Tropical Bird Watching Basics & Birding Tips
Recognizing shapes in foliage is a habit that many good birders pick up. It's the instinctive ability to notice the distinct shape of a bird perched on a tree or on a branch through the sunlight in a clutter of leaves.
This acquired skill is especially useful when the bird is keeping still. Cuckoos, raptors, shrikes and many passerines (perching birds) will come to a stand still so it helps to be able to notice the outlines even in a busy background. Once I have located the bird with my bins, it's important to note a prominent marker or object next to the bird like the tree branch elbow, flower or leaf patch before getting off the bins so you can still locate the distant spot. Keeping this spot in view, I would quickly use the scope to acquire the bird. Moving and focusing a scope in one fluid motion takes practice because every precious second counts.
Birds will move so once I have a lock-on with the scope, I would hand hold my trust Nikon Coolpix digital camera over the eyepiece of the Lieca scope, hold one third of my breath and get off as many shots as possible. All this has to be done smoothly and collected because sometime even a distant bird will be easily spooked by a birders panicky action.
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