birding humour

And now, the prologue...

I'd upped and left for the Far East by the time the first NOT BB appeared; heard of its success - read out at log time on Scilly, Prof Shamrock reading it till he cried with laughter. Some people even bought copies, with my share of the loot helping me pay off monies borrowed to chase around after Siberian migrants in the name of science.

Well, we thought, perhaps we should try a second NOT BB. I sent material, Simon n Dan dreamed up more daftness, and there were other contributors too - with a Bill Morton cartoon making an entrance, and an unhealthy obsession with Samantha Fox Sparrows (or was that all me). Vol II was even properly printed, and word-processed on something way better than the initial Amstrad (RIP). albeit without fancy stuff like Italics.

What a great pleasure this is, to invite myself to introduce the welcome rerun (Surely, totally unnecessary rehashing - ED) of Not BB, and to have this chance to reminisce about its rise and fall, which surely represented a golden era in British birding comedy. As my old friend Steve Hassles Holloway would say, "Halycon days."

While we planned our second trip to Beidaihe in China, Simon Stirrup, Dan Duff and I used to drive up to the Norfolk coast and chat about British Birds' penchant for letters about corpse-eating Turnstones, and articles like the renowned Toyland Story. What a lark it would be, we thought, to produce something wry, almost as wry as Private Eye was wry.

Of course, back in those days you could still get bread pudding at NancyBoy's, where you were often interrupted by the ringing of the nation's birdline. Those were indeed halycon times, when you took bird photos using proper cameras loaded with real, grainy film, A Man Called Roy was almost reinventing the grapevine, I had to wrestle with my scope just to open the thing. As I sat in my student house on warm evenings, typing Not BB on a friend's Amstrad, I (get on with it! - ED)
(Read on for Vol 1.)