Birding

We love to travel to find new birds and participate in a lot of bird counts. We also created a Guide to Birding Field Guides and host a collection of over 300 birding links from all over the globe.

Conservation

While our main focus continues to be birds, we promote other areas of conservation as well. Conserving land not only benefits wildlife, but is hugely beneficial to people as well.

Outdoors

We love all sorts of outdoor activities, especially hiking and spend a lot of time outside with dogs and horses. We are working to produce more articles on all sorts of outdoor fun!

Photography

Every week we bring you Bird Photography Weekly. We periodically talk about our adventures in digiscoping. Feel free to browse our photo lifelist.

Digiscoping Setup

Our digiscoping setup is just one of many variations of camera/spotting scope/tripod. Please read below to see each component of the digiscoping setup & what we think of it.

Spotting Scope

Swarovski 80 HD STS Spotting Scope

Swarovski 80 HD Spotting Scope Review

Swarovski 80 HD Spotting Scope
Aluminum body, 80mm objective lens, fluoride high definition (HD) coating

Swarovski 20-60x & 25-50x W Eyepieces

     

The 20-60x eyepiece has a field of view of 108 ft/1000 yds at 20x and 60 ft/1000 yds at 60x.
The 25-50x W(ide) eyepiece has a field of view of 126 ft/1000 yds at 25x and 81 ft/1000 yds at 50x.

We have used the 20-60x for most of our viewing and digiscoping and are still testing the 25-50x.


Yellow-crowned Night-Heron shot through the 20-60x eyepiece

Tripod and Balance Rail

Swarovski CT 101 Carbon Fiber Tripod with FH 101 Head

Review of the Swarovski CT 101 Carbon Fiber Tripod and FH 101 Head
Swarovski Carbon Fiber Tripod

Swarovski Balance Rail

Swarovski Balance Rail

Cameras and Adapters

Canon EOS 50D 15.1MP & Canon EOS Rebel XTi 10.1MP DSLR

Review of digiscoping with a DSLR Camera
 

We now exclusively use the 50D for all our DSLR photography. The XTi has a newer version available, the XSi which has more megapixels (12.2 vs 10.1) and is a fine camera (priced less than the 50D).

Canon 50mm Lens with Swarovski Digital Camera Adapter (DCA)

50mm Lens and Digiscoping Adapter

Nikon Coolpix 5100 Point-and-Shoot Camera

We use this less but it does video and takes good shots; compact size is nice when not wanting to lug around a DLSR.
nikon-coolpix-5100

Swarovski Shetland Backpack {off market}

Can carry scope, bins, and even the tripod (attached to the outside of the bag)
Swarovski Shetland Backpack