| |
|
The Equipment
Let's start with the easiest part of Birdwatching, which
is deciding what equipment you need. There are only two absolute essentials:
a pair of binoculars and a field guide. Pretty simple right? This is one
more reason to like Birdwatching - it is inexpensive. In fact, birding
is one of the least expensive hobbies a person can undertake. There are
no monthly dues, no rackets to string, no nets to tie up, no golf clubs
to buy, no green fees to pay or balls to lose. Binoculars of adequate
quality run about sixty dollars, a good field guide is around twenty dollars,
and with these supplies you are well on your way.
|
| |
|
Binoculars
Binoculars are a birder's eyes on the world, and they
can greatly affect the quality of a bird outing. Good binoculars make
for good birding, while bad binoculars can lead to missed birds and severe
headaches induced by blurred images, double vision, and eye strain.
Binoculars come in many different shapes and forms and
carry such descriptions as "roof prism," "close focus," "armor coated,"
etc. At the outset, you don't need to spend too much time deciphering
this arcane lexicon. If you really get hooked on Birdwatching, you can
learn more about binoculars later and trade in for a better pair.
There are a few simple rules to consider and questions
to ask when purchasing your first pair of binoculars.
|
| |
|
| 1. |
Make sure the power (or magnification) is at least 7-power.
The power is the first number given in the numerical notation that describes
binoculars. For example, a "7 X 35" pair of "glasses" will make objects
appear as if they are seven times as close as they actually are. Seven-power
binoculars are about the minimum needed to see birds well. Binoculars 10-power
or stronger can be difficult for some birders to hold steady. |
| 2. |
Make sure that the second number ("35" for a "7 X 35"
pair of glasses) is at least five times as large as the power (e.g., "7
X 35," "8 X 40," etc.). This second number describes the diameter, in
millimeters, of the large lens that faces the object of interest - the "objective"
lens. The larger this lens is, the greater the amount of light the binoculars
gather and thus the easier it will be to see characteristics in dim light
or on a dull-colored bird. |
| 3. |
Are the binoculars too heavy for you to carry and use
for at least two hours straight? Don't end up with a hunchback because
your binoculars act like a yoke. |
| 4. |
Can you flex the barrels of the binoculars fairly easily?
To test to see if they are too flexible, spread the barrels out as far as
possible and then hold onto only one of the barrels. Does the free barrel
slip or fall from the spread position? It shouldn't. |
| 5. |
When held a foot away, do the large objective lenses
reflect a bluish or purplish tinge? If they do, the lenses are color-coated.
This coating reduces internal glare in the binoculars and increases the
amount of light that actually comes to your eyes. Check lenses to make sure
the coatings are free of any blotches or scrapes. |
| 6. |
Can you bring the barrels of the binoculars close enough
together so that the image you see merges into a single, clear image within
a single, perfect circle? If the image isn't singular or clear, the
binoculars may be out of alignment or the eyepieces may not come close enough
together to accommodate your eyes. These two problems may lead to eye strain
and severe headaches. |
| 7. |
Do you wear prescription eyeglasses? If you do,
your binoculars should have rubber eye cups that fold back. This allows
you to put your eyeglasses up closer to the eyepieces of your binoculars
and gives you a much larger field of view. |
| 8. |
Do the binoculars produce a clear image of an object
only 20 feet away? Some binoculars do not focus on objects this close,
so you may miss the sparrow or warbler that skulks in a nearby bush. |
| 9. |
Look at a sign with large lettering. Do the letters
close to the edge of the field of view appear as precise and well-formed
as the letters in the center of the field of view? Image distortion
towards the edge of binoculars is common in bad binoculars - like looking
through a fish-eye lens. Look for a pair that has minimal distortion. |
| 10. |
When you focus on a license plate or small sign two
blocks away, are the letters and numbers clear? |
| |
|
Practicing with your new binoculars
Before using your binoculars, it is important to adjust
them so they compensate for the differing strengths of your two eyes.
Take a lens cap and cover up the right objective lens with it. Then look
through the left lens and focus on an object 30 feet away using the main
focusing knob located between the two barrels of your binoculars. Once
you have focused on the object, move the lens cap from the right lens
to the left lens. Look through the right lens at the same object (but
don't touch the main focusing wheel!) If the image you see is not as clear
as it looked through the left lens, adjust it using the focusing ring
attached to the right eyepiece of your binoculars. Take note of where
you have set the focus on the right eyepiece. Now your binoculars are
adjusted to your eyes and ready for action.
Next, spend some time developing the hand-eye coordination
you'll need to spot birds quickly. Most Birdwatching is definitely not
like watching football. With Birdwatching there's much more action - everything
is happening at 1/100 the scale and moves 100 times as quickly over an
unlimited expanse of space. It takes time for beginning birders to get
the knack of spotting birds with their binoculars. The secret is to learn
to spot a bird with the naked eye and then lift the binoculars up to your
eyes without ever taking your eyes off the bird.
I usually recommend that the fledgling birder find a comfortable
spot at a local park and spend time just practicing spotting objects with
their binoculars. Initially, set the focus lever on the binoculars so
that an object approximately 30 feet away is in clear view. This is a
good average distance from which you can learn to focus the binoculars
in and out. Next, begin to look for birds with your naked eyes and then
find them with your binoculars. Simply follow the bird around for a while,
lowering and lifting your binoculars every so often. Don't worry about
identifying birds yet. Just watch what they are doing. Soon, you'll be
able to spot and focus like a pro.
|
| |
|
Field Guides
There has been a veritable explosion in the number of
field guides published about birds over the last few years. Until the
late 1960s, the guide most widely used was Roger Tory Peterson's original
The Birds of Eastern North America, the first field guide of its
kind produced. This book literally made Birdwatching a popular activity
by making accurate identifications of birds possible. Today, however,
there are specific field guides available for certain regions of the country
(Texas even has its own field guide) as well as for specific groups of
birds, such as hawks, gulls, shorebirds, ducks, and others. These specialized
books may eventually make their way into the library of a birding enthusiast.
Still, beginners need only consider the comprehensive guides when choosing
their first field guide.
When purchasing your first guide, it is best to start
with one that displays paintings of birds rather than photographs. Paintings
allow artists to include all distinguishing features (called "field marks")
that help to identify a bird in each illustration. Often, photographs
do not show all these marks due to lighting or positioning of the bird.
Photographic guides can be a valuable companion reference, however, especially
when studying the details of a bird's shape. Of the many comprehensive
guides available, here are four of the most popular.
|
| |
|
| A Field Guide to the Birds.
Eastern and Central North America. 4th Edition, 1980. Roger Tory Peterson
|
| |
The "Peterson guide" offers a clarity and consistency hard
to find elsewhere. This is because all paintings in the guide were drawn
by Roger Tory Peterson rather than several different artists as in other
guides. In addition, the guide is limited to birds found in the central
and eastern United States, which means Floridians do not have to sort through
birds that do not occur here very often. Peterson also uses a simple, effective
method of highlighting the field marks of different birds by using arrows
to point to them. These simple, visual indications of key features help
save valuable identification time in the field. One drawback of this field
guide is that range maps describing where each species of bird occurs are
grouped at the back, rather than placing each map beside the bird's picture
and description. Also, the American Ornithologists' Union, which determines
the classification of all North American birds, has changed the common names
of a number of birds since this guide's 1980 publication. This may confuse
beginners when they compare this guide to more recently published guides.
|
| |
|
| Stokes Field Guide to Birds.
Eastern Region. 1st Edition, 1996. Donald and Lillian Stokes |
| |
The Stokes guide is among the most popular of the photographic
guides. This guide is well organized with a color tab index to bird families.
It also contains a large number of quality photos, especially for its small
size. Text contains clear descriptions on how to identify each bird plus
interesting life history information. |
| |
|
| All the Birds of North America.
1st Edition, 1997. The American Bird Conservancy |
| |
This guide is a relative newcomer compared to the other
illustrated guides discussed here. Its high quality paintings cover virtually
all birds found in the U.S. and Canada. If you travel out west this can
be a benefit - you won't have to purchase another field guide. This guide
also includes a number of essays covering bird behavior that beginners might
find interesting. One drawback of this guide is that some people find it
is organized in a confusing way. It is not arranged strictly in "phylogenetic"
order like most other guides (discussed later in this booklet). This makes
finding birds more difficult for those used to traditional field guide organization.
|
| |
|
| Field Guide to the Birds
of North America. 3rd Edition, 1999. The National Geographic Society
|
| |
This popular field guide is currently the most recently
revised guide and includes the current common names of all North American
bird species. The National Geographic guide also contains more illustrations
and gives better descriptions of the variation that certain birds exhibit
in their color patterning. For example, red- shouldered hawks in Florida
generally are a lighter color than red-shouldered hawks in other parts of
the country. Most field guides mention this, but pictures in the National
Geographic guide actually show this type of variation. For some species,
there may be as many as five pictures showing the coloration differences
of juvenile birds, subadult birds, males versus females, as well as differences
that occur across broad geographic regions. This additional information
can help to settle some tricky identification problems, but may also overwhelm
beginning birders with more information than is needed to identify the common
birds around their neighborhood. |
| |
|
| Once you have selected your field
guide, do not - repeat, do not - immediately run off looking for birds,
because what you'll actually find instead of birds is trouble and frustration.
Many a field guide has spent more time collecting dust than helping to identify
birds because the owner didn't learn how to use the guide. Sit down with
your field guide when you first get it and read through the complete introduction.
Next, look at some of the pictures and figure out where some of the common
birds you recognize are located in the field guide (i.e., front, back, or
middle). |
| |
|
Field Guide Organization
I have watched numerous beginners spot a bird and immediately
open their field guide to the middle pages. They then look to the right
ten pages, look left ten pages, and don't find the bird. Then they look
right 20 pages, look left 20 pages, and still don't find the bird. After
looking a few more pages left and right, they heave the guide into the
air out of disgust and give up the whole enterprise.
This happens because the person hasn't learned how bird
species are arranged in the field guide. It's no wonder they get frustrated.
Field guides, just like dictionaries and phone books, are ordered according
to a precise system that determines where different birds are located
in the book. If you were looking up the word "aardvark" in the dictionary,
you wouldn't begin somewhere in the middle, would you? Similarly, if you
see a sparrow-like bird sitting on the ground, don't start searching through
the middle of a field guide because all the sparrows are located in the
last quarter of field guides.
Most guides are roughly organized in "phylogenetic order."
Phylogenetic order is the way scientists classify all living things (not
just birds) based on their evolutionary history - which creatures, according
to likenesses in their present-day appearance, most probably evolved from
common ancestors. You can learn more about this ordering system by reading
your field guide. The point is that birds having similar physical appearances
occur very close together in a field guide. You won't find sparrows on
the same page with hawks or a loon facing a warbler. All sparrows, loons,
warblers, hawks, and even gulls and blackbirds are located many pages
away from one another.
There are five essential levels of classification by which
all birds are grouped. When we refer to birds of the same "species," for
example a group of 15 blue jays, we are using the most specific level
of classification. Similar species are grouped into a "genus," then different
genera (plural of genus) are grouped into a "family," different families
are grouped into an "order" of birds, and finally all orders are grouped
into just one "class." This is the class "Aves," which in Latin refers
to all birds. As you may guess, species in the same genus are more closely
related to one another - and look more alike - than species in different
genera. Likewise, families grouped in a single order are more similar
to one another than families grouped in different orders.
Most field guides covering North America contain about
800-900 species, grouped into over 300 genera, grouped into 74 different
families, grouped into just 20 different orders (guides limited to eastern
or western North America have about half as many species).
The most convenient and logical classification level for
the beginning birder to focus on is the family. There are simply too many
genera and species out there for a novice to grasp easily, and identification
to a particular order is too broad to be challenging. More importantly,
by learning the general shape, size, and appearance of the different families
of birds, you will develop the powers of observation that characterize
a good birder. In fact, you probably know more about some of the families
than you realize. For example, if you can recognize a laughing gull you
already know a lot about the general sizes and shapes of all the gulls.
Similarly, by knowing what a cardinal looks like, you know a good bit
about buntings, grosbeaks, and other members of this family - namely that
they have very thick, pointed bills. Our state bird, the northern mockingbird,
is in the family of mimic thrushes. All birds in this family have the
same approximate size and shape, including that long tail.
Armed with the ability to recognize the shapes of the
major bird families and a good local field guide, you can go anywhere
in the world and immediately find yourself head and shoulders above non-birders
in terms of identification skills - even though you don't have any familiarity
or experience with the local birds.
So when you first get your field guide, spend time looking
at its organization and the way it groups families of birds. Divide your
guide into four sections using tags or sticky notes. The first quarter
will contain the families of large water birds, the second quarter the
large land birds (ending with the woodpeckers), and the last two quarters
will contain the small land birds (all in the order "Passeriformes," commonly
called the "passerines" or "perching birds"). Continue to look for common
species that you already know and use these as a guide for learning the
common characteristics of other species in the family. Remember, you should
begin birding using your head, not running around chasing after elusive
thrushes and confusing fall warblers. Look casually, not frantically,
at birds you don't know. Equipped with your spyglasses and trusty field
guide, you can now begin to get acquainted with all those flitting bundles
of feathers.
|
Publications
