, which would have involved a long train or bus ride followed by a cross-country trek to reach the final destination, so prolonged stays of normally a week or more were desirable. Nowadays, day visits, single overnight stays or weekend courses are commonplace. Birding holidays abroad were virtually unheard of before the 1980s and now there are hundreds of companies offering them with destinations to all six1 continents!
Access to bird ‘news’ became easier during the 1960s when birdwatchers became more willing to trek further from their local patch to view others’ ‘finds’, the latter due partly as a by-product of increased private car ownership. The presence of a Macqueen’s Bustard at Hinton in 1962 caused feverish excitement amongst local and national birdwatchers, resulting in Suffolk’s (and probably the country’s) first ‘twitch’. However, only about 100 people saw this great rarity following news of its whereabouts, although the ‘crowd’ did include some famous ornithologists of the day such as James Ferguson-Lees (David Pearson pers comm). SOG members and others celebrated the Golden Jubilee of this ‘twitch’ at Hinton in November 2012, which allowed surviving original observers to reminisce amongst themselves and pore over photographs of the event. The story was superbly written up by SOG stalwart John Grant and published in the East Anglian Daily Times. The photographs that complemented John’s article were intriguing to say the least, not only for their quality, but also for the array of vehicles present and the photographic equipment being used. David Hosking (son of Eric Hosking) recalled that he was five years old at the time and he watched the bird from the back of his father’s Rolls Royce. Today, one would expect more than 3000 to be present within the first few hours of the news of such a rarity being released! Macqueen’s Bustard, plus note the nose and headlamp of Eric Hosking’s ‘Roller’
Optical aids and textbooks improved As the emphasis switched from behavioural studies of birds to their plumage characteristics twitching became more fashionable during the 1970s. Optical aids and textbooks improved
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Or seven, if you treat North and South America as separate.
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THE HAR R I ER – S e p te mb e r 2 0 1 3
