Banjo Twitching In The Bushes

Banjo Duckponderer is probably Britain’s most famous birdwatcher, becoming one of the UK’s most unlikely celebrities through the surprise ratings success of his early evening TV nature programme – Banjo Twitching In The Bushes – where he lurks in bushes the length and breadth of the UK in the hoped of spotting some of Britain’s less small and brown birds.

The fact that Britain is home to many different types of birds has come as a great surprise to most inhabitants of this island who thought that the British Isles had only two species of birds: the small brown ones and pigeons.

In fact it was Duckponderer’s startling revelation that there are different sorts of the small brown birds, during the first series of Banjo Twitching In The Bushes, that made him into the star he is today, even though most people, and that includes most birdwatchers, cannot easily tell any of the small brown birds apart.

It has been long known, of course, that in the UK there is not a single surviving bird that looks anything like any of the illustrations in any book of domestic birds, which has led many people to believe that the different species that these books contained were just a way of padding out a book that - if it did contain descriptions of the actual birds of the UK - would be little more than a pamphlet.