BirdForum is the net's largest birding community dedicated to wild birds and birding, and is absolutely FREE!

Register for an account to take part in lively discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hermann" data-source="post: 1518108" data-attributes="member: 4925">Well, there's another side to digiscoping you shouldn't forget. Quite a few people use digiscoping to get record shots of rarities or "difficult" birds. In that case the quality isn't really that important, what counts is whether the important features of a bird can be assessed. Digiscoping has made that a lot easier, and I suspect quite a few people use digiscoping mainly for that purpose. Actually, that's nothing new. Much of the early research into Yellow-legged Gulls (L. cachinnans / L. michahellis) in Europe was based on record shots of birds takes at various sites in Northern Germany, many of them on fast slide film (ISO 200/400) through Russian made 1000m mirror lenses. These pictures were *not* pretty, but they allowed the careful analysis of plumage and structural differences that led to the establishment of clear-cut identification criteria. If you've got access to these articles in the German birding magazine "Limicola", you'll find plenty of examples of such shots in the classic articles on the taxonomy of large gulls in Europe. Hermann</blockquote>