16^th June - Thrupp, Oxfordshire

	The Owl was so scared of being blinded that it decided to hide in a post box

“At least think of the poor old Fiesta,” I said to Miss Cole when she decided for both of us that we were going to see the Scops Owl. The poor old Fiesta, faithful to the very end, has now given me an ultimatum: either I give it a break and allow it to retire with dignity, or it purposefully breaks down on the way to a really good bird and ensures that I miss it. 135,000 miles on the clock for a Fiesta is pretty good going, in fact when I took it in for its last service the mechanic told me he’d never even seen a Fiesta that had done so many miles, he even said it was in damn fine condition for a car that had endured such excruciating hardships, before then stinging me with a bill for £400. So the Fiesta is to take a well deserved retirement, and soon my birding will be conducted by means of a new Toyota Yaris, so long as the bastards in Old Trafford give me a decent price for a 135,000 mile Fiesta.

“I’ve already seen it. It’s crap,” was my change of tactics to dissuade The Cole from wanting any part in the disgusting goings on down in Oxfordshire. “Wait till another Scops Owl turns up in a few years that you can actually see; one that doesn’t get blinded and spat at and trod on and mistreated by the revoltingly inconsiderate moron twitchers that have no field craft skills or regard for either the bird’s or the local residents’ welfare,” said I. Miss Cole had been in Spain when I saw the Scops Owl on Wednesday, but after hearing about the utterly disgraceful behaviour I witnessed she wanted in and began collecting a variety of missiles and deadly projectiles from the alleyway, which she could throw at the bird and the local residents.

“O..oooo……ooo….ooh….hh..hh.hh…..hhh.hh…..h ssssshhhhiii…..i.ii..iii….ii…i ii.ii.i.i..ii… iiii.iii….ttt…tt…..tt,” I could have swore the Fiesta said as I started up his ignition, and then informed him we were off to Oxfordshire, via Bedfordshire.

“Bedfordshire?”said the Fiesta.

“Yep,” I replied.

“But why?” he said.

“There’s a Red-footed Falcon there,” I told him.

“A Red what?” he enquired.

“A Red-footed Falcon,” I repeated. At which point the tyres blew, the suspension collapsed and the doors fell off.

“I can’t take it anymore!” the Fiesta pitifully told me.

“Get up!” I ordered him. “Come on, get up!”

“I can’t, I can’t! It’s all too much for me now!”

“Damn you,” I said, cuz now I was getting angry, “after everything we’ve been through and you treat me like this? Haven’t I always made sure you’re well watered and oiled? Haven’t I always made sure that you get a proper service every six months?”

“Please Tom, please not today. I’m knackered,” he begged.

“Look at Miss Cole,” I told him, “how do you think she’s going to feel if she finds out you’re just a big pussy? Eh? Do you want Miss Cole thinking you’re a chicken shit bastard with no balls?”

After that he was back up, a stallion of an automobile, and we were grinding our way down to Bedford to see a Red-footed Falcon. Or not, as it so turned out, because despite being at Marston Vale Millenium Country Park for the last week, at midday it simply decided that it was time to sample further delights of the UK and take a wander elsewhere. But we did get 2 Hobbies - which I like, a few Lesser Whitethroats - which I also like, and a Fox - I like. I also saw a fly-over Golden Plover, but when Katie and Darren showed up they kindly informed me that I was a big stringing bastard and that a Golden Plover in June was a very unusual Bedfordshire record. “Racing Pigeon,” was their suggestion, but I can’t find that in my Heinzel, Fitter & Parslow, all I can find is Feudal Pigeon, a bird described as being associated with city centres, diseases and medieval systems of land ownership.

After the most tediously irritating drive possibly imaginable through the roundabout theme park of Milton Keynes, an evening in Thrupp was again upon us. I couldn’t believe the scenes of utter devastation that greeted our arrival: burnt out cars, boarded-up windows, trampled flower beds, dead horses, gangs of ragged clothed children with no shoes on scampering in the gutter looking for food and squabbling over a dead squirrel. I grabbed hold of one young girl and shook her shoulders:

“Where are your parents? Where are all the adults? What the Hell has happened here?”

She bit my hand and squealed, “They’re dead! Okay? Can I go now?”

I noticed that she was wearing a grubby pin badge with a picture of herself. Under the picture I could just about read her name: “Rebecca? That’s your name is it? It’s a nice name.”

“My name’s Newt,” she told told me, “only my brother calls me Rebecca.”

“And where is your brother, Newt?” I asked.

“He’s dead too!” she cried.

“Look Newt, it’s all going to be okay. We’re from SWIFT (the Society for Withholding Information From Twitchers), and we’re going to kick these twitching bastard’s arses… I mean asses.”

“My mummy told me that there are no such things as monsters,” Newt mournfully told us, “but there are, aren’t there?”

“Yes there are, Newt. And they usually carry binoculars and pagers,” I explained, “but you’re safe now.”

“Okay,” she smiled - there was a pretty young girl under all of that dirt, “but we have to go now, because the twitchers mostly come out at night. Mostly.”

When will twitchers learn? When will they realise that this destruction and chaos just can’t go on? Children are becoming orphans, beautiful villages reduced to smouldering lawless ganglands. And what for? Another tick? Another greenhouse gas-emitting journey for a bird that is dogshit common elsewhere in Europe? Shame on you all. Shame on every single one of you, you fucking savage bastards.

tyoo, said the Owl. Right, that’ll do, and it was off to The Boat inn. I asked the landlord if many birdspotters had been in to buy a drink: what a surprise to discover that hardly any had been in, the tight-fisted bastards! Go on, you miserable twitchering fuckers, if the poor old residents of Thrupp have to put up with all of us wankers every night - wandering around saying words like cracking, stonking and beauty to describe a bird of which 99% of them had only seen its arse, and then boring everyone for the eight millionth time about their last trip to Lesbos when they had fifteen Scops Owls pissing in their apartment toilet and sharing a glass of wine with them on their balcony - then the least you can do is go and buy a drink and a bag of nuts, you tight bastards. It’s a brilliant pub as well, with glazed-eyed locals sat at the bar, staring at the weird outsiders that had travelled by means of transport neither pulled by horse nor mule.

Tonight’s views were even worse than Wednesday’s, with only a number of tail feathers (not even a full tail!) sticking out from behind the trunk of a tree, bobbing each time it tyoo-ed. Oh yeah, something I have to get off my chest: the bird is singing a clear musical E-natural note, other than when it is about to fly when it sharpens to an F or F-sharp (don’t argue - me and The Cole have like proper musical ears, so fuck off), so if you do have to annoy everyone by trying to whistle at it, you should at least try and whistle at the correct pitch!

It’s times like this that you realise twitchering often has absolutely nothing to do with birds. If you want to watch birds then twitchering isn’t really the way to do it, is it? For me twitchering is about standing under a tree with a couple of good pals, drinking a coffee in a paper cup (of which the cost goes to a cystic fibrosis charity), watching more than seventy-five grown men (for it nearly is always men) gaze up into a tree, listening for over four hours to something going tyoo every three seconds and hoping to get a brief glimpse of something small and grey-brown at midnight on a hot summer’s night. Highly enjoyable, highly amusing and involving enough characters to keep a psychiatrist in business for decades.

Go forth and rock!

14^th June - Thrupp, Oxfordshire

Tuesday night: “You going for it?” was Dan’s abrupt opening to our conversation conducted upon mobile phones. I’d left my pager at home, so I had no idea that there was a small but very rare Owl in Oxfordshire, which the rarity birdspotting information services had mega’d. It was called a Scops Owl, it had come all the way from Algeria and apparently it would be very good for my British birdspotting list. Minor problem: I was watching Brazil against Croatia and drinking bottles of Brazilian Brahma lager - see, we were really entering into the spirit of things. We couldn’t find any Croatian lager in Morrison’s, so both the football and the drinking were rather biased, but because of drinking Brahma it meant that driving to Oxfordshire at this late hour was neither feasible nor legal. I did think about booking a taxi there and back, but Raz at Olympic said he couldn’t do it for less than £8,500 each way.

Instead I went to bed, tossing and turning all night with desperation and panic - how the hell was I going to get to see this bird? My fanatical twitcherisms took over and I began to experience spasms and convulsions as I thought of all those twitcherers gripping me off. Of course in reality I just went to bed and slept. Soundly. I didn’t give a shit about an Owl calling in a tree in Oxfordshire, but you kind of have to pretend that twitching is more than just a hobby, like it’s more of a medical condition. “Oh yeah, I’m the maddest twitching bastard in the World. Whenever I hear the mega-alert I just go fucking mental. I just can’t cope and I don’t care who or what gets in my way - I will get the bird, even at the cost of my own life and the lives of others.” You know, all the usual shit you hear, when the real truth is that they put on their nicest smile and bring in a cup of tea to their oft-maligned partners, before begging them to be allowed out for the night with their weirdo birdspotting mates.

Wednesday dawned, as did Tuesday and Monday, and I quickly managed to arrange a car-load for the journey down to Thrupp that night: the Comberbach Casuals Paul and Phil, and Uttoxeter’s Teeny-Ticking Dwayne. Twitch on! The good old Fiesta growled to a halt outside the lovely village of Thrupp just before nine, and within minutes we were being driven insane by the melodically inventive and enthralling song of the Scops Owl, foolishly lost in Oxfordshire, which should have been in the Mediterranean either being shot at, stuck to branches by lime, or caged and sold at a Gringo tourist market.

Apparently this bird has been around for seven months, but the locals only first noticed its presence during their traditional Moseley’s Day celebrations - the age old, but still widely practiced Pagan festival throughout the Cotswolds - where men dress as women and women dress as oxen in a celebration of rural life. To celebrate Moseley’s Day they round up the local immigrants and gypsies for a game of tramp skittles, before finally taking them to the nearby immigrant detention centre where they can be held indefinitely until the Cotswold locals decide whether to either drown them or burn them. A part of these traditional celebrations is the so-called Crystal Nacht herding of the immigrants, during which the Owl was flushed from its favoured roost site as the Cotswoldians marched through the woodland singing “As I was going to Banbury.”

After managing to avoid the mead drinking, pitch fork-wielding locals, and navigating the assault course of man traps and burning crosses, we arrived at the field to find well in excess of 4,000 twitchers; and let me just say that the word “carnage” has never been more aptly applied than when describing the disgraceful scenes we encountered. The pager services had given strict instructions on how to behave:

Quite shockingly, all of the above behavioural guidelines were not just being discreetly disobeyed but were being outrageously flaunted in the most spectacular fashion - it was just like a scene from one of those sci-fi films, starring Rutger Hauer as an Android, about a post-nuclear holocaust twitch in which everyone was sniffing glue and throwing bricks at birds.

All the big-hitting twitching lister names were out tonight: T-Jay, Alphonse, Curly, Brick, Vaseline, Pothead Jake, MC Fishslice, Rohypnol Pete, Mungo, Lockstock, Barry, Q-Tip, Runcorn Dave, Inzamam Ul’Haq, Ejaz Ahmed, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Badgerman. It was a veritable Who’s Who of the great names in the pantheon of twitching history.

Unfortunately Owls are not known for giving up tremendously good views unless they are either stuffed or in a zoo, preferably both, so all of the 5,000 drug-crazed twitchers were going to have a tough time getting a view of this bird tonight, and - not surprisingly - tension was building to exploding point. I watched someone come through the kissing gate and quietly tell his mate that he’d found it just around the corner. They both moved off toward the kissing gate as I screamed at the rest of the crowd:

“Run! Run! Run for no reason whatsoever in the direction of those two blokes. Run! Run like you’ve never run before in your entire lives!”

8,000 solvent-fuelled twitchers thundered savagely towards the kissing gate. Some tried to hurdle the fence but fell and later had to be humanely destroyed, while others ripped out the fence posts and either stabbed their fellow birdspotters through the heart with them or threw them through the residents’ windows. I just barely managed to escape the scrum and soon found myself peering into a dark bush where someone had glimpsed the rare Owl, who’s name I had by now forgotten. “Let there be light,” said one birdspotter, and sure enough BANG, the whole of Oxfordshire was suddenly illuminated by someone who had decided to steal a floodlight from the roof of Barcelona’s New Camp stadium. The beam singed the leaves and caused the trees to wither and die in front of us, as our corneas burnt out and our retinas imploded. After all the trees in the area were burnt bare we were all able to ascertain that the Owl had moved elsewhere. Hearing the Owl tyoo-ing in the distance, the 10,000-strong hooligan crowd ran off in its direction, but Phil and I were somewhat more cool-headed about the situation and decided to go back to the field to wait for its return. We could see the masses stood under a tree in the village and began to panic that they were enjoying crippling views, but then a huge “ooohhhh” roared out of the crowd as I watched the little fella fly over their heads and land in the big tree right next to Phil and me. Bingo!

Even though there were only a few birders left in the field, thankfully one of them was bearing the floodlight, and again BANG, but this time with success. A few of us were able to get under the tree and look directly up to see a Scops Owl looking down at us. Depending on your angle you could either see a tail, an ear or an eye which would move when it sang - okay, these were hardly nut bag-exploding views, but they were views nonetheless. At one point I was able to see both an ear and a tail at the same time, and able to decipher that it was indeed a bird. Now came the dilemma: 15,000 twitchers were heading our way but there was only room for about twenty to see the bird. No worries though - pile on! Everyone eventually got a view of a different square centimetre of the Scops Owl, and a compound description unequivocally identified this bird as a bird, probably an Owl. The evening ended with me frantically trying to find my car keys which I accidentally dropped into a bag in the boot - what a hoot! (boot / hoot - it both rhymes and is relevant to the evening.)

You may have guessed that not all of the above is entirely true. Indeed exaggeration and hyperbole may have inadvertently entered my account. It was a brilliant night, with top company and a top bird (well, top square centimetre of a bird).

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