Guest blog – A Farewell by Twitcher in the Swamp

If you read British Wildlife, the subscription-only magazine that was launched back in 1989, and which has now reached its 35^th volume, you may know my column Twitcher in the Swamp. It began halfway through Volume 1, and finally ended at the end of Volume 34. I have grown old with Twitcher. A single page near the back, just before the reviews and reader’s letters, has been his roost for 33 years.

In the number containing my final contribution, the editor included a generous note of appreciation, both for my own efforts and those of Sue Everett, who compiled and wrote Conservation News for each issue, and who is also departing. It gave the impression, however, that my decision to stop writing Twitcher came out of the blue, perhaps because I’m getting on a bit, or perhaps because I had run out of inspiration.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that. I enjoyed writing Twitcher very much, and I hoped the column would go on and on until I dropped, or was sacked. If you don’t know it, I should explain that Twitcher is, or rather was, a satire on the ways of the conservation world, written purely as entertainment – but perhaps with the occasional flash of insight or sense of a shaft-hit-home. I claim to have invented the genre of nature-conservation satire, and I am not yet running out of intellectual fuel, in case anyone out there is looking for a world-weary but still fairly inventive hack.

What happened was this. Lately my column has suffered from a rash of red-pencilling, and certain topics were ruled out of order. For example, a reference to my favourite bête noir, the Woodland Trust, went under the editor’s scissors. When, rather desperately, I looked for support from the magazine’s owner, I was informed that Twitcher should try in future to avoid ‘cultural’ topics. That British Wildlife was a wildlife magazine and should concentrate on wildlife issues. Salmon-farming was mentioned. Also the badger cull. But it seemed to me that narrowing the focus of Twitcher like this would change the nature of the column, and that it would lose its sparkle, its sense of fun. That was why I decided to stop.

I bear no ill-will to the magazine, which I have supported since its inception, and, I hope, will continue to do so. These are dangerous times for satire. The green industry takes itself very seriously. It isn’t difficult for a would-be joke to turn into heresy (legal libel was never the issue). I probably don’t need to bang on about current limitations on free speech and how much the social media love putting offenders in the stocks. Proprietors of small magazines, with small profits and narrow margins, have to consider the risks. I accept that. I think Twitcher was starting to cause some discomfort in the editor’s office.

I hope you enjoyed the column. I even hope you will miss it. I certainly will. But I hope to pen a different kind of column for British Wildlife called Encounters. Watch this space.

Peter Marren aka the late Twitcher in the Swamp.

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