Birding

Birding / Gear — 14 Comments
17
Jul 11

Review of Lens2scope spotting scope adapter – and a warning

I want to share my experiences with the “Lens2scope” device, and offer a word of warning potentially sparing you some disappointment – and some money.

What is it?

The device is not a new invention – the idea to put an eyepiece on a photographic lens is old and has been done a couple of times before by different vendors, e.g. Nikon and Minolta.

Basically it justs consists of an eyepiece, a magnification lens, and a prism – the prism turns the upright-down image from a photographic lens back into the correct orientation, and the eyepiece lets you look through the lens just like through a telescope.

The Lens2scope attached to my Sigma 100-300 f/4

Who needs it?

This device is obviously not for photography – it is for watching the action, not making pictures. A situation I find myself in rather more often than not is that I have reached a certain interesting place, but the action is going on really too far to take any photos that are for more than just IDing the birds. Instead of sitting there frustrated, I could switch the camera for the Lens2scope and watch the action instead.

I bought mine in May before my summer vacation, and had planned to use it during several birding trips in Britanny, Western France. My 100-300 mm f/4 Sigma lens would be turned into a 10x-30x magnification spotting scope, or even a 14x-42x using the 1.4x teleconverter.

Use and observations

Sweet and short: The device works as advertised. I found the picture to be clear and surprisingly bright. Lens errors were of no concern, certainly there was a slight chromatic aberration, but much less than with my standard 8×36 Nikon Monarch binoculars. The magnification could clearly be improved by using the 1.4x teleconverter, while adding the 2x converter didn’t seem to improve the situation – I wouldn’t recommend using it.

Focusing is actually quite sensitive, but still very easy with the excellent manual focusing ring of the 100-300. This will be much harder with a lens which cannot be precisely focused manually.

The device is sturdily built albeit a little plasticky, but the advantage is its light weight of just 185 g. More on the quality of the metal bayonet below…

Example – what to expect

As the device is not for photography, I cannot show any pictures of what you can see if you look through the scope. But I can give you an example of where I used it successfully.

Close to Cancale, in Eastern Brittany, Western France, there is a small bird colony of gulls, cormorants, some shags, and common shelduck on the Île des Landes. The island itself as a bird protection area is of course off-limits for humans, but the seabird colony can be watched from the nearby Pointe de Grouin.

The observation distance is actually not that bad, looking at Google maps it’s between 300-400 meters. But photographing the birds? Forget it, too far. With the 8x binoculars? Nice, but nothing really interesting to be seen. Just good enough to identify the birds.

Setting up the scope looking at the Île des Landes

With a dedicated spotting scope – or in this case the Sigma 100-300 mm with 1.4x tele converter and the Lens2scope? Wow! Suddenly you are able to see the gull’s chicks in their nests, and to clearly distinguish the European Shags there from their pretty similar looking relatives, the Cormorants, also present on the island. I enjoyed watching two Shags feed their chick which was hiding behind one of the boulders on top of the island – all you could see from the chick was the beak hungrily opening when one of the parents came back with more fish, and sometimes the near bald head if things weren’t moving quickly enough to its liking .

With my 8x binoculars: Which chick? Which boulder?

The Caveat

So far, so good. Mission accomplished – the device itself has no electrical or moving parts, and the optics are ok. What could go wrong? Well, the bayonet mechanics used to connect the Lens2scope to the lens were so sharp and tight that the use of it damaged my precious Sigma. During the vacation. With no repair service or replacement lens available. Argh.

What had happened was that obviously in one of the many times I exchanged the Lens2scope for the camera, mounting it with the bayonet I was too fast, or too slow, or didn’t hit the right connection spot (red dot to red dot) – and I turned the Lens2scope in the bayonet damaging the first of the electrical lens contacts.

The first pin of the telelens damaged by the Lens2scope

The camera would no longer speak to the lens giving me the infamous fEE error – I knew, the lens was toast. I suspect the Sigma lens to be more susceptible for that damage than an original Nikkor, as the Nikon electrical mounts are little metal balls, while the Sigma has a plastic tongue with an electrical contact, which additionally feels slightly spring loaded, intended to provide active closed contact.

So I warn anybody thinking about using the Lens2scope with Sigma lenses – I think this is a dangerous combination. I certainly will never attach it to my 1000€ lens again. The other brands I cannot judge, but after this experience I would recommend at least high caution when mounting and dismounting the adapter – and honestly, out in the field things sometimes have to happen fast, and I want my equipment to be robst and not have to think about fragile connections.

My vendor offered to take mine back, but of course refused to take over the bill for the Sigma repair. The German distributor I asked relayed my question to the manufacturer in Taiwan, but the disappointing answer roughly translates as “be more careful”.

I “survived” my vacation and many photo opportunities by taping the contacts preventing any electrical error to creep up, and instructed the camera I had attached a manual 300 mm lens. This gave me back the aperture priority mode, at least. No autofocus – I re-learned manual focus over a 3 week period, but that is another story…

Birding — 3 Comments
13
May 11

Summer Bird Census 2011 – #stg11

Blogging seems to be so old fashioned nowadays – I just saw that the Nabu Germany now also advertises Twitter. To follow the discussion about this year’s summer bird census, called Stunde Der Gartenvögel, you can use the tag #stg11.

This weekend everybody is invited to spend one hour counting (and identifying) birds in the garden or a different place, and report the results back to support scientific long term observations on the biodiversity in our “civilized” environment.

Not much content on Twitter yet, though. So for you here is the result of me counting birds in Munich Alt-Bogenhausen, one of the greener corners of this not-everywhere-so-green city.

I am getting better in identifying birds by their song, therefore my list actually is a little bit longer than last year’s :-)

  1. Blackbird – three. Actually they were everywhere, but you ought to only count those you can see at the same time (they might fly behind your back to the next corner and continue singing there… not probable? Who knows…)
  2. Great Tit – Two. They confused me without end because I actually saw two juvenile first, already big enough for me to think “hey, this is a different type of swamp tit!”. Embarrassing enough, but you don’t see the little ones that often!
  3. Blue Tit – One. Very busy very high up in a tree, no time to loose to collect food for the chicks.
  4. Chaffinch – Three, a complete family with a chick being fed by Mom. And I saw a second lonely chick trying to “climb” a huge tree with a trunk diameter of certainly more than two feet without success. I hope it did not fall from the nest. While I watched, it tried again and again to climb that wall that must have seemed like the Eiger Nordwand from its perspective. But probably it helps if you have two wings, even if they were not flight functional they seemed to provide some stability when beaten fast enough. When I passed by the same tree 20 minutes later again, the little one was gone. I like to think he made it :-)
  5. Great Spotted Woodpecker – One. They are quite common around here, and I got a good and long look at this individual.
  6. Carrion Crow – One. You can’t leave the house without seeing them around here.
  7. European Greenfinch – Two. These had eluded me the prior years, but maybe only by now I have learned to look at the highest tree tops to find them.
  8. Eurasian Collared Dove – One. Beautifully colored bird.
  9. Common Swift – Eight. My current favorite species, I keep watching their aerial maneuvers from my balcony in the evenings :-)
  10. Common Chiffchaff – One. At least, I kept hearing one, I didn’t see it.

Oh, and as usual you can see the online results of the bird census over at the LBV. Will be interesting to see the trends in bird population.

To learn more bird-songs, I bought the – German language only, sorry – book Grundkurs Vogelstimmen: Heimische Vögel an ihren Stimmen erkennen, written by Hans-Heiner Bergmann and Uwe Westphal. Not sure on my success with that book, though, I will report in a later post, so stay tuned and subscribe!

Birding — No Comments
9
Jan 11

Bird Census 2011

The “Stunde der Wintervögel“, you could say “one hour for the winter’s birds”, aims every year to determine the health of the bird population in our country. The mechanism is simple enough – volunteers spend one hour on the 6th of January (conveniently being Epiphany, a public holiday in Bavaria) or the following weekend at one site counting the birds of each species seen during that period.

The result is an overview of the Bavarian bird population, at least of the most commonly seen song birds, giving the nature protecting NGOs like the Landesbund für Vogelschutz in Bayern (LBV) or the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU) the data they need to act protecting the birds.

And for a birder, there is of course no better excuse to spend that hour birding than for a larger cause :-)

I had participated – and reported here – already in 2009 and 2010, and this time I again chose a different place for my birding – a place at the eastern shore of the famous Starnberger See some 40 km south-west of Munich. So in addition to the song birds in the trees near a winter RV park there, I also hoped to add some water fowl.

And here is the result:

  1. Three Great Tits. At least. Probably ten, but you’re tasked to count only those that you can clearly see concurrently, because the danger of counting the same individuum more than once is just too high. And these as usual gave me a hard time telling them apart.
  2. One Blue Tit. I kept having one in my binoculars over and over again, and again I am sure there were more.
  3. One Long-tailed Tit. Why it was only one I do not know, as they usually come in the dozen, but I was enchanted as I absolutely adore these cuties! Of course, I failed to take a decent photograph (again) – they just never sit still.
  4. A stranger I mistook for an Eurasian Blackcap at first sight – though of course all the Blackcaps have by now found a nice warm place in the southern sun. But I took some photos of my riddle bird (the one shown above is probably the best of these), and of course it is a Marsh Tit (its song made it clear, from the looks it could have been a Willow Tit as well).
  5. Nuthatch. One. I always love seeing these colorful birds.
  6. Treecreeper, short-toed I guess from the habitat. One.
  7. Chaffinch. One, on the ground between the RVs picking up food that fell down from a bird house there.
  8. Carrion Crow. One. It did not seem to enjoy as the other birds did today’s beautiful plus 13° C seemingly announcing spring, but in reality being only Foehn wind turning winter briefly into something, well, muddy, given the amount of snow melting on the meadows.
  9. Two Mute Swans, being fed by the strollers at the lake side.
  10. Six Mallard Ducks, trying to get some of the food as well.
  11. One Blackbird.
  12. One Cormorant, flying high above.
  13. A flock of sixteen or so Black-headed Gulls.
  14. A riddle Gull that swam lonely far out on the lake, as my photos ended up being not sharp enough I could not distinguish between Caspian Gull and Herring Gull. The excellent birding field guide for southern Germany, “Vögel Beobachten in Süddeutschland” by Moning and Wagner mentions both of these being very likely at that spot, so I don’t dare to guess – this bird will go by unreported to the LBV.

Later added (after the official 60 minute counting time was over):

  1. A large flock of Canada Goose. In one sub-flock I counted 13 Canada Goose, and they had a:
  2. Single little Barnacle Goose hiding between them, also flying with them as the Canada Goose took off as one.

All in a very typical result of the most common birds around here, and no big suprises today. But a Long-Tailed Tit :-)

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