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On 10th March 2015, North Walsham Photography Group were hosts to Trevor Williams of the newly created North East Norfolk Bird Club, who regaled us with his talk entitled ‘Birding: the beginnings of a happy obsession’. His talk was both greatly informative and highly entertaining, and his passion for birding was clearly evident. His interest in bird watching has spanned 50 years, and has encompassed 30 countries over 7 continents.
Brought up in Norfolk, the ‘hallowed county for bird watchers’, he gradually amassed his botanical knowledge and understanding of birds; using physical and behavioural features, the habitat and seasonal adaptation, his recognition and identification of birds became more precisional. As did his technical hardware: developing from a basic ‘point and shoot’ camera as a teenager, to today’s ‘standard’ equipment of a fully fledged twitcher. The term ‘twitcher’, Trevor told us, is simply defined as someone who travels to see a previously spotted rare bird; the emphasis, of course, is on the word ‘travel’. Recently, for example, when a Brunnich’s Guillemot turned up unexpectedly at Portland Harbour, hundreds of twitchers descended on the quayside, from all parts of the UK, laden down with telescopic lenses, DSLRs and checklists.

His presentation contained photographs of some spectacular birds – various brightly coloured hummingbirds resident in South America, and the spectacular Cock-of-the-Rock, whose habitat is high in the Andes, but whose habitat is threatened by de-forestation. And here is the interesting crossover between an obsession with birds on a checklist and the conservation work to protect these beautiful creatures. An interesting example of this is the international conservation efforts between Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand and the WWT reserve at Slimbridge in Gloucester to save the Spoonbill Sandpiper, a small bird living in North East Russia which is threatened with extinction through illegal killing and loss of habitat. Eggs are taken from the first clutch, (the breeding birds will lay a replacement clutch), which are incubated and reared in Slimbridge, and returned to their natural habitat to bolster numbers.

Trevor and his wife Jane (also a twitcher) are both volunteers at the RSPB reserve at Cley where, as ‘Hide Guides’, they impart their knowledge and enthusiasm to visitors. He has travelled to all parts of the UK, answering the call of the twitch, and in 2013, devoted the entire year to emulating the feat of Richard Millington’s ‘Twitcher’s Diary’, published in 1981, in which the author checklisted 300 birds in one year. Trevor ticked off his 306th bird on New Year’s Eve!

He acknowledges the bitter-sweet effect of the increase in advanced technology and the immediate dispersal of internet data: he has witnessed a detraction from the reality of observing and learning about birds and their behaviour, to an instant data-chase and the possible loss of an appreciation for what birds should actually symbolise in our all-too-instant frenetic society. But there is no doubting his enthusiasm and passion for these feathered and fragile creatures, and it must be acknowledged, that without people like Trevor and Jane, with such single-minded determination, our bird world would be less understood and probably in greater decline.

If you would like to learn more about the club’s activities, contact the North East Norfolk Bird Club on their website at www.nenbc.co.uk.