And so the endless and very memorable bird watching sessions on our beautiful patio started with each new species spotted carefully recorded. The problem with some species thou is that there are just so many variations. Different feet and eye colours, long or short beaks, feather's and so on. We were very serious about the rules. Only record a new sighting if both of us saw it and agreed on exactly what the bird is. This led to many discussions and failed recordings as we could not successfully identify the exact bird species. Questions like what colour is the eyes and does it have a long beak drove me insane as I could not see it clearly with the binoculars.
This carried on for some time until one day I decided to find a solution to the problem and headed down to the Pavilion Shopping Mall to find me some real binoculars. As an amateur, I obviously did not know much about binocular technology but decided to get the strongest possible. The kind Indian man who helped me gave me a strange look when I made my choice (A Big Heavy Pentax 16x50 3,5") and asked what I was going to use it for. I said, to watch birds to which he replied, What kind of "Birds"
The new Pentax worked like a charm, improving our success rate with the bird watching and you could see into the future that's how strong the magnification is. Only some time later I realised what he actually meant. You can sit on a beach and look at a "Bikini Babe" more than a kilometre away and see if she shaved her legs that morning.
The downside, the Pentax is heavy and you can not look for long unless you rest your elbows on something. I still have them for the odd "Bird" spotting opportunity. Sadly, not much use in Singapore so far, but will come in handy with any future Island travels.
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