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Very Cute |
A consideration for birding.
Our trip to the Costa Rican rain forest made it quite clear that our current optics were woefully lacking. One day into the birding and they fogged up but good. Luckily(?) we did not see the resplendent Quetzal so we only had four letter words for our optics and not carefully crafted multisyllabic multiword phrases. Excellent quality, nitrogen purged bins are a necessity for the drive. I know what you’re thinking: Leica Ultravid and be done with it! Well, given our modest means we settled on the Zeiss Conquest Series 8×40 for all around clarity, ergonomics, and value.
For the compact bins we decided to go with the top of the line Zeiss Victory FL 8×20, the rationale being that the smaller objective lenses have more need of better optical quality. The wee binoculars are sweet! We tested them out last weekend at the opera, with excellent results.
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Conquest 8×40 |
In sum then Conquest 8×40 have opened a can of the proverbial whoop-ass on our old Minoltas and the 8×20 Victory outclass the old compacts.
Have you studied what birds you are likely to see? There is lot of excitement if you can name the bird on sighting & studying it,s habit & habitat. Also the females of the species & juveniles also look very different.
Having taken a good bin, you may also like to study , apart from birds, the plants & flowers seen along the drive. You may also find it interesting to observe geology along the road.
We do not know much about the species other than the famous ones like Quetzals, Toucans, Macaws, etc. One of the amazing things is discovering new and interesting species we hadn’t known before – like the Wattled Bell-Bird in Costa Rica or the Pels Fishing Owl in Bostwana.
Finally we have some reasonably decent equipment to hopefully concentrate on observations rather than fiddling with the gear.