...But a wide zoom with long eye relief is another thing Alexis,..I think is very useful for birding,..heck i dont know what can be more useful!...
Wide zooms are a nice innovation and are certainly the way of the future as the default eyepiece on scopes. However, for the sort of birding that I do, which has the primary goal of IDing birds (i.e. it is birding, not bird watching), I don't find magnifications above 30x very useful (except in a few circumstances, e.g. shorebirds on mudflats on the very rare day that the air is stable). In general, when a bird attracts my attention, I am able to identify it with a 30x scope if I can't already ID it with 8x bins. And it's not as if I don't pay attention to distant birds--when I'm birding with other people, I am able to ID, at 30x, nearly everything that anyone points out. Sure, the birds may be small in the view, but the details are there. On those occasions when the details are not there and I need to see better, I usually find that increasing the magnification 2x (to 60x) is generally not enough of a boost to help me [It is quite modest, no?, ...compared to eyes to binos being an 8x boost, and binos to 30x scope being a 4x boost.], or else that atmospheric conditions do not support seeing any more detail at the higher power.
I think that most birders zoom much more than is necessary. It's a bad habit to constantly fiddle with the zoom. Of course those with old narrow-field zooms are _forced_ to zoom to low power (15x or 20x) to find the birds, then zoom in to 30x to get the needed magnification [I think they would be better off instead using a wide-angle 30x and dispense with zooming to gain FOV.], but I note that birders with the new wide-field zooms often do the same. At least they have the option of leaving their zoom at a good all-around power and still enjoying a decent FOV. I notice that most zoomers have a habit of zooming in on a bird of interest beyond what is needed for ID. I consider that a bad habit as it doesn't help with the ID and, by needlessly restricting the FOV, hinders stumbling across other individuals, potentially of other species, near the focal individual.
I do, these days, make heavy use of a wide-angle zoom (the 25-60x as a 40-96x using 1.6x extender on Kowa 884), but not for birding. I use it for digiscoping map turtles to document the presence of several species during visual surveys as a component of my research. The heads of these turtle are quite small compared to most birds, the differences in head patterning are the best means of identification, and the camera benefits from spreading the image over as many pixels as possible, so high magnifications are very useful for that work even though most sighting are within 120 m distance and the magnification isn't needed for ID by eye through the scope. Because the distances aren't very great, atmospheric stability isn't usually an issue.
--AP