I had to have a giggle at part of this message:
"The purpose of the exercise was to see representatives of all the worlds
202 bird families in one year."
I wonder how many "worlds" this person was talking about. I thought birds
are only known from one world and it is the birds of this world that are
involved. Surely they mean "all the world's 202 bird families", instead.
(i.e. with the apostrophe for possessive.)
Anyway, what a self indulgent exercise. Do things like this contribute
anything useful to ornithology? Especially, as family divisions are largely
arbitrary anyway.
-----Original Message-----
From: <>
To: <>
Date: Wednesday, 12 May 1999 22:41
Subject: birding-aus Serious World Twitch
>John Boyce asked for more info re this topic.
> According to the Times newspaper (28/4) this 'twitchathon' was undertaken
by
>Harry Howard a 59-year-old hatters merchant from Lancashire who had not
done
>any serious birding/twitching or for that matter overseas travelling
>previously. He was accompanied by a professional ornithologist Derek Scott
>who had first given him the idea some years earlier. The purpose of the
>exercise was to see representatives of all the worlds 202 bird families in
>one year (something not previously achieved and probably not even
attempted),
>rather than maximise number of species seen. This required 2 round the
world
>trips one of 8 and one of 9 weeks duration plus a number of seperate trips
to
>specific countries, visiting 28 countries in total, including Australia and
>New Zealand of course. There was no mention of the overall cost of the
trips
>in the article but it does say that they took 80 scheduled flights on 31
>different airlines, stayed in 83 different hotels plus 11 nights camping
and
>covered over 12,00 miles in hire cars. One sad footnote, his wife was taken
>ill while he was in Brazil and died before he could get back home during
his
>second world trip. However, he decided to resume his trip after the funeral
>as it was his wife who encouraged him to try for the record in the first
>place.
> The total number of species seen (2726) was incidental to the exercise and
>if this had been the goal they would no doubt have adopted a different
>strategy and a different itinerary. I doubt if New Caledonia for instance,
>which they visited to see Kagu, would have been included. I don't know of
any
>claim regarding total number of species seen in a year but I suspect given
>the time, money, careful planning and lots of energy it might be possible
to
>exceed 5000. Any takers?
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