My wife and I were I suppose "casual" birdwatchers until about 3 years ago lots of walks in the country with a pair of 8X21 bins in case we saw anything then one day we went to the Tees marshes to see what all the fuss was about and found loads of birds we had never seen before. The big broblem was everything was so distant it was frustrating so we bought a scope, suddenly we were adding new lifers almost every week our list has gone from 150ish to almost 250 in three years but biased toward seawatching and estuary birds as no matter how we tried woodland birds were very difficult to find. Two weeks ago we bought a pair of Leica ultravids each ...what a revelation now when we see a movement in a tree we can actually find the bird! we have had about 20 new lifers this year and thought new ticks were going to be extremely hard to come by but now we can't wait for the spring Norfolk in May I think time to finally get Nightingale!