I get knocked down, but I get up again - you're never going to keep me down!

                                                 

Is Garry's delicate study the only image of the white-throated needletail that thrilled birder on Harris ten yeas ago? And does anyone knows what happened to its corpse after its fatal collision with a wind turbine?

WORDS from the pop song, Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba could almost provide the backdrop for the life and times of  one of the UK's highest-profile  twitchers.

In his highly readable first book, Twitching by Numbers, Garry Bagnell  reveals that, in a dash to see rare birds, he has twice badly bloodied his face by stumbling and hitting his head on his 'scope tripod. 

One of these incidents came in 2011 when he was sprinting to see an Isabelline wheatear that had been spotted on Crowlink Down in Sussex, not far from his home.

"I tripped on a rabbit hole and fell flat on my face," he recalls. "My tripod landed on my face which was covered in blood.

"My front teeth cut through my lips and the bleeding covered my face and T-shirt - I apologise for looking so scary!" 

                                           

Garry's first book - lively and comprehensive insight into the world of twitching

In fact, the author has has got into no end of scrapes, some amusing, some less, so during his 25 years travelling by road, sea and air to see rare vagrants all over the UK.

In one 12-year period, he wrote off no fewer than five cars. On another occasion, in 2017, he was so preoccupied with photographing a red-winged blackbird that he did not realise he had mislaid his car keys on North Ronaldsay in The Orkneys.

In 2003, relatively early in his twitching career, he decided to take a day off from work, sick, in order to catch up with an American robin in Cornwall - only to be dobbed in to his employer by someone, possibly another twitcher, who saw him.

Returning to work, he was summoned to the office of his line manager who told him: "I've discussed the matter with Human Resources, and, on this occasion, I will be issuing you with a verbal warning.

"Next time it will be a written warning."

The author - highly entertaining as well as authoritative

Garry was understandably not best pleased by the snitch. "What do birders get out of grassing other birders up?"he demands.

"Twitching is best performed as a group activity - you should be able to trust your friends.

"All it takes is for one mischievous individual to hear gossip on the grapevine and you could end up jobless." 

When a BBC documentary was made about him and other twitchers, he was embarrassed to find that he had been filmed committing a double motoring breach - not wearing a seatbelt and using his phone at the wheel.

Garry's  book is a  fast-paced  and  amusing romp through the past quarter century of his life - the journeys he has taken, the places where has stayed, the rare birds he has seen (and those he has missed) and the pals he has made along the way.

The megas - some of them  exquisitely illustrated by his own hand - include White's thrush, slender-billed gull, snowy egret, lesser sand plover, savannah sparrow, lesser-crested tern, Canada warbler, Asian brown flycatcher, little blue heron, varied thrush and blue-cheeked bee-eater.

Interspersed in all this action are excerpts from his working career as a company accountant/ finance analyst, his support for Arsenal FC, his experiences with sometimes dodgy secondhand cars his brushes with ill-health (including cancer) and his many early-life romantic flings.

But he is clearly dedicated, above all, to his supremely understanding and patient wife, Kim, and to his family and friends. 

The book is incredibly detailed, particularly about the  frequently complicated logistics involved in travelling to twitch rare birds, but also about the minutiae of daily life, even down to the size of Kim's shoes (she takes a five!)

As such, it is a testament to the extraordinary thoroughness of his note-taking with hints of a personality that sometimes borders on the obsessive.

Remarkable, even before he became a dedicated twitcher, Sussex-based Garry (55) already had plenty of other interests to occupy his hours of leisure - DJ-ing, spotting rare jet aircraft and playing both darts and chess, the latter to county standard.

Among the most recent setbacks was one entirely that was entirely unexpected.

Having spent hours completing the manuscript, illustrating it, then self-publishing it via Amazon, he sent a review copy to a foremost UK birding magazine.

Understandably, he expected a fair and preferably favourable review - but, as it turned out, his confidence was entirely misplaced.

Not only did the reviewer - a fellow-twitcher - deliberately withhold the name of the title, but she condemned the book.

Seizing on just a couple of paragraphs, she sought to shame the author as mysogynistic and homophobic.

What she had perhaps failed to appreciate was that Garry grew up during the bawdy era of Page 3 Girls in The Sun newspaper, lads' magazines such as Loaded, Club 18-30 holidays and Benny Hill comedy on TV. 

It is true that one or two sections in the book reflect the happy-go-lucky frivolity  of that time, but hardly sufficient for the book to be condemned in its entirety.

There was worse to follow. The reviewer, who has grown up in a different cultural climate, then took to Twitter to reiterate her comments - sparking a barrage of abuse towards Garry (he was even accused of being "predatory") from many who had not even read the book, let alone met him.

The author got knocked down - but he  got up again.

He deleted the passages that had caused offence and re-launched his book which, in the wake of more favourable reviews, has, deservedly, been a brisk seller ever since.

But back to the birds. One of the biggest dilemmas faced by a twitcher comes when two mega-rare birds turn up simultaneously at locations hundreds of miles apart.

In such cases, Garry's gambit is to research historical records to see how long each species tend to tarry before moving on - the shorter stayer, naturally, is the one he generally chooses to twitch first.

His experience has also taught him that an American vagrant will generally stay around while building up its fat reserves after having flown across the Atlantic.

By contrast, an Asian rarity which has most likely built up its reserves through numerous stops en route to Britain may be gone the next day.

Garry has taken photographs of some of the birds he has seen, but he does not say much about this side of the hobby except to offer a word of caution.

In 1999, while on a twitch to his first Baillon's crake at Grove Ferry, near Canterbury in Kent, he made it his priority to take  moving pictures of the bird on his camcorder.

But, back home, zooming in on the playback reduced the quality of the images which became increasingly pixellated.

He writes "I felt a bit cheated as I should have studied it through my bins."

Twitchers are sometimes accused of being more interested in securing the tick than in observing the bird.

This is certainly not the case with Garry.

Of his ovenbird, seen in Scilly in 2012, he writes: "It was walking over birders' feet to feed, but the wind was strong and it got blown over a few times."

Because it was clearly in poor condition, the bird was, the next day, taken into care but it died.

It is this particular bird whose illustration graces  the cover of Twitching by Numbers.

"Watching it for six hours pecking at people's feet was so special," writes the author. "I couldn't stop the tears when the news of its death came through."

The author was equally enchanted by the white-throated needletail that was detected in the sky above the island of  Harris in the Outer Hebrides in June 2013.

Of this bird (discovered, incidentally by Adam Gretton and Mark Cocker who has written many books, including one about twitchers), he enthuses: "Watching the fastest bird in the world whooshing inches over my head felt like the defining moment of my twitching career.

"If Britain ever gets another twitchable one, make sure you see it as it really is the ultimate twitch."

Sad to relate, the fate of the needletail was no happier than that of the ovenbird. It was killed after colliding at speed with the tower of a wind turbine.

Inevitably, there are sometimes tensions between twitchers, particularly for instance if there is a scramble for seats on a small chartered aircraft.

On rare occasions, fights have even broke out

Writes Garry: "Sometimes the competition to see a bird is more import than friendships.

"Some say birders will only stop at murder to see a rare bird."

Mostly, Garry has greatly enjoyed his encounters with fellow-twitchers - including Lee Evans, the self-styled chief of the tribe, who receives several namechecks in the book.

Where he knows their identities, the author makes a point of giving credit to  the individuals who have found the rarities. Indeed, the last sentence of his book reads: "Don't forget to thank the real stars of the hobby, the finders."

Back in 1999 in Scilly, there was, however, one incident which disappointed him - a fellow-birder who refused to share his scope with others who had been unable to get twitchable views of a skulking White's thrush.

"I had never really encountered this selfish behaviour before," writes Garry.

There are reckoned to be some 33,000 serious twitchers in Britain, but not many can match the author's list of British sightings which, by the end of the book, has extended to no fewer than 553 species - many of seen through a secondhand pair of Leica 10x42 binoculars and a Kowa TSN823 'scope.

Inevitably, with so many species now, the intensity of Garry's twitching has reduced since his book was published. 

Indeed, there are signs, that his growing interest in butterflies may soon feature almost as high as his passion for birds.

However, he still very much in the game and is already gathering material for a follow-up book, though possibly not due to be published for another five years.

In the meantime, catch up with Twitching By Numbers which  is available in large format paperback, price £18.95, from  Amazon!

Such a large eye for such a small bird - the Asian brown flycatcher that arrived on the North Yorkshire Coast in October, 2007