This morning I saw three house sparrows sitting together on a bush opposite our house. Three-and-a-half points, I thought, totting up on my personal scale of relative bird values, where spadgers are worth a mere half-a-point each. My spirits sank, and I wondered where all the hoopoes had gone this weekend.
Then I remembered. Sparrows are now on the famous Red List of fast-disappearing specieses.
…house sparrows, once so common, have dropped in number by more than half in 25 years…
source: Guardian
Instantly, my spirits bobbed back up to the surface. That means I’m a twitcher, I figured, since, by definition, a twitcher is one who logs sightings of rare birds. Granted, most twitchers travel hundreds of miles to see birds, whereas I hadn’t even left the sofa, but I wasn’t going to let a little technicality like that disqualify me from the club.
In the interests of bird welfare, though (and because I’m loath to see our quiet little piece of the boondocks overrun with telephoto-toting ornithological nutcases) I’m afraid I’ll have to keep the location of those — or should that be ‘my’ ? — sparrows secret. Like a good scientist, however, I shall be entering all the relevant details in my I-Spy book of birds.
Oh, wait a minute, though. Is that a cat I can see sneaking up to that bush? It is. Oh heck, I can hardly bear to look…

