The ideal way to learn about birding is as the pupil of a master. Sixty some years ago, the young men of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group that included Roger Tory Peterson among its members, had Ludlow Griscom as idol, teacher, and gadfly. Griscom was the first master of birding, the first ornithologist to substitute skilled eyes and ears for the shotgun that had served Audubon and his successors as the principal tool of field identification.
Fortunately, the field guides are better than ever. The absolute beginner can advance quite rapidly if he studies his Peterson and spends enough time in the field. But one of the lessons you learn out in the field is that some birds have never read the field guides. Many of them are doubtful cases, ambiguous creatures, avian transvestites that look like one thing from one angle and like something completely different from another angle.
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Identifying the difficult birds, the birds whose identification requires more knowledge than a field guide can hold, is a master’s most important function. With masters in short supply, and the market for bird books so large, book publishers are beginning to fill the void. Several specialized guides to difficult groups such as hawks, gulls, and pelagic birds have been published in the past few years. These are generally written in the sort of terse, almost telegraphic style usually associated with Sears catalogs. They assume an audience that must read them rather than an audience that might want to read them.
His conclusion is that while there is no single ideal binocular, the Leitz and Zeiss roof-prism models are the best available. They are also the most expensive, with prices ranging from around $600 to around $1,000, depending on the current relationship between the dollar and the deutsche mark. If you can’t come up with enough to bring home a pair of these Uberglasses, drop down to Nikon, Bushnell, or Bausch & Lomb. Whatever you get, spend as much as you can. Nothing affects your enjoyment of birding more than the quality of your optics.
Connor advises birders to wait until late in the winter to look for irruptives. In November, the owls and finches are on the move, but by February, they have usually settled into a winter territory where they can be found every day.
Gulls may be the most difficult group of all. Herring gulls, for example, pass through nine distinct plumages on their way from childhood to adulthood, and, as Connor points out, “There are more plumage variations within most gull species than there are between species.”
