twitching

[steddy77]

what does the term twitching mean in the bird watching sense

[Cetti]

It's one of those words that is invariably used in the wrong context. If you say to someone you like birdwatcher they will generally assume you are a 'twitcher'. They couldn't be more wrong!

A 'twitcher' is any birder who will travel sometimes hundreds of miles to see a particular rarity - and to get a tick on their Life List. If a very rare species is ever shown in a newspaper you might also see a line of telescopes peering at the poor creature. This is the habitat of the twitcher!

The actual name meaning is hard to pin down, but the most likely explanation  refers to a birder in the 1960's who would literally twitch with excitement when he heard news of a rare bird.

[Cetti]

Sorry, should be  'like birdwatching'

[bedlam]

It started off as a derisive name used by "real" bird watchers to describe the people who only looked for birds to tick off their list, and werent interested in the bird's behaviour etc, but over time has stuck and become an auto-associative word, like Hoover is for vacuum cleaners.

It started off because of the way the twitchers were always on the look out and ready to whiz off after a bird, so were called "twitchers" cos they were all edgy and twitchy :�)

christ knows why I know this... haha