The Big Twitch

If you drove down River Road in Walpole the week of Monday, November 8^th, you might have marveled at the band of camera carrying paparazzi to be seen standing in a cornfield each day of the week, apparently gathered in vain.  No rock star or politician to be seen, surely they were victims of some cruel prankster; perhaps a strategic phone call placed to a local newspaper that Bono was going to record live from the banks of the Connecticut River.  Alas fans of U2 would have to wait, for the madding crowd had assembled to see a tiny Townsend’s warbler, the fifth occurrence of this species in the state and the object of southwestern New Hampshire’s first “big twitch”.

Twitcher is British term for an exponent of a very British hobby called twitching.  Known as listing in the US, it represents the extremes of birding, whereby the object of the sport is to amass an ever-larger list of birds seen.  The bigger the rarity, the greater the lengths to which twitchers will go, to the point of chartering aircraft in a few memorable cases. Some twitches are the stuff of legend – Newburyport’s Ross’s Gull in 1974 and North America’s first red-footed falcon on Martha’s Vineyard thirty years later – each drew thousands of people. I too spent a fair amount of time twitching birds in years past, but eventually grew tired of the miles spent traveling and the obsessive nature of the sport.  But the Townsend’s warbler momentarily revived an old habit.

How far would you travel? Townsend's warbler, Walpole NH

It is a western species that normally comes no closer to Walpole than the great plains of Wyoming and Colorado.  That this species occasionally strays off course is no surprise – you can only get lost if you travel, and Townsend’s warblers travel, from the hemlock and spruce forests of the Western US to Central America and back each year.  Wayward wanderings among the population of this and other migrants is relatively poorly understood but well documented, especially in fall when there is an abundance of inexperienced youngsters embarking on their first migration.  Every year, a significant number become disoriented and get lost due to a combination of factors.  Many birds are known to have tiny crystals of organic magnetite that form in their brain and which function as an aid to navigation.  A small percentage has faulty wiring and migrates in the reverse direction than should be the case.  Others get blown off course by autumnal weather patterns.  And undoubtedly there are reasons not yet understood.

Usually, the disoriented birds become concentrated along the coast, where their itinerant wanderings are brought to a sudden halt.  So it follows that birders get concentrated along the coast, where the chances of finding a rarity are still tiny, but less tiny than would otherwise be the case.  But there is a core band of top-notch birders that eschew the coast for the hedgerows and cornfields, ponds and forests, and the highways and byways of southwest New Hampshire, and none better than Ken Klapper.  It was Ken that found the Townsend’s warbler on Sunday, November 7^th.  Normally, these chance occurrences are one-day wonders, but this bird had found a ready food supply in a weedy manure pile adjacent to River Road and stayed for the week, in the process enabling people to twitch the bird from New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

Thanks Ken.