The poet Simon Armitage in the Bird Room at the Tolson Museum, Huddersfield. Photograph: Gary Calton
Birdwatching ? when it is non-birdwatchers you are talking to ? produces an almost uniform reaction: amused condescension, as if the sheer harmlessness of the activity were dangerous or put it beyond the pale as a subject. It's the received idea of the "twitcher", the bird boffin (not, as the birding fraternity point out, to be confused with the less obsessive "birder"), that is the turn-off. And the gentle image of a leisurely older population in green anoraks does little to help, suggesting birdwatching as shorthand for retirement, evoking a life in which birds have flown as a substitute for more urgent human dramas.
But these prejudices are due an overhaul. For the news is that on the quiet there has been a birdwatching revolution. A recent survey by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) spells it out: six million Britons now enjoy birdwatching every couple of weeks. And membership of the RSPB now exceeds one million (a figure that has doubled within a decade).
Graham Madge, of the RSPB, reports that this spring, there was a 20% increase of visitors to the UK's reserves compared with last year. It appears that more women are birdwatching and that dowdy is no longer the name of the game. Unlikely fans abound: Mick Jagger, Van Morrison, Joanna Lumley, Daryl Hannah and Cameron Diaz ? the list is long.
At the same time ? and it can be no accident ? a flock of exceptional bird books is being published this autumn, each so remarkable that it's likely to have a whole new audience reaching for the binoculars. Tim Dee's memoir, The Running Sky, is a little masterpiece, like an intricate skein of all the avian life he has seen, a gorgeously overpopulated love letter to birds. The anthology The Poetry of Birds, which Dee edits with Simon Armitage, also had me entranced. And it comes ? a sensible yet radical idea this ? with ornithological notes attached. Jeremy Mynott's Birdscapes is another find, a meticulous and erudite book about birds and what they mean to us.
Graham Madge points out that television must take much of the credit for the upsurge in birdwatching: the BBC's Springwatch and Autumnwatch always encourage new audiences, he says. And they are shortly to have competition from comedian Bill Bailey whose series, Bill Bailey's Big Bird Watch, starts on Sky 1 in January. Nor does it stop there. A brilliant new film, Pelican Blood, out next month, based on the cult novel by Cris Freddi, has a birdwatcher as its hero. (But perhaps I shouldn't get too carried away ? this story may deter potential birdwatchers since Nikko, played by Harry Treadaway, is a suicidal twitcher whose hobby nearly finishes him off.)
Sheena Harvey, editor of Birdwatching magazine, spells out another reason for the hobby's growing popularity: "We are becoming much busier as a society and people are looking for peace and quiet. Birdwatching is a very good de-stressing activity. You have to be patient, quiet, in the outdoors, using all your senses."
Tim Dee suggests that the pleasure of birdwatching stems partly from our sense of "alienation and severance from the wild" and the corresponding joy and relief of finding birds are "still around and can be seen". David Lindo, alias the Urban Birder, adds: "It is global warming that has galvanised people ? even if only subconsciously."
Simon Armitage argues that recession must have played a part. "When there are fewer shiny objects on offer, we turn to things with more integrity."
I was ripe for conversion, delighted to have an excuse to birdwatch for the first time, and had gleaned advice from everyone I had spoken to ? dominated by one simple idea: don't worry. I had been intimidated by the sense of the impossible body of knowledge I would need to master. I was at the pidgin ? or pigeon? ? stage of ornithological language. I was also binocular-averse. I feared they would somehow get between me and the birds.
But at Minsmere, the reserve on the Suffolk coast, all worries evaporated. I was taken under the wing (how full the language suddenly is of birds) of Ian Barthorpe, a patient tutor who admits that on his recent honeymoon to India he missed the Taj Mahal because he was too busy looking at birds.
For me, the most extraordinary moment, in which I suddenly understood how I could become hooked, was in the third hide (the shed from which you look at birds; watchers sit on long benches, like worshippers on pews). I was looking out on to the tranquil landscape of reeds and small islands with Sizewell power station in the distance like a great white mosque. I had sat down next to a pleasant-looking man who introduced himself with the question: "See the bittern?" to which the answer was no. A short, forlorn discussion followed, about the bittern that might have been, how there are only about 80 males nationally and how you need to be quick to spot them.
Nothing much was happening above the reedbeds. And then, suddenly, there it was ? a bittern, flying clear and close, as if conjured out of the reeds for my benefit, humouring a beginner. And oh, the feeling of personal achievement. I felt calm yet elated. I could see how that bird, the bittern, had enabled me not only to live in the moment but to understand how, for a birdwatcher, a single moment is happiness enough.
The enthusiasts
SIMON ARMITAGE
The poet Simon Armitage, 46, lives in Huddersfield. He has just edited The Poetry of Birds, an anthology of poems about birds, for Viking.
"It is hard to find a poet who hasn't written a bird poem," says Simon Armitage, who has managed to resist dropping any of his own into his wonderful anthology. "I strayed into birdwatching four or five years ago ? I have all the paraphernalia." During the World Cup, he went on a "bird race" with some friends in which "you set off in summer, in extended daylight, and try and see as many species as possible. We started 10 miles south-east of Norwich and saw 120 species in 18 hours." Since then, he has held back: "I thought it might develop into a mania and I've only room for one ? poetry."
When he first started birdwatching, he found the binoculars cumbersome: "I noticed I'd lift them to my eyes, but couldn't find the bird because they have a narrow field of vision." He broods on the power of binoculars to allow you to see a bird in a "way that you were never meant you to see it". They cancel out the bird's chosen distance and "take you to a place where in the natural world you would not be allowed to be. It can be quite startling to see the moustache on a jay or the blue feather on its side. You feel not exactly that you are intruding but that you are standing somewhere God ? or whoever ? didn't mean you to go. There is a slight voyeurism in it". Birds' ability to fly makes them "simultaneously of this world and otherworldly. And that," he adds, "is what poems are as well."
DAVID LINDO
David Lindo runs a popular birdwatching website called the Urban Birder. Aged 40, he is also a writer and broadcaster and lives in Wormwood Scrubs, London.
David Lindo describes himself as a one-off. Black people are not birdwatchers, he says. But he would change that if he could. His website aims to persuade people that cities are as viable for birdwatching as the country. "I must have been a birder in a previous life," he laughs. "My parents were Jamaican immigrants. Dad was a welder, Mum a factory worker. I had no mentor. I was six when my sister was born ? I remember waiting outside Central Middlesex hospital counting sparrows." At primary school, he was nicknamed "Birdbrain". He stared out of windows and remembers thinking birds were "connected to God. I thought God was a puppeteer and that sparrows and starlings had strings attached". Eventually, his parents recognised that the bird fixation was incurable and bought him his first pair of binoculars from Dixons ? "£14 on hire purchase". He borrowed a Field Guide to Birds of Britain, Europe and Northern Africa from the library and learnt it off by heart.
Wormwood Scrubs is his patch nowadays ? but it is not the jailbirds he watches. It is an "ordinary park" and he goes there every day ? in the summer at daybreak ? "regardless of whatever time I went to bed the night before". It is very "grounding" he says. And you can hear the territorial satisfaction as he boasts that the Scrubs are home to "a very important breeding colony of meadow pipits". He'd like everyone to look up and join in: "I am interested in getting people to see the wildlife that is right by their heads. Look up above Oxford Street and you may see a gull. Just think: that gull was born in the Baltic and is spending its winter over here."
ANNA FORD
Anna Ford, 66, stepped down from her role as a BBC newsreader in 2006. She is now on the board of Sainsbury's and the Amazing Group, an educational software company.
"I am not a twitcher," says Anna Ford firmly. "But I am a birdwatcher in the sense that I am very aware of birds and I get enormous pleasure from observing them." She believes people are being drawn to birdwatching because they are "tired of consumerism ? I think they are realising that the sort of lifestyle that was foisted on them in the 70s and 80s does not suit them. They are finding that being close to nature is much more pleasurable than going shopping."
There is another reason, too: the influence of Ford's "hero", David Attenborough. "The quality of his programmes, the attention to detail, have opened up the natural world to a whole new audience," she says.
Ford grew up the Lake District surrounded by interesting birds: "Hawks, buzzards, peregrines, woodpeckers, spotted woodpeckers, tree creepers, owls ? hundreds of different species. The morning chorus was wonderful. As a child, I used to wake up early especially to listen to it. So birds were absolutely threaded into my life."
She steers clear of bird reserves, preferring to watch birds while walking, especially by the English coast. "I was in Norfolk recently and saw curlews and lapwings by the sea. I've seen albatrosses in the Galapagos Islands and incredibly rare species in Bhutan."
But some of her happiest birdwatching experiences have been in her garden in west London. "I have a lot of garden birds and I feed them regularly," she says. "There is a pair of collared doves, who mate for life, wood pigeons, blackbirds, a couple of robins and several of the green parakeets that have colonised west London. The other day, a sparrowhawk flew in low over the fence and landed on a pigeon on the lawn. It spent an hour pulling off all the pigeon's feathers until it was raw, then 15 minutes eating the flesh. Fascinating."
ALEX HORNE
Alex Horne, 31, comedian and writer, lives in Chesham in the Chilterns. His book, Birdwatchingwatching, is out now.
Dragged around nature reserves as a child by his bird-obsessed father, Alex Horne was initially embarrassed of his dad's habit: "Grown men sneaking around after little birds ? it's like trainspotting. My dad even wore camouflage sometimes!"
But after a dramatic conversion, he's now a keen birder, proud of the kingfisher near his home (the sight of which makes his "heart flutter") and never far from a pair of binoculars. His rite of passage began in 2005, when, considering fatherhood and therefore keen to bond with his dad, he challenged him to a competition: who could spot the most species in a single year? "It struck me that birdwatching was the perfect hobby for someone who likes sport but is getting too old to play, likes the outdoors and is slightly anal."
He racked up 257 species. "The highlight was on Brighton beach in October with my dad watching a murmuration of starlings swirling about. Seeing that spectacular sight will change your opinion." He also loves the fact that "apparently British robins are the only robins that will sit on the spade of a gardener. It's because our gardeners would have fed and petted them in the past".
The highs and lows of Alex's conversion became a book, Birdwatchingwatching, and a stand-up show. "On tour, I was surprised at how normal the audiences were. For people my age, birdwatching has got geek chic."
Now the proud father of a baby boy, he's also found himself luring his son into birdwatching: "I've filled his room with 60 cuddly birds donated by the RSPB. They're great for early identification skills."
TIM DEE
Tim Dee, 48, is the author of The Running Sky, published by Jonathan Cape. A BBC producer, he lives in Bristol and the Cambridgeshire Fens.
"To be a birdwatcher, you need the power to be bewitched ? an openness to it." Tim Dee, a lifelong birder, thinks that men, in particular, are drawn to it as "a way of organising the world". In the 19th century, that might have meant egg collection. Nowadays, it's the "list". He remembers how, as a youngster, "bizarrely and wonderfully, birds would come to me". For a teenager, birdwatching is great because "your sexuality is all over the place and the naming of something wild and free and flying is liberating".
In The Running Sky, he celebrates the connection people have with birds ? and the absence of connection, the way birds lead separate but parallel lives. He is a literary recorder of birds, catching birds on paper yet admitting that they are "ungraspable".
In the acknowledgments, he apologises to his children, saying it is "dire" having a father as a birder. Is he serious? "It is a curse at some level. Once you fall in with birds, once you have made the connection, you cannot unlearn it. Birds stitch me into the world as much as human conversation does. "
He sees birdwatching as a "sentimental education that happens over and over again. I experience it in the body. Writing cannot not take possession of such things but it can attempt to record them".
ALISON STEADMAN
Alison Steadman, 68, is about to star in the third series of Gavin & Stacey on BBC 1. She lives in Highgate, north London.
"If you put out a shallow bowl ? you can get one for £2.95 ? and fill it with water, it can give you more pleasure than anything." Alison Steadman is talking about birdbaths. Her love of birds began when, aged 13, she was given a "little Grundig tape recorder" which she "balanced on a windowsill" to record birdsong in the garden of the house in suburban Liverpool where she grew up. Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" charmed her further: "I loved ? and still do ? the idea that you can be alone somewhere, hear birdsong and be transported."
Birdwatching is a relaxing antidote to her life as an actress. It is also an escape from noise and the horrors of the news. She loves the way birds "recycle, using dead grass and twigs for their nests. They live in an eco-world while we pile up the landfills. It is so refreshing". She likes to help them along: "I take all the hair out of my hairbrush and birds use it for their nests. That gives me such pleasure." She loves to go to bird reserves where "nature is happening whether you like it or not". And she loves London's Highgate Woods where, although she says she shouldn't really feed the birds, she carefully selects "wholemeal bread with seeds in it" for the rooks who are "such characters".
Does she find any birds theatrical? "Yes!" she says and urges me to watch an encounter with an Australian lyrebird on YouTube (with David Attenborough as compere). The lyrebird is a virtuoso mimic that successfully imitates "car alarms, chainsaws and camera shutters".
And if she were to come back to life as a bird? "I'd be a nuthatch ? oh my God ? they feed upside down! They are small and sleek with blue grey tops, amber breasts and the sweetest little faces, like furry dollies."