Subject: New book about birding
Date: Oct 15 13:23:24 2002
From: Jack Stephens - jstephens62 at attbi.com


I just finished reading "Birders, Tales of a Tribe", a book written by Mark
Cocker. It is about what it is like being a birder, and interesting to see
the English slant on this obsession that we share. However, some of his
points are common those of us on both sides of the Atlantic. One passage
that particularly struck me I will quote below. As usual, I have no
financial interest, etc.

"Most binoculars allow you about eight degrees of vision. It means that for
the moments you hold them to your eyes, the other 352 degrees are completely
excluded. Anything within the orbit of those eight degrees is magnified and
enhanced, while everything else - job, relationship, money, sex - is
consigned to the aura of darkness around you. That, in a nutshell is the
joy, the magic, of binoculars. They convert life into something else,
something almost abstract, something purer, clearer, usually more beautiful
and almost always something you'd never really seen that way before. That's
what birder are hooked on - not the physical object, the complex prisms and
lenses of binoculars, but their wonderous alchemical power to transform you
and your state of being. When I saw those Meadow Pipits grovelling around in
fields at Lightwoood, or that Short-eared owl sailing above the moors at
Goldstitch Moss it was this new way of seeing, as much as the birds
themselves, which transfixed me. And life could never be the same again."


Jack Stephens
Edmonds, WA
jstephens62 at attbi.com