One of the best bits of advice I never should have taken came from a wildlife biologist familiar with most Indiana birds. We were collecting ticks at Mt. Summit SRA many springs ago (serious: I found yet another in my mustache the next evening).
Andy was paid by Ball State to count birds on a designated route two or three times a week. Sound recognition was critical, as identification was the purpose.
(Editorial note: bird watchers should be focused on seeing the birds. "Birding" nauseates me, is a scurrilous word, and no one interested in birds should tolerate the term, ever.)
What Andy told me was my Nikkon 8X40's, dear to me in cost and purpose, were useless in heavy cover, like most of spring and all of summer, and one would benefit from much less glass. Maybe like his Tasco camos, about $2 at any useful yard sale.
I bought compact Nikkons in 8X23, and I keep them behind the seat in my truck, and, to my enduring sorrow, no one has stolen them.
Andy can recognize a chipping sparrow on a Land-Sat print, but my little glass would only help if the bird perched on the hood of my car.
That 8X translates to 2X, at best 3X, for me.
I have glassed what I think is the same bird at Mier Cemetery a couple of times, with the Nikkes, and still couldn't pick it out of a lineup, never mind an identification.
I thought for a bit it might be a merlin, which would be uber-cool.
Merlins are kestrels on steroids. They have been flown for a thousand years on game, and are still preferred by many European and American falconers for their disposition, flying display, and ability to take down much larger birds.
I saw several kestrels today, and will attest to and defend their abilities and "game" as true falcons. They are stone killers, and will take sparrows, and much larger starlings, on the wing. With enthusiasm and training, a kestrel, like any falcon, will take birds three, four, five, and even more, times its size/weight.
Merlins are only an inch or so "bigger" than kestrels, but are much larger, pound for pound.
And there is a problem.
The US is married, welded, to a system of weights and measures obsolete since Archimedes demonstrated displacement.
Inches and ounces and pints and feet and pounds and quarts and miles and tons and gallons are perfectly suited to measure your waist, pot, and beer, your rugs, mass, and milk, your drive in terms of fuel and mileage in relation to your mode of transport.
This system has been largely useless since the 19th Century.
The metric system is a decimal system, every order of magnitude, whether measuring liquids, mass, or distance, expressed in terms of 1 through 9. And 0, signifying nothing, is nothing.
And nothing in the metric system is expressed. Zeroes are used only as a multiple of ten, and can be eliminated with a shift in order of magnitude.
And all data may be reduced and manipulated with a minimal understanding of the numbers 1 through 9, and any conceivable number, no matter how cosmically large or how infinitesimally small , can be expressed in terms of 1 through 9.
Sounds really simple? It is.
By way of comparison, there are 16 ounces in a pound, 2 cups in a pint, 12 inches in a foot, pounds grow to tons, pints to quarts and gallons, no limit, feet to yards and miles.
It is a nightmare to quantify any greater, lesser, or intermediate volume, weight, distance. It's why computers haven't replaced calculators.
And it's why there are no US numbers to demonstrate any real difference between kestrels and merlins, to explain why one is a hallowed hunter lauded for hundreds of years, and the other, averaging an inch shorter, is called a "sparrow hawk".
Just into Howard County this morning, I saw red tails on the next two pole-tops, and stopped. Male and female, both had flown while I clumsily uncased my glass. The female stayed in front, soaring and swooping and doing what huge hawks do.
The male came around and lit on a pole behind me, to the (east) left, and flew as soon as I glassed him. She left soon after, low, difficult to follow over the August Indiana corn.
Coming back north, I saw our most brilliantly colored woodpecker, a Red Headed Woodpecker, on a utility pole, of all places.
The red is brilliant, the black intense, glossy. Should I ever require a coat of arms, those exact colors will be featured.
There was another bird there, too, which I haven't begun to ID. Why they were on a pole soaked in creosote looking for organic matter beats me.
I have no skills to identify raptors. Mostly, I can't sort them out through glass.
But an accipiter, probably a Cooper's hawk, came off a milk cow farmlot, low, and it was most likely short an Amish chicken dinner.
Accipiters have a distinctive flight, flap flap flap glide, and this hawk had that down pat.
Little bit large for a sharp shin.
Too cool not to be glassed.
The glass was wanting.