It's a shark...no it;s a twitcher

It’s a shark! No, it’s a twitcher!

The other night I went out ‘sharking’. A friend is doing (or trying to) his master’s research on blue sharks, and how they are affected by changes in ocean water temperature. He was going out on a tagging boat, where they try to catch the sharks, put little metal tags on their fins and release them (much like the sea turtle research I did). It was truly a mini-epic voyage. It was a stormy night (isn’t that how all stories start?), with 15 foot waves and very strong winds. Our 5 ½ hour boat trip took us 9 miles out into the sea (only what 3000 odd more miles and we would have reached home?) The guys started by filling a net with mushed up mackerel they had caught and left in the bottom of the boat for a week to get extra smelly, and than threw that in the sea, bobbing it up and down like a tea bag, trying to tempt the sharks. Unfortunately, we were unlucky on the shark front (we were only looking for small sharks, not the great whites spotted off the Cornish coast).

However, midway through our voyage we spotted a small black bird which darted across the boat. The various passengers went absolutely out of control, jumping, hugging, and kissing each other. The reason-they are twitchers, people who travel from as far as Norway to come on these boat trips in hopes of seeing “rare birds”. This little black bird whose name escapes me (don’t tell them or they’d be outraged) had never before been seen in Britain. SO when they saw it they were excited to say the least, they called the bird hotline, much like the bat signal, text messaged their ‘mates’, and paged all other twitchers; the rest of the night their phones would not cease going off, their pagers beeping and so on, they had set the birding world astorm, and I had no idea, or interest, in what was just observed-not only because it was just a black fleck that was only visible for three seconds, but because, and here is what I think is the strangest part, it is not like the bird is truly rare, or incredibly colorful or exotic, but only rare to Britain, for our North Carolina colleagues they can see thousands of these birds in their backyards, it is just the very very lost bird that somehow manages to show up in England. And so during the month of October, following a certain type of storm that often affects the North East US during that time (they definitely know more about our weather than I do), some birds get lost and end up in England, and with them a stampede of twitchers flies down for the day (now that’s an expensive hobby) to try and catch a glimpse of them before they keel over, knackered to the point of death. What is also interesting about this strange breed of humans is that they’re not particularly interested in the bird per se, it is really more of a weird game where they literally have a list which they are constantly adding to in competition with their mates. As my mom would say, at least it keeps them off the streets (and I would add-and in the air).