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. So, now you've made your purchase. You
have your pair of binoculars. So, what do you do with your new toy? Well, the first thing that you
want to do is to make sure that the binoculars are set for your eyes. And, without going into great
detail, it's sufficient to say that the eye pieces can be set so that to accommodate differences between
your eyes, it's possible to get them set once and then once you turn the focus wheel, they will, both
lenses will move together and will accommodate for the differences between any variations in your
eyes. So, you have the binoculars in hand and believe it or not using binoculars is not an intuitive
skill. Once you see a bird, what you need to do is to keep your eye on the bird. And, while you're
watching the bird, slowly raise the binoculars to your eyes. Then, with your fingers turn the focus
wheel and obviously the image will slowing come in or out of view. It may not be that the bird will
be obvious to you when you look in the binoculars because birds do move. So that you want to be
sure that first of all, you hold the binocular as steady as possible. And then, watch for any
movement that the bird might make. If the bird moves a short distance, keep the binoculars to your
eyes, and sort of move it this way. So that locating something with binoculars is sort of a two step
process. One is, you see something and you want to look at it. You keep your eye on it and you put
the binoculars to your eyes. With a little bit of luck, the bird will be there. The other step is
scanning for birds, where you're actually looking for a bird, but you don't see it. And, in heavily
vegetated situations that can be a little difficult. Sometimes it's better to watch for some movement
and then put your binoculars where you see the movement and then specifically try to locate the
bird. But, in situations at the sea shore, for example, where you might be looking at big flocks of
shore birds, or water foul, or gulls, then you may want to use your binoculars for scanning. And,
you move very slowly from right to left or from left to right looking for individual birds that may be
of interest to you. Once you find something, obviously, then, you can spend time, and you can
really focus in on it and look for details. If a bird suddenly flies, then, the best thing is to take your
binoculars away from your eyes and try to pick up the bird visually and then relocate it with the
optics because otherwise that tunnel vision concept that comes from looking only through a fixed
field of view. If the bird flies very far, you're going to lose it.
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