I was a hardcore twitcher. I understand why the Cocos booby has Australia’s birders in a frenzy | Andrew Stafford

The discovery of a black-headed gull in Geraldton, Western Australia, has put Australian birders in a bit of a flap. Normal people might wonder why, considering it is abundant in the northern hemisphere – it is the ubiquitous resident seagull in London. But twitchers, the bucket listers of birding, are proudly not normal.

As a semi-reformed, semi-retired twitcher, you can trust me on this. Frankly, flying across the country for a black-headed gull is no biggie. Every year, Australian birding’s elite travel not just to every corner of the continent but our extralimital territories – Christmas, Cocos, the Torres Strait and Macquarie Islands – in search of birds to add to their Australian lists.

The gull (recorded at least 10 times in Australia, according to BirdLife Australia’s Rarities Committee) isn’t even the biggest twitching frenzy taking place right now. That honour goes to our first Cocos booby, first identified on 26 May. It’s an eastern Pacific seabird that’s taken up residence on the New South Wales Central Coast. An estimated 200 twitchers have now kayaked out on Lake Macquarie to add the booby to their Australian (and NSW) lists.

Initially, “Coco” was mistaken for a brown booby, a common bird in tropical Australian waters. The Cocos booby was only recently recognised as its own species by scientists, who split it based on genetic and morphological differences that lay observers might regard as, well, gene-splitting.

Thanks to these vagaries of taxonomy, the number of birds known to breed in Australia that I am yet to see ballooned from a measly four (including the holy grail, the night parrot) to more than a dozen. But big twitches involve vagrants such as the gull and the booby – foreign species blown off course by extreme weather or whose internal compass has somehow been scrambled.

Probably my most extreme twitching adventure was in 2001, when I sailed from Broome to Ashmore Reef – a paradise for seabirds and, at the time, a landing for asylum seekers, before the atoll was deliberately excised from the Australian migration zone. Our pleasure cruise was confronted by a listing hulk with about 200 Afghans on board, plus a customs vessel.

And here we were: a boat full of certifiable nutters armed with telephoto lenses. It was in the middle of the Tampa election campaign. My journalism instincts aroused – and journalists were forbidden access to Ashmore by the Howard government – I was able to ask a few very basic questions of the customs officer as we had our environmental permits inspected.

This caused quite a kerfuffle when the story wound up in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, accompanied by excellent photographs. “How the fuck was a fucking journalist posing as a fucking birdwatcher allowed out there?!” an immigration official thundered. I was banned from ever returning – not by immigration, but the tour operator.

Oh, but that was nothing compared to the time I flew from Brisbane to Perth in 2007, hired a car and drove 1,638km to Whim Creek in the Pilbara to twitch a small, furtive waterbird called a red-legged crake. The crake had been blown in by a cyclone and found an oasis of well-watered lawn surrounded by mining camp dongas, under which it had taken refuge.

There’d only been one red-legged crake in Australia to that point, in 1958 – a bird that jumped on a pearl-lugger then promptly plopped off a Broome jetty and drowned on disembarking. The crake at Whim Creek didn’t last long, either. I arrived bleary-eyed after a few hours’ sleep, only to be told the bird had become a meal for a feral cat a day or two before.

I had to slow down after that. My writerly income simply couldn’t justify the financial expenditure of hardcore twitching, to say nothing of the associated carbon emissions that are its dirty secret. But that’s not to say I’ve stopped entirely, or that the urge has passed. I’ve seen plenty of black-headed gulls, but it’s not (jerks involuntarily) on my Australian list.

Which brings me to the derivation of the noun. What makes a twitcher twitch? The pioneer was British birder Howard Medhurst, who (back in the 1950s) would chase rarities around the UK riding pillion on a motorcycle. Invariably, he would arrive at his destination shivering with cold. His friends mistook his frozen tremors for excitement.

The man who brought twitching to Australia from the UK, the legendary Mike Carter, held the record for the most number of birds seen within Australia almost until his death aged 89 in 2024. Mike also mentored Sean Dooley, author of The Big Twitch (in which I feature, among a fantastic cast of other oddballs) and now BirdLife Australia’s public affairs manager.

Twitchers are the subject of a fair amount of derision in the wider birding community. “When I hear of someone suffering a mental illness that causes them to be riven with anxiety, socially isolated and prone to feelings of paranoia, I think, ‘Yep, sounds like a twitcher to me’,” Dooley himself wrote in his book.

But twitchers – among our first citizen scientists – have also helped pushed back the frontiers of ornithology, particularly in the finer points of field identification. They have also expanded our understanding of the distribution, dispersal and movements of birdlife in the age of extinction. We can thank them for their extralimital commitment to their hobby.