You’ve got to start back to blogging sometime, I guess. Here’s one for all you plugged-in readers who know what a twitcher is.***
Someone at eBird had the great idea to feed rare-bird sightings into a Google widget. Now you can get a fresh list, right down to the last harlequin duck and wandering tattler, every time you check your e-mail tally/Fox News headlines/stock prices. You even get a link to a Google map of the bird’s last known address.
Future versions of the widget might improve the text wrapping or make the regional selections more versatile, but this is a nice piece of software that ought to be lapped up by hordes of avid listers. Get it here.
***A twitcher is a kind of birdwatcher with an unwavering focus on rare birds. Your typical twitcher keeps a variety of lists, including all birds seen in a lifetime, in a year, on a continent, country, state, county, backyard, etc. In pursuit of the longest lists possible, twitchers are willing to travel great distances when birds show up in unexpected places.
As with most addictions, it’s not easy to tell when you have a problem, but one rule of thumb is that if you are willing to burn more than one tank of gas specifically to pick up a rarity, you might be a twitcher.
“Twitch” also works as a verb, as: “Last winter he spent MLK weekend twitching hawk owls. Drove nonstop from Cincinnati to Minnesota through the night. Lived off diet Cherry Coke and Pecan Sandies the whole time.”
surf.bird.scribble. 
Your readers, who may not have the benefit of a transatlantic upbringing as you do, may be interested to know that the term “twitcher” is of British origin. The Brits do not check things off on a list; they tick them instead. The lists that they tick off things with is called a tick-llist, not a checklist. There is a noun form as well, as in “Laughing Gull is a jolly good tick, even in the Scillies.” From there it was but a short step to “twitch,” a derogatory reference to the nervous anticipation that accompanied a quest for a jolly good tick.
And I am sure I don’t know who you could possibly be talking about with reference to the hawk-owl. I will admit to driving from southern Ohio to Minnesota three years ago to observe the greatest incursion of northern owls on record, but that was for purely scientific reasons.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
VetNat
Welcome back to the States, Scribbler! Outstanding job on the Polar Discovery dispatches. We loved reading them. (It’s 1 degree here in Bend this morning so we’re getting a little taste of the polar life ourselves…come ski when you get the chance). I’ve been accused of being a rare bird chaser, someone who tends to identify super rare species, perhaps ones that don’t even exist…. Perhaps. Do I qualify as a twitcher? I’m definitely sticking to my story (stories).
VetNat – thanks for fleshing out the vocabulary here – and I should clarify that not everyone who keeps a list is necessarily a twitcher. But it’s a step in the right direction.
MRJ – you’re not a twitcher if you are the discoverer of the rarities. You could be that most valuable kind of birder, the one who gives twitchers a place and a sighting to build their travel itineraries around. The only problem for you is your tendency to find undiscovered species, making it difficult to check them off in the eBird software.