Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, a Race Against Time—A True Story about Birdwatching
Dooley makes his living in Australia writing television comedy scripts, but his real passion is bird-watching—in fact, he'll frequently "twitch," dropping whatever he's doing to travel hundreds of miles for a brief glimpse of a recently sighted rare species. In 2002, he set out to break the record for the most birds spotted throughout the Australian territories in a single year. The effort to track down more than 700 species takes him from a sooty owl sitting on a tree branch in the early hours of New Year's Day to a blue-faced parrot finch climbing a blade of grass on Christmas Eve. Stories about frustrated efforts to spot various birds show a winning humor, but without any pictures of birds or their habitats, all the locations start to blur together. The amiable, conversational tone keeps the story from getting dull, and the Aussie cultural references are easily deciphered, but Dooley's accomplishment in the end feels anticlimactic.(Aug. )Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.