From the Newsletter [1]…
Addicted
My name is John Hague I'm 45 years old and I'm a twitcher. There, I've said it and one of the first things any addict has to face is their problem. How did I become a twitcher? Well like most addictions I just started out birdwatching at an early age, I started using
The Observer Book of Birds and later moved on to Bird Spotting.
These early books led to some wild hallucinations, Red-backed Shrikes breeding by the old brickworks in Upper Hoyland. My granddad always claimed they'd bred there. I then moved on to harder and harder stuff like a Peterson and then my Aunt and Uncle got me hooked on Lars Jonsson in the 1980s.
Well one thing led to another and I was dabbling in Bird Watching Magazine by 1992 and watching gull roosts soon after.
A number of famous birders at Broomhill Flash started filling my head with daft ideas and I was then going further and further afield in search of scarcer birds. I was often to be found heading off on trains in looking for bigger and bigger kicks. After a male Golden Oriole in the Brecks I was in need of more and more and before I knew I was putting a note in the LROS (Leicestershire & Rutland Ornithological Society) newsletter looking for other birders who had access to rarer and rarer birds.
My descent into twitching hell and a full scale addiction came in January 1996 when a Black-throated Thrush turned up in Webheath. I was hooked, I was now sneaking off, and spending hours in cars and generally getting less and less sleep to feed my habit. Soon Eastern vagrants weren't enough and I was chasing Yanks.
Does any of this sound familiar and if so where does it leave us? Why can't I seem to stop twitching, even though, in the past I once cancelled my pager subscription? I've also lost count of the number of times I've said I was stopping twitching. Currently I've fallen off the wagon, again. I dipped the Eastern Crowned Warbler because I'm more focused now on that ultimate rush – finding my own ‘rares.' Is it a weakness? Why do we become so obsessed with birds and birding? Is it that birding gives us a common bond and that sense of belonging to a community? Could the answer be medical? Recent studies by the great-granddaughter of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, Nora Volkow, might just have provided an excuse for my behaviour.
Volkow has been studying the effects of the neurochemical dopamine in addiction. She believes drugs and other addictive habits tap into our lust for newness, that thrill of being alive. In essence, that thrill of getting onto that skulking mega or nailing that crucial id feature; just ask Dougie Holden finder of the Eastern Crowned Warbler or Bird Watching's own Mike Weedon, who spent hours trying to clinch the id on a Taiga Flycatcher on Shetland, about that.
Researchers for years thought that addictive substances or behaviours caused dopamine to flood the brain but then they wondered why we weren't then in a constant state of bliss. What was discovered was that most addicts got little pleasure from their ‘drug' and that most addicts didn't ever want to be addicted. I'm not sure I fit that description, I'm happy with my birding but I would like to be able to manage my addiction.
Volkow and her team found that rather than dopamine just telling us to feel good it also tells us what is salient – those unexpected nuggets or new information we need to survive or to learn and become better birders. So, does dopamine help us to learn that crucial difference in primary formula? I don't really know.
In Volkow's theory then, the salience theory of dopamine, means that the neurochemical is released when something surprisingly important happens; be it unexpected reward, finding that Sibe' Rubythroat or dipping the Pacific Swift that's been lingering all morning at Cley. Dopamine helps us to pay attention to that we need to survive, to act on it and to remember it for the future. I bet most birders don't remember every Richard's Pipit but I bet they remember that horrible feeling of having dipped.
Another aspect to the dopamine hypothesis examined by John Bunyard, an expert in neuroscience and mass behaviour, is that our birding minds are constantly and almost subconsciously predicting what will happen next (those rose bushes look good for a Pallas's Warbler or spying out any coastal stands of Sycamore) and being rewarded when our predictions come right or even over-rewarded if we find that Siberian Blue Robin. In Bunyard's theory our brains like it when our predictions are right but he also says that we readjust if the outcome isn't so good. Thus, the constant too much, just right, too little activity we go through hundreds of times at a twitch; that ‘there it is,' ‘no it's another Dunnock (why is it always a Dunnock)' is better and more rewarding for our brains than going shopping or mowing the lawn.
Before we leave the subject of dopamine there is another theory that links the production of excess dopamine with psychosis. Psychosis is a major mental illness characterised by visual and/or auditory hallucinations… but that is another story.
So next time you get into trouble for messing up the plans for a family lunch when the winds turn easterly or the mega-alert goes off, remember, it might all be neurochemistry and you may, just may have a medical problem. I can't promise this will stop you getting into trouble at home, work or wherever but it's got to be worth a try.
John Hague
John is a registered nurse (Mental Health) and works as a community psychiatric nurse. He edits the LROS Newsletter and blogs as the Drunk Birder: The Drunk Birder (not for those of a sensitive disposition)
Last updated: 10th November 2011
By becoming a member of Nottinghamshire Birdwatchers, you will have access to all of the content from our excellent newsletter as well as receiving the superb annual report.
You can opt to receive the monthly reports as either a paper copy, or, if you have e-mail, as an electronic version [Adobe PDF].
Our website will only be featuring a couple of articles from the newsletter - the rest of the newsletter is for members only, but joining Notts Birdwatchers is both inexpensive and easy.
Why not have a look at a free sample? We are publishing the entire PDF versions of January 2007 Newsletter [1.8mb], October 2007 Newsletter [1.9mb] & January 2008 Newsletter [4.3mb]. All are minus the Notts Birdline number - which is strictly for members only.
Some content in this page is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Licence. Official licence
The copyright of such material remains with the original authors.
