cvanbosk

Thanks for the leads, Kevin. Reading through the reviews, I’m not really finding anything of very high quality. Have any of the experienced birders here ever used anything like these?

This may be a silly question but ... is there such a thing as a decent pair of binoculars that comes equipped with a built in camera? I find it so frustrating when I'm looking at an unknown bird with the binos and then I try to switch to the camera to get a couple shots. Usually the bird has moved, or I can't find it on the camera's viewfinder, or my Nikon POS decides to focus on everything BUT the bird. What I want is to be able to push a button on my binos that will just take a half-way decent picture of what I'm looking at, at the moment I'm looking at it. I don't need National Geographic quality photos, just photos good enough to look at later for identification purposes (and hopefully good enough to satisfy the Ebird Overloards). It seems like that in this day and age, with optics and tiny cell phone cameras being what they are, there should be such a product.

Not sanderlings? Okay, I quit birding.

Oh yeah! Got a lifer (Horned Grebe).

Thanks Alex. The photo doesn't show it well but the speculum was uniformly blue, no white. I've seen lots of mottled ducks and these struck me as such, but Ebird marked it rare so I began doubting myself.

What the heck is the deal with Dunlins? According to Cornell, their size (length) range ranges from 7.1 to 8.7 inches. That's about a 30 percent variation! A quick look through similar shorebirds shows that the normal size variation is typically much smaller. I never paid much attention to this because in my normal birding grounds on the east coast of Florida, dunlins are always smaller than sanderlings. But last weekend I made a trip over to the west coast ... and got real confused. In the photo below, notice the gargantuan bird to the right of the two sanderlings. I desperately tried to convince myself it wasn't a dunlin - but couldn't. It just seems too doggone big. Can someone please put me out of my misery?

Spotted earlier today Happy Thanksgiving, fellow birders. Thanks for your help this year!

Show off! 😜

The upturned, longer bill indicates Greater.

In all three, the foreground bird looks like ring-billed. Not sure on the more mottled birds. (probably obvious, and not what you were interested in)