Recently read three books by compulsive birders or twitchers:
Sean Dooley - The Big Twitch
Kenn Kaufman - Kingbird Highway
Adrian Riley - Arrivals and Rivals - A Birding Oddity
Although the themes are similar they take quite divergent paths and are driven by by quite different demons.
I always find any kind of biographical or autobiographical books intriguing. I like to get inside people’s heads to try and understand what drives them. Yes - these guys are are all interested in birds, but each is driven by the urge to ‘tick’ as many as they can. Why do people do that? I’m not sure.
Dooley had a lucky monetary windfall (due the loss of his parents). Was he trying to deal with that? Probably to some extent. But I suspect it is more complex than that. Riley had just retired and needed a focus and a twitch seemed to be the thing. Kaufman was much younger (17 when he started). Book is written many years after the event, but is interesting in they way he was so single-minded in his approach to the task.
Of course you would think that this is a man’s game, and mostly it is, but the out and out leader on a world scale is a woman. Phoebe Snetsinger, with 8000 plus birds. All recorded in her book Birding on Borrowed Time.
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