How to Use Birding Binoculars for Bird Watching

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. 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."