Essential Birding Equipment

Essential Birding Equipment
Hello! Welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Peterson and I'm the director of the Important Bird Areas Program for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Today we're here at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshfield, Massachusetts where we'll be talking about bird identification and some of the equipment and essential tools that are useful to get one started in this incredibly interesting pastime. One of the things that one needs to get one started in birding these days...Really, it's basically 3 things. First of all, is a descent pair of binoculars. How much one spends for binoculars is something that's entirely up to one's budget and preference, but ideally, one wants something that has a central focus that allows magnification that will be useful to you. Typically, somewhere between a 7, 8, or 10 power and that affords a lot of brightness and an objective lens that's wide enough to admit plenty of light. A combination of magnification and brightness, and then something called eye relief, which is basically how much tunneling occurs in terms of where the binoculars fall on your eyes. If you're someone like me who wears glasses, having an eye cup that retracts is a very useful feature, so that if you're somebody who is an eyeglass wearer, you'll want the lens as close to your glasses as possible. If you don't wear eyeglasses, you may very well turn the eye cups out so that you can actually get your eye as close to that eye piece as possible. For birding, I would suggest the generally something on the 7 or 8 power magnification is probably useful as a starter. As you get more proficient, you'll may very well want to go to something like a 10 power binocular. With a comparable field of view, 7 x 35, 8 x 40, 10 x 40. Something in that range. The 40 having to do with the opening of the objective lens, which is a function of what your field of view is and how much light is admitted. In addition to binoculars for bringing birds closer to you, a good field guide is very useful. Field guides are books that obviously have pictures. They can be photographs or they can be paintings that will help you recognize what you see. There's a great variety of field guide types and all different variations on the way that they're organized. Then finally, is a notebook. A notebook is obviously a place where you can write down what you see and take notes on things that you record in the field. There are all a manner of notebooks. Some of them are small and portable; some of them are more diary like and can be used to enter observations after you've come back of a day's birding experiences, and one can use more of a narrative approach in this type of digest. Later on, we'll talk about other birding resources. Many people increasingly today are using the Internet and various software programs as ways to keep track of their bird observations.