This morning, I went to the Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve, an 88-acre park located on Lake Erie to the west of Cleveland proper. The highlight was two Northern Saw-whet Owls, gray morph, perched high above on their respective pine trees. They are so small and so cute, and it was great to view them this morning, along with other species including immature Red-shouldered Hawk, White-throated Sparrow, Carolina Wrens and Dark-eyed Juncos bathing and playing in the streams. I then went to Fairport Harbor and got FOY Bufflehead, so it was a very good day for me. I’m now at 40 FOY species, but who’s counting. Not the best shot below, but you can see him/her….

Today I also started taking a look at getting a new, real spotting scope. I was out today with my camera, and at the high end of zoom, it did not work as well as I thought it would. I had also bought a very cheap 25-75×60 spotting scope from Temu, paid only $53 for it and figured what the hell, give it a try. It’s very dark and not unusually sharp at, well, any distance. But now, I am looking at 20-60×85 Vortex Diamondback as it’s in my price range. I was also looking at the Nikon ProStaff in the same range, and the sales associate at Optics4Birding commented that it was basically a crap scope for $599. There’s so many different models and hard to tell the differences between them.

If figuring out what spotting scope weren’t hard enough, the next pick is a tripod. Things like height and weight really matter, as well as what tripod head it comes with. Carbon fiber is the lightest, and also the most expensive, and it would be easy to buy a scope that is more expensive than the scope itself. Gitzo and Manfrotto are the most expensive tripod systems to buy, are also the lightest. Aluminum tripods are the most reasonably priced, but also heavier and sometimes not as sturdy.

So I will be evaluating all of these things while considering the purchase of a new spotting scope system.