Rating

★★★★☆

Category

non-fiction

Read

2025-02-16

Pages

322

Fun and funny account of Sean Dooley’s one year effort to break the Australian twitching record by sighting more than 700 birds.

‘So even though I go birdwatching I don’t really think of myself as a birdwatcher as such. I mean, they’re generally very nice people, but they’re just a bit too obsessive for my liking.’ I scanned her face to see whether she was buying it. Actually, her eyes were more silvery blue, like you’d find on a Red-winged Fairy-wren.

Just after my mother died I received a call from a birder friend. He had enough awareness of the forms of social intercourse to greet me with a perfunctory inquiry as to how I was. I told him that in fact I wasn’t all that great as Mum had just passed away. There was an uncomfortable silence at the other end of the line. After about twenty seconds he managed, ‘There’s a Broad-billed Sandpiper at Werribee Sewage Farm.’