Twitching

Within birdwatching, the specific pursuit of a previously located rare bird, called chasing in North America; the enthusiast who does it is a twitcher, a term reserved for someone willing to travel a long distance to see a rare bird and add it, or tick it, to a personal list. The term is said to have originated in the 1950s from the nervous behavior of the British birdwatcher Howard Medhurst. Twitching is particularly well developed in smaller European countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Finland and Sweden, where short distances make rapid travel to a rare sighting practical. This entity carries a shorter description than most of this wave's entries because its only source is a section within the broader Birdwatching article rather than a dedicated article of its own.