A twitcher is a competitive birder who compiles a life list of bird species they have seen. Often, long distances are travelled, as quickly as feasible, to places where rare and vagrant bird species have been recorded.
The origin of the term twitcher is a little bit crazy. The story runs like this. There was a British birder named Howard Medhurst (1931–2019). During the 1950s, he would travel to places, often on the back of a friend’s motorbike, to find rarities that had been seen. When he got to the destination, he would first light up a cigarette, and do some excited shivering, which got exaggerated into jerky movements. Other people around started doing imitations. So the practice of travelling to see a rare bird became known as “going on a twitch”. The people who did this became known as “twitchers”, and the activity became “twitching”.
Sometimes, when a particularly sought after species is recorded, the number of twitchers becomes impressive …
