from the github page:
Birdeater does not use Twitter's API. It was built as a demonstration of an approach I like to use for parsing structured information from unstructured HTML.
A better (and practical) example is scraping an internet forum (I've done it, partially)
The API probably has a key that can be blocked.
Not that I'm advocating this, but a potential advantage of scraping, is it can be combined with tor or proxies, etc to get around limits.
It's rate-limited to 150 requests per hour and you can only pull the 3,200 most recent tweets for a user.
api has rate limits
So does this it seems:
Be mindful when running it, as Twitter limits the number of requests that a single client can make per hour.