My first experience of deliberate birdwatching took place in Richmond Great Park. The time; 1966, the occasion; one of the first dates with my (now) husband. There I was, all dressed up and ready to knock him out with my drop dead gorgeousness (memory plays strange tricks as you get older!) and there he was, luring me into the undergrowth of the park, hissing to me to keep my head down. No, it wasn’t this bird’s feathers he was after observing, but a green woodpecker that he had spotted. It must have been love on my part because, although I don’t remember seeing the flash of emerald, I do remember getting my trendy high boots covered in mud.
And that was the first of many times that I have shared the joys of avian observation with my spouse. He had been a committed twitcher from an early age. As a boy, a family friend had dragged him along to many birdwatching expeditions, from sighting a large wader (a ruff) on a one time sewage farm, soon to become the fifth terminal at Heathrow, to happy weekends spent observing the many migrants arriving on the Norfolk coast from Europe.
Birdwatching is one nature pursuit that just about anybody can get...