I took my binoculars for a walk this morning – we went to Stanwick Lakes on their 45th birthday. They seemed to cope well enough. They weren’t needed to identify the singing Chiffchaffs but they came into their own for some distant Sand Martins – my first of 2021.
Later, in the sunny garden as the wind dropped, I saw my first Bee-fly of the year feeding on Lesser Celandines in what might laughably be called the lawn.
It is Spring, for sure.
And the joint NGO petition has jumped by about a thousand signatures in 12 hours.
#stateofnature petition https://bit.ly/3kjLIsX
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Hi Mark, yet another great post, I’m old enough, 69 years young, to remember when birders were split into two camps, those that used Zeiss and those that used Leica binoculars. Things are a lot more ‘cloudy’ now with many more manufacturers available, so the Zeiss/Leica camps probably don’t exist as they once did, my current binoculars, not quite the age of yours, are Zeiss 7×42 Dialyt BGAT really amazing optics. Go team Zeiss (sorry team Leica).
I rather think that birders back then were split into three camps rather than two; those that used Zeiss, those that used Leica and those that could afford neither. Zeiss Jena (8×30 & 10×50) were popular, but many of us used Swift binoculars of various specifications. I think it was Mirador that really established 42mm binoculars (8x or 10x) as the popular format.
Quite right John, having been fortunate to ‘grab’ a look through quite a few other birders optics, I never got the chance with any Carl Zeiss Jena’s, so can’t quantify as to how good they were, but always thought the ‘old school’ leather cases looked the best thing about them. Other than that any optic business that formed and supported an East German football team must have had something going for them I suppose even though they never made it to tier one.
At a 45th birthday, Mark your binoculars could be a touch out of date.!!! Optics technology has moved on a bit since then, but perhaps they are old friends so that one can’t let them go.
Long before i understood the significance of such matters, i remember John Gooders advertising these binoculars.
The chief selling point was the ease with which they could be slipped into a jacket pocket, equally at home in the
countryside, or the streets of the capital, spying on girls in short skirts getting on buses.
By the time i could afford a pair, skirts generally had lengthened.
Trapit – I think you may have extrapolated from the actual words in the advert. Wasn’t he looking at a Kestrel over the Bank? Now a Peregrine would be almost commonplace, so there has been progress.