For those of us who were accustomed to turn first to the Twitcher column in British Wildlife the loss of it was a heartfelt blow. Here then is a lightly edited compilation of the later columns from 2004-2023 to add to the earlier collection of 1990-2003 writings.
Humour is a personal matter, and acerbic humour all the more so, but whether you laugh out loud, smile or frown at the barbs contained in these commentaries they do hit their marks. Time and again Twitcher spotted loose thinking, loose language and often a loose grasp of how conservation needs to be done and made fun of those failings. The column stood up for clear English and clear thinking and derided groupthink, cliché and management gobbledygook. Twitcher was not quite wildlife conservation’s conscience (though sometimes he was) nor its court jester (though sometimes he seemed so) but his commentary contained so much good sense that he could accurately have been said to be providing a service to us all alongside the entertainment.
When Twitcher left British Wildlife I published a guest blog on this site – click here – where he set out some background to his departure. I was pleased to publish it but some in British Wildlife were not pleased to read it and so I offered to follow Twitcher out of the pages of British Wildlife but that offer was refused. I fear that means that I am regarded a bit like Earth in Hitchhiker’s – ‘Harmless’ – or at best, ‘Mostly harmless’. How shaming!
When I open the Guardian app on my phone I read a headline or two and then John Crace’s piece taking the micky, amusingly, out of politicians. When the Spectator and New Statesman both arrived in the post I would first turn to the Spectator (despite its politics being far from my own) and first, absolutely without fail, in its pages to Rod Liddle’s column which would annoy, amuse but sometimes convince me that the author had a well-made point.
The wildlife world is pretty bland these days, bland within its own bubble and bland to the outside world of government failure and indolence. It needs, we need, our bubble to be burst and our consciences to be pricked now and again. Twitcher’s barbs only spurred us on, never held us back, and a re-reading of these pieces simply reminded me of how perceptive they often were and how valuable as a whole. Life, and British Wildlife, is worse albeit more comfortable without a Twitcher emerging from the Swamp now and then.
The cover? Quite nice. I’d give it 8/10.
More Twitching through the Swamp by Peter Marren is published by YouCaxton.
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