Advantages of Using a Telescope for Birding

Video Transcript

Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen and I direct the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Important Bird Areas Program for Massachusetts. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts. And, we're going to be talking about the equipment needed to get one started in birding. After you've gotten your first pair of binoculars, and you've started spending time using optics, you're going to quickly realize that there are some places where more power is better. And for this, typically we go to a telescope. As with binoculars, there are all variations in price and in model. Today, a lot of the really good telescopes are quite expensive, again, be prepared to spend well over a thousand dollars for them. The scope I have in front of me here is one where the eyepiece is set at a forty-five degree angle. Others, the eyepiece is a straight through the barrel view. Increasingly lots of people, lots of birders seem to like the forty-five degree angle because you can basically use it the way you would a microscope and not have to sort of contort yourself particularly if the bird is perched high in a tree where it's very difficult to have to lean down and look at it this way. But, regardless of style, a couple of things to keep in mind. Many telescopes come with zoom eyepieces. This is one that zooms from a twenty power magnification and then by simply turning the eyepiece we can go all the way up to sixty. Some other telescopes have a fixed eyepiece where the magnification may be set at fifteen power, twenty power, thirty power, or something. But, a lot of the birding telescopes that people like today do have the zoom lens. So, that they can look at things at various magnifications. Using a scope is a little different than binoculars in certain respects, but in some other respects it's very similar. For birds that are standing or perched and obviously going to stay in one spot for a few moments, the trick is to quickly get the scope onto the object and to that end it's better to start with a lower magnification. If you zoom up the power to a high power, you reduce your field of view and it's just that much more difficult to locate it.

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