Back in February 2021, BBH creative director Stu Royall tweeted a picture of a bird – the Drab Seedeater – with the caption “my favourite species of birds are the ones named by people who clearly hate birds”.

The Drab Seedeater was soon joined by Rough Faced Shags, Monotonous Larks and Red-Rumped Bush Tyrants, and before long the whole thing went viral. One year and thousands of retweets later, the thread has been adapted into Tits, Boobies and Loons, an illustrated book from HarperCollins.

Here, Daniel Benneworth-Gray, a prolific Twitter user himself, talks to Royall about how he managed to turn a joke into a fully-fledged publication.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray: First of all, be honest, was this planned as a book all along?
Stu Royall: No! I wish I had that sort of influence! It was never the plan. I had a sneaking suspicion it might get a hundred likes or something, purely because everyone likes rude words.

DBG: And now it has over 75,000 – not to mention the thousands of likes and retweets spread across the rest of the thread. Did you notice any particular interactions of turning points that sent it all crazy-viral?
SR: Normally when a tweet does numbers, you can trace it back to one person with a big following sharing it or something like that. This one … I don’t know. I didn’t do it all in one burst; I did a few and left it for a bit and then came back to it and it just started to grow. It really exploded in the evening, and I still have no idea who was responsible! All hell broke loose for about four days – I couldn’t use my phone. I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since.

DBG: So no valuable lessons learned about how to play the viral game?
SR: It’s just dumb luck! You could try very hard to find reason behind it, but I’m sure it’s just a right place, right time sort of thing, rather than anything that you could actually put into action.

DBG: You pulled all the names from Wikipedia’s list of birds by common name – were you there looking for something else for the day job and got distracted? Is this whole thing basically a moment of procrastination that has taken on a life of its own?
SR: I’m not sure how honest I should be! It was all done outside of working hours. To be honest, February last year, we were in the depths of lockdown, there wasn’t a lot to do. I just so happened to use all my spare time searching Wikipedia. There’s a specific page that lists all the common bird names and they all have names and … there are so many birds.

DBG: So how did HarperColins get involved – did you pitch it to them, or did they approach you?
SR: About a week later, after my phone had stopped melting, I had a chance to look through my DMs and there was a message from Anna Mrowiec, senior commissioning editor at HarperCollins Non Fiction. She had been trying to come up with a book about bird names and someone sent her my thread, and it was exactly the sort of thing she was after. ‘Would I like to turn it into a book since I’d done all the work already?’ I never imagined my debut into the literary world would be a joke bird-spotting guide … but sure, why not? It’s not the sort of thing that happens very often.

DBG: Once they were involved and contracts signed etc, what was the process? How much creative involvement did you have?
I spent all my off-time searching for more ridiculous bird names. I thought I’d been quite thorough, but I’d barely scratched the surface in that initial thread. I whittled them down to a final list, sent it over, they showed me some proofs. And then a year later, it’s on shelves. It’s mad. It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

DBG: Were you at least involved in selecting Libby Morris as the illustrator?
SR: No. I mean, they shared some sample work with me, and I thought it was lovely. If it was too cartoonish or silly, I don’t think it would have worked – it needed to feel like the illustrations belonged in a serious bird-spotters guide, something that real world twitchers would appreciate. The juxtaposition of the puerile names and the profanity-laced copy works really well with these charming, very empathetic illustrations of the poor creatures themselves.

DBG: Were there any deemed too crude for inclusion in the book?
SR: No – the birds’ names are the birds’ names! I did think about throwing in a few fake ones to see if anyone noticed, but I didn’t want to incur the wrath of the twitching community. You don’t want to pick a fight with those people.

DBG: What’s the response been like from the ornithology crowd? Have they finally acknowledged that their field is basically just one big Carry On film?
SR: I now have a lot of ornithological followers, or certainly a lot of people with ornithology and bird watching and twitching in their bios. I disappoint them all on a daily basis, tweeting about advertising and basically any other kind of nonsense except for birds. But yeah, lots of them got in touch – a few people very seriously telling me that these are actually common names, not Latin names. Quite a few people were determined not to see the joke.

But by and large, most of them have been very positive. Last week, I got invited to go on some Australian science podcast where they talk about nature and all those sorts of things. I’m completely out of my depth. I’m just a person who likes puns and rude words, and they think I have some sort of deep understanding of ornithology and bird naming.

DBG: What’s your favourite?
SR: I can’t choose between my children! Everyone’s familiar with your standard tits and boobies, that’s kind of entry level schoolboy humour. It’s when you get to the slightly more obscure cuts, like the Juan Fernández Tit-Tyrant or the Buff-Faced Pygmy Parrot, where you get to your more ornate insults, that’s probably where my heart lies. The ones where it’s impossible to say without it sounding like the most deeply personal insult you could imagine.

Because they’re all named after their body parts, they sound like real slights on the bird – thick-kneed, plump-headed, short-toed. The ones that sound like Armando Iannucci named them. For purely sentimental reasons though, I have to say my favourite is the Drab Seedeater.

DBG: What’s next? Are you trawling through Wikipedia lists of fungi or livestock?
Yeah, maybe? It was a fun experience. And certainly liberating, in that there wasn’t anyone really saying no. In my day job, there’s lots of people all queuing up to say no to my stupid ideas – for very good reasons, I should add – but just being able to do what I wanted was quite fun. So yeah, I’d definitely be interested in doing something similar.

Tits, Boobies and Loons by Stu Royall is published by HarperCollins; harpercollins.co.uk; sturoyall.com