I discover I’m a twit and that twitching isn’t for the birds

I really noticed the obsessive hoopla around birds for the first time a number of years ago in the mist on a wet and slippery path high above the Victoria Falls. I was with a group of journalists among whom was Kate Turkington, the charming and well-traveled journalist and broadcaster who is also a renowned twitterer.

The enthusiastic twits around her, pecked at every description she offered, keen to be recognised for their ability as twits — or is it for twitching? Whatever!

As Kate identified one little black or brown job (LBJ) after another they chirped in delightful recognition. Lagging behind the gaggle was the former editor of the Sunday Times Magazine. He glanced across at me, cocked an eyebrow at the twittering among the twitches and said with disdain: “I know penguins.” That summed it up for me.

But of course I knew birds. There were the Indian Mynahs (Acridotheres tristis) at the shopping centre in Broadway, Durban North were I grew up making such a racket in the trees that you could not hear yourself think.

Then there was a trip to an ostrich farm, so I got to know what an ostrich looked like and of course there were all those black birds in that scary Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds. From my longhair hippie days, before I became short, bald and slightly podgy I recall the depressive Leonard Cohen signing about being a bird on a wire, but he never named the kind of bird that he was nor wanted to be. He was just happy to be a bird on a wire like a drunk in a midnight choir trying in his way to be free.

I also know vultures. They were in that animated Disney version of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. Modeled on the Beatles, they were very funny wondering what to do with themselves not at all like the real vultures that I saw near Kruger Park who knew exactly what they were doing as they shredded what was left of a bambi that had been killed earlier that morning.

Of course I was also aware of the kind of “birds” pursued by Michael Caine in Alfie and I am pleased that I never stooped so low so as to refer to a girlfriend, even in my Brylcream days as “my goose.” But I digress. There were also seagulls those grey birds flapping around, pecking for scraps on the beach while we were bleaching our hair with peroxide, tuning our 50 cc buzzies for more speed or, on good surf days, hanging ten in the tubes off Battery Bbeach. Then I read a book about Cape Point, where the seagulls are apparently terns and there are so many of them that the authors of the book claimed that no stone in the area remains unterned.

I also know doves. I tried to kill some a few years ago by throwing stones at them when I was trying to get some sleep in the afternoons so I could survive night shift. Their constant cooing kept me wide awake. Eventually I strapped a sad-looking teddy bear to the chimney in the hope that the glare from his glass eye would scare them off.
But my indifference to birds has changed now thanks to a recent trip to the Richtersveld with friends Sara and John who know their birds. Now I too have a hunger to be a twit. So I page through bird books with the same intense interest that I once devoted to Scope in the hope that I too can get to the point where to see them is to know them