Earlier this month I declared on Twitter that I’d adopted the term ‘birdster’ to describe people who love birds but who aren’t obnoxious about it. It was a joke; little did I know that only a couple of weeks later people all over Australia would turn out to be birdsters.

The Guardian’s ‘Australian bird of the year 2017’ poll on Monday came out of nowhere, unanticipated and unexpected, like a vagrant bird that takes a turn down the wrong migration route. Such vagrants do occur, and if you’re a twitcher you’ll drop everything and rush to see one; but if you’re a birdster you might instead agonise over whether to vote for an kookaburra or a pardalote on the internet.