About Easy-Bird-Watching-Guide.com

My love affair with bird watching started one morning while having breakfast at a neighborhood coffee shop I noticed a small bird sitting on the fence. It swooped down to the ground on a cockroach and return to the fence where it made short work tearing and polishing off the relatively large insect.

Soon I brought a small pair of binoculars to watch this “sniper” of a bird make kills. My fascination took a serious turn when I went to the bookstore and found an easy bird watching pocket guide on the local birds of Singapore and Malaysia.

My little feathered friend was a Brown Shrike, a winter migrant visitor from as far up as Siberia. The description in the pocket guide was rather brief so naturally I went on line and found out more about Brown Shrikes from the Internet.

In no time I studied the pocket guide and found that there were a multitude of local birds around Singapore that I didn’t realize existed. I bought a new pair of binoculars or “bins” for short. It was not exactly up to bird watching standard since I didn’t know much about choosing binoculars but with it I began to explore the bird habitats around me.

Much later after some research and knowing more about what makes good bird watching binoculars, I made the next leap upgrading to a premium pair of bins that open up my bird watching experience.

While surfing the Internet I discovered an online forum led by the late Laurence Poh who was pioneering a novel technique for photographing birds that he dubbed as “digiscoping”.

This involved placing a digital camera over the eyepiece of a good bird scope to photograph birds with very amazing results. A digiscoping set up was much cheaper than an SLR camera with a telephoto lens but what made it very attractive was that being digital you could readily share your photos over the internet.

I corresponded with Laurence and eventually bought the same digiscoping combination that he was using being the Nikon Coolpix 900 digital camera and a Lieca scope (see more on Digiscoping). Of course the very first bird I successfully digiscope with this Nikon-Lieca combo was the Brown Shrike.

Capturing beautiful photographic records of birds and sharing them over the Internet is a very satisfying experience. It opened up a whole new world of seeing birds and the serious interest in bird watching became a true obsession.

A new bird sighting is call a “lifer”. I guess the Brown Shrike was my very first lifer (apart from sparrows and crows). The bird guide lists some 350 species of resident and migrant birds in Singapore.

As you can imagine by now, my pocket guide has grown into a library of bird-books that includes most of the available publications to help me identify and learn about both local as well as other Asian birds that turn up unexpectantly on our island.

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<a href="http://www.easy-bird-watching-guide.com/">Easy-Bird-Watching-Guide.com: Singapore Best Bird Watching Site</a>