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.