A Birder's Journey to the Big 300+

Hands up if your career is not your first passion? My escape this past 43 years has been ‘birding and twitching’ – the thrill of rare bird pursuit, in-field identification, visiting beautiful places, eventful journeys and meeting unique characters.

Locating and identifying a rare bird in the field is complex. What one observer can identify in a 5th of a second may simply appear as a blob to another. Are some of us re-invoking primeval instincts or simply re-educating our brain to see that which others cannot? For birders, the list of species identified is sacrosanct and trust paramount. We don’t collect, we just list, and it can get competitive.

Join me on a rollercoaster adventure that takes up the challenge of seeing more than half the wild bird species ever recorded in Britain, in just one year. It won’t be a smooth ride.

Dr Terry Wells is a life-long birder and former director in IT & Business Services, having gained a DIC and PhD in Biochemistry from Imperial College, and an MBA from the Open University. Terry lives in Wiltshire with his two sons Harry, Oliver, and partner Mary, but grew up in Tottenham, London in the 1960s. As a boy Terry was an amateur boxer and excelled at sports, but was most at home exploring the wildlife of Haringey Marshes and reservoirs.

Moving to Gloucester, aged 14, Terry met new characters that would ignite and shape his passion for birds – twitching them across the country, sharing cars, sleeping rough. A successful career and overseas appointments constrained this until in 2017, aged 57, frustrated by work-politics and ill health Terry quit his job to begin a new chapter. Having been inspired in the 1980s by books like Richard Millington’s A Twitcher’s Diary, and Bill Oddie and David Tomlinson’s The Big Bird Race, Terry was in no doubt that his first retirement challenge would be to see as many birds as possible in Britain in one year! 300 birds was the benchmark for Britain’s top birders and so the goal was set.