Ask a cyclist: do I need a bicycle to be cycling? Ask a president: do I need to be lying to be a politician? The answer is: no, but it really helps if you do!
Birding before binoculars was extremely destructive. To see the bird, one had to shoot it. Unsurprisingly, early ornithologists/birders were very keen on shooting. Very. Charles Wilson Peale describes how he discharges his gun into a flock of Carolina Parakeets, kills scores of the now-extinct parakeet and then watches how the distraught birds return to their fallen comrades. He then shoots again. And again, and our Charles was a naturalist, he liked animals… I am quoting him from Bill Bryson’s more than excellent ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’:
“At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me”.
With a pair of binoculars, the excuse to shoot at a bird just disappears. You would think.
Dear reader, you are not a soulless murderer, but you do want to see birds up close. Unless you’re a Peregrine Falcon your eyes will have evolved to estimate the distance to the next branch and distinguish between ripe and unripe fruit but seeing a bird at a thousand paces is not your cup of tea. You have no choice and will have to buy some binoculars. That answers the question. Finding the right set, maybe even a very fancy one, and avoiding mistakes – that is the type of information you can find on 10000birds.com. There, you will also find more excellent photographs, like Kai Pflug’s of Rainbow Lorikeets.
Thanks for the advertising plug, Peter! Seems a bit pointless as obviously, the readers of your post are already on 10,000 Birds – but the thought is appreciated nevertheless. Now, just get us a plug in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or CNN …
Good post Peter. Well done. Like your humor. I will also mention another, actually long-form essay, that has been printed into a small hardcover book (gave away my copy so I can’t share details here), titled The Passenger Pigeon and written by none other than John James Audubon himself. Turns out J.J. Audubon was not just himself a bird shooter and an artist, he was also a pretty good essayist. In his essay, he describes in graphic detail, a Passenger Pigeon hunt which he himself observed. He doesn’t write that he participated in the hunt, but we can probably be sure that he snatched a bird or two or three for his own uses. But he also writes about the complete ecology of the Pigeon Pigeon. So even though now long extinct, we actually know quite a lot about the Passenger Pigeon. I know that his essay is also published in an anthology or two and I’m sure those interested in reading it can find it easily. Quite agree. Binoculars have improved our world immeasurably.