Fieldcraft Note
The Biggest Twitch: a world record year, by the people who did it
Ruth Miller and Alan Davies spent 2008 chasing a world year list across 27 countries, beat a record that had stood since 1989, and finished on 4,341 species.
In 2008 Ruth Miller and Alan Davies spent the whole year on a continuous global twitch, birding in twenty-seven countries from Finland in the north to South Africa, and from Ecuador west to Australia. The target was the world year list record, which had stood since 1989 to Jim Clements at 3,662 species — a figure that is more impressive the longer you think about when it was set, since it was done without the internet, without pagers, and without any of the trip reports a modern year-lister starts from.
They passed it on 31 October and finished the year on 4,341 species, somewhere around 45 per cent of the world’s birds.
What the conversation was actually about
An extended podcast conversation with the two of them, recorded for this site, spent less time on the total than might be expected and more on the things that surround it.
Both had worked for the RSPB for many years, and both came out of the year with a conservation argument rather than a list: having seen a large share of the world’s rare and threatened birds in twelve months, the pattern of what is in trouble and where becomes hard to unsee.
They were also clear about being ordinary birders rather than a professional expedition, which is the part that makes the record legible to anyone else. Much of the discussion is about the practicalities of a year spent almost entirely in each other’s company, and Miller’s account of a year she describes as mainly a bloke’s year is the frankest section of it.
The last part is the one that gets left out of record attempts: how it feels afterwards, when a year like that ends and there is nothing scheduled the following week.
Their account of the year was published as a book, The Biggest Twitch.