Birding in Stereo: The New BTX from Swarovski

The new BTX from Swarovski offers binocular vision through a spotting scope.

There is a clash of Titans at the top of the sport optics field among three European optics manufacturers—Swarovski, Zeiss, and Leica—vying to be the brand that you choose when purchasing a high-end binocular or spotting scope. Your average serious birder interested in using the best optics available could select a model from any of these three companies and be deliriously happy. In the rarified air of these highest, high-end optics, the differences in the optical quality from one to another is probably beyond what the human eye can perceive. It comes down to what feels good to you personally—in the hand, to your eyes, and around your neck. I own and use optics from all three companies and have enjoyed years of amazing optics performance from them.

When one of these manufacturers develops a new product that they feel is important, or even game-changing, they sometimes organize a tour or event to help launch the new product in a big way. That's how I found myself on an airplane bound for Innsbruck, Austria, just a few hours after returning home to Ohio from the Space Coast Birding Festival in Florida. I'd been invited, along with a bevy of other journalists, optics retailers, opinion leaders, and marketing professionals, to attend the unveiling of a new, top-secret product from Swarovski Optik.

I won't keep you in suspense—like they did us. The new product is called the BTX, and it's a modular binocular unit that fits onto the existing ATX/STX line of Swarovski spotting scopes. This means that if you already own a Swarovski ATX/STX  spotting scope, you can purchase the BTX unit and dynamically change how you use your scope. You simply remove the existing single eyepiece section and replace it with the BTX, rotating it and snapping it in place exactly as you would the eyepiece.

Let me explain in my typically non-techy way what is special about the BTX (which stands for Binocular Telescope. ATX and STX stand for Angled and Straight Telescope, respectively.)

The BTX offers incredible, stereoscopic viewing by combining a binocular vision/two-eyed image with the magnification power of a spotting scope. The image gathered by the objective lens of the scope is split into two images in the front end of the BTX and delivered, in stereo, to your eyes. This is something you probably have to experience to understand fully. And I'm sure you'll get a chance at one of the birding festivals later on in 2017 where Swarovski is certain to have the BTX on display.

The BTX can mount on any of the three ATX/STX objective lens bodies.

Like any binocular, the BTX has multiple adjustments that must be made for optimal, customized, individual use. These are:

• the inter-pupillary distance (the barrels adjust in or out like binocs to match the distance between your eyes)
• the eye relief for those who wear glasses (adjusted by rolling eyecups up or down)
• the diopter (to correct for differences in visual acuity between your two eyes; adjusted on the right eyepiece)
• and the forehead rest

The what?

Yes, the forehead rest. The BTX comes with a forehead rest that makes the viewing experience more stable and somehow more relaxing.

The optics inside the BTX are a product of meticulous engineering and rigorous testing, as we've come to expect from Swarovski. I don't pretend to understand the physics behind how the BTX functions optically, but I can tell you that watching birds in stereo is magical.

I noticed much greater plumage detail on distant ducks, despite the mostly gray and drizzly conditions in which we were birding. Birds seemed to pop out of their surroundings because the stereo view added dimension and a shallower depth of field, which made the focus seem much sharper.

Standing on the shore of Lake Constance, in Austria, scanning through rafts of ducks and loitering flocks of gulls, I felt my eyes and brain practically sighing as they relaxed.  Stepping to use a standard spotting scope next to me, I immediately felt the strain of closing one eye and forcing my open eye to do all the work. This may seem weird, but it was my natural reaction.

The BTX test group at Lake Constance.

Sharing a BTX with another birder or birders is a slight challenge because there's no one-size-fits-all setting for the various adjustments. In fact making those adjustments takes time, so any birder in a hurry or overcome by impatience to get a quick, focused look will likely experience some frustration.

The ultimate use for the BTX might be for birders/ornithologists spending long periods of time scanning shorebird flocks, or doing a sea watch, or a hawk watch, or monitoring an active nest. I believe a bird artist would seriously love field sketching while looking through a BTX. It is this type of extended use that can wear out the eyes and brain. In my few days of using one, the more relaxed stereo view provided by the BTX virtually eliminates this fatigue problem.

A variety of accessories are available with the BTX. A sliding shoe-mount balance rail permits a user to position a scope with a BTX for better balance, preventing its weightier back end from obeying the Law of Gravity at inopportune times. A Gimbal-style tripod head makes for smooth panning in all directions. A 1.7x magnifying extender makes the BTX into an even more powerful optical weapon. And a stay-on case protects your BTX from weather, dings, and other damage.

I can attest personally to the durability of the BTX: The one I was using fell off the tripod mount as I hefted the unit onto my shoulder. It crashed hard onto a cement parking lot, followed immediately by my scream of utter horror. Three of the engineers who helped to develop the BTX saw this happen and rushed to help. Other than a small scratch on the unprotected side armoring, the unit was completely fine. Unlike yours truly. They were pleased to witness this independent demonstration of the BTX's durability. I was light-headed with relief.

Like any top-of-the-line product, the BTX isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's a large unit, and, mounted on the ATX 95, it's a bit on the heavy side. With all of the adjustments necessary to "personalize" one's BTX experience, it may not be as easy to use in group settings, such as on guided birding outings. And the price tag, at $2,689 (MAP, or minimum advertised price) means that there probably won't be a BTX in every birder's arsenal. But this type of quality and innovation comes at a price, as Swarovski has previously demonstrated with its successful EL line of binoculars and the ATX/STX scopes. Additional details and specifications on the BTX can be found here on the Swarovski website.

BTX side view.

BTX showing Stay-on Case and Gimbal head.

These considerations aside, the BTX is a great leap forward, optically. It reminds me of the first time I saw true high-definition television—there was a palpable sense of "NOW I get it!" And then a sense of "I can never go back to the old way of watching again!"

If the BTX sounds like YOUR cup of tea, you'll have to cool your jets until early May 2017, when the first units are scheduled to be available for sale in North America.

My thanks to Swarovski for inviting me to have a sneak peek at the BTX.

The 2011 Big Sit, Part III

Moon at midnight of the 2011 Big Sit.

We left our story last week with me racing (carefully) through the foggy and winding country roads from the high school homecoming dance back home to the farm and the Indigo Hill Birding Tower for the midnight start of The Big Sit!

Well, we made it with 10 minutes to spare. Just as I was about to scramble up to the tower, I spied the homecoming princess heading to the master bathroom for a shower. Knowing this would mean 40 minutes of showering and 50 minutes of the roar of the water heater trying to keep up, I begged like the desperate birder-parent I was for a delay in the hygiene-based activity so that the night would remain quiet enough for me to hear passing migrant birds overhead.

The princess in her regal ballgown and one of her loyal footmen.

This was met with the soul-withering, resistance-is-futile, how-dare-you-even-THINK-that I'm-not-showering-now-you-complete-loser-stare from my adorable and indulgent 15-year-old daughter. I tucked my tail between my legs and climbed into the tower, dented not daunted.

In addition to the roar of the water heater rising skyward on the south side of the tower, there was the surprisingly loud burble from the bird spa on the north side, and coming from all directions was an impressive wall of insect sounds. Hearing the soft seet of a Savannah sparrow overhead was going to be impossible.

Midnight. The hour of enchantment. When everything in the coming day seems possible—even probable! The 2011 Big Sit was ON! My first sound was a nearby ATV. Then some dogs. Then a mufflerless truck. Then coyotes. Plus the shower-bird spa-cricket noise. Then some distant shouting followed by the boom of a large-caliber gun. Then lowing cows. Then coyotes.

This went on for nearly 20 minutes before I heard my first bird: a black-crowned night-heron (actually at least three of them) flying in the darkness overhead, occasionally uttering their tell-tale quock!

Whoa! That's a species we've only had one other time on our farm and it was on a Big Sit about a decade earlier. I remember it clearly—a line of migrants flying slowly southward against the western sunset. A very auspicious start to the 2011 Big Sit!

I smiled as I snapped on my headlamp to tick the night-heron off on the official checklist. Then I pulled out my phone to post the Big Sit's first sighting to Facebook and Twitter. I got immediate reactions from all over the world! Neat! Even though I was alone up in the tower, and would be until just before dawn, I had a digital posse of bird watching pals along with me, connected by satellite-tossed data.

Shortly after 1 am the wind picked up suddenly out of the southeast. Weird! Without being able to hear at all now, and with the night being so dark, there would be no new birds added to the list. I headed back downstairs to catch a few winks.

I was back in the tower at 3:45 and the wind was gone. Almost immediately I began adding birds as flyovers uttering call notes. Many of them I could not identify, but those that I could (indigo bunting, Savannah sparrow, Tennessee warbler, Swainson's thrush, gray-cheeked thrush) I added to the list. The owls started up, too. A great horned owl hooted from the northeast for the next two hours. And two eastern screech-owls whinnied from the meadow's edge.

Julie and Jim (right) joined me in the tower before dawn.

About an hour before dawn, Big Sit stalwart and Mr. Ohio Birding Jim McCormac showed up to join me in the tower. Jim is fun to bird with and always adds a number of species to the list. Sadly most of these are insects and plants which don't actually count on the Big Sit list, but I smile and act like I'm checking them off on the list, which seems to make Jim happy.

Seriously, though, Jim's strong birding ears nailed us veery, black-throated green warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, and chipping sparrow. As dawn hinted at its imminent arrival, the resident birds began stirring: northern cardinal, song sparrow, eastern towhee, mourning dove, Carolina chickadee.

Actual sunrise on Big Sit day.

By the time the sun was up, we were pushing 30 species and already draining a second pot of coffee. It was time for more visiting sitters to arrive. Julie (a resident sitter) came up from the main house and threw her birding powers into the mix. Soon Jason arrived, followed by Nina, and Jen, and Bob and Mimi, and then the day became a blur of birds and shouts, and quick hugs hello, and more coffee.

Early sitters in the birding tower, from left: Jen, Jason, Steve, Evan, Julie, Jim, Nina.

On any given Big Sit (always the second Sunday in October) we're struggling to delay the end of the summer seasons, to find the last migrant songbirds—hoping for a late wave of warblers similar to those we enjoyed just a few weeks earlier. We're also tugging the season in the other direction, hoping for the later migrants and winter visitors to arrive on time or even early, birds like dark-eyed junco, swamp sparrow, Lincoln's sparrow, northern harrier, pine siskin. We got some of these species this year, but missed some, too.

Some birds seem to know you are looking for them and they hide out on Big Sit day. This year it was the juncos and Lincoln's sparrows that gaslighted us. I saw them the day before and the day after. But not on the day of the Big Sit.

View from the tower looking ENE.

By mid-morning we had a list full of birds (62 species at 9:45 am) and a tower full of bird watchers. And a driveway full of cars. It was pretty clear that it was shaping up to be a good day–perhaps even record-setting, if our luck held out. I reminded my fellow veteran sitters that we'd been here before (literally and figuratively). Many times in the past we'd race out to an amazing start for the sit, holding a list of 60 species by 11 am, only to spend the next nine hours adding a paltry few to the list.

The Big Sit is not a competitive event at all. We compete against ourselves and against all the totals seen our previous Big Sits in this spot. There is a prize for The Big Sit, however: The Golden Bird. The Golden Bird prize is awarded each year based on a random drawing of one species from among all of the bird species seen during the Big Sit by North American Big Sit circles. Then all the teams that saw that species are put into a hat and one team's name is drawn at random. That team wins The Golden Bird prize: $500 from Swarovski Optik to put toward a local conservation cause of the team's choosing. Swarovski has generously sponsored The Golden Bird prize for many years, and we Big Sitters really appreciate their support!

The sky made a frowny face.

At 10:30 am a frowning face appeared in the northeastern sky, made from cloud bits and jet contrails. I chose not to take this as an omen.

Monkey-cam shot of the Big Sitters just before the wasps became active.

As the day warmed up, the tower's other residents became menacingly active: wasps! Dozens of wasps of two species swarmed about us, never stinging, just making everyone feel on edge. Within 30 minutes I was alone in the tower, wondering about the effectiveness of my deodorant, but hoping it was the wasps that drove people away.


While I maintained the Big Sit vigil, Jim organized an insect walk around the farm. He knows more about insects and their sounds than most people know about themselves, so he drew quite a crowd of bug-seekers.

Bugging out in the meadow.

I watched them sidle out the middle meadow path and tried not to let the swirling cloud of wasps drive me nuts. The plastic owl we'd mounting on a pole above the tower (in hopes of attracting a stooping attack from a passing merlin) was also being plagued by the wasps, though it seemed less perturbed than I was.

Waspy the owl.

The afternoon doldrums descended upon the Indigo Hill Birding Tower. I lay down on the tower floor and scanned the sky for high-flying raptors. Chimney swifts, turkey vultures, and monarch butterflies were all that passed overhead.

The awesome loneliness of command.

We had eight more hours of sitting. The count was 66. The all-time record Big Sit total for this site was 69. Three more birds did not seem like too much to hope for....

to be continued.....

Birds & People at MBS 2011

I want to share some images with you from the 2011 Midwest Birding Symposium held September 15 to 18 at Lakeside, Ohio. If you were there, you know we had a really great time. If you weren't there, I hope these images will give you some idea of what the MBS is all about. I'll be posting about the MBS a few times in the coming weeks, but for this initial post, let's just take a gander at some of the birds and people. The image above is a male American redstart. The symposium was held at the peak of fall warbler migration along the Lake Erie shore.

Hoover Auditorium was filled with MBS attendees for both morning and evening keynote presentations by folks like Al Batt, Bridget Stutchbury, Peter Dunne, Julie Zickefoose, Kenn and Kim Kaufman, and Greg Miller (one of the three real characters from the book The Big Year). During the MBS, Hoover Auditorium was sponsored by SWAROVSKI OPTIK.

These are our friends Hugo, Irene, and Rafael from the Guatemala-based tour company Operador Latino. They were displaying their tours and materials in a booth in the Birder's Marketplace in South Auditorium. We had more than 60 vendors this year!

Avid Ohio birder/naturalist Sandy Brown keeps her birdmobile loaded with all the gear she needs to enjoy the natural world. Her license plate says it all.

Out at the six MBS designated birding sites, we had volunteer guides stationed, ready to take people out for some bird watching. All guides sported the official MBS guides' trucker hat: black with the MBS Caspian tern stitched on the front panel.

Over at Magee Marsh, many MBS attendees enjoyed looking at the trumpeter swan families. These birds are part of a reintroduction program that is aimed at restoring a viable population of these elegant birds to Ohio.

In South Auditorium on Saturday afternoon lots of bird book authors lined up to sign copies of their books. Shown here from right to left are: Mark Garland, Marie Read, Julie Zickefoose, Connie Toops, and Jeff Gordon.

Another fall migrant, a magnolia warbler. This beauty was photographed at Meadowbrook Marsh and official MBS birding site on the Marblehead Peninsula.

Bird sound expert and Zen master Michael O'Brien lead a walk to the Lakeside pier to listen for the sounds of migrant birds overhead. This was a nice add-on to his MBS talk "Things That Go Seet in the Night."

Super volunteers Marc Nolls and Mike and Karen Edgington helped to organize and run the MBS bird checklist as well as the conservation raffle. Thanks to their efforts, the generosity of our sponsors and donors, and the avid participation of our attendees, the 2011 MBS conservation raffle raised more than $11,000 for bird conservation causes. The Ohio Ornithological Society agreed to match up to $10,000, so our MBS conservation fund total was $21,000! I'm extremely proud of this.

Among the incredibly hard-working MBS staff were, from left to right: volunteer Sheryl Young, Jim Cirigliano, managing editor of Bird Watcher's Digest, and Ann Kerenyi, BWD controller and goddess of ossumness in charge of details for the MBS.

Guides from MBS sponsor Field Guides Birding Tours lead groups of MBS attendees at Magee Marsh. A total of 137 bird species were seen during the 2011 MBS, including a fly-by red-necked phalarope spotted by Cameron Cox at the Leica Lake Watch on the Lakeside pavilion.

My gratitude to the following photographers who took the images above during the 2011 MBS: Ernie Cornelius, Ann Oliver, Liz McQuaid, Sherrie Duris, Micki Hendrick, and Sandy Brown.

Attention Digiscopers!

Bird Watcher's Digest has partnered with Swarovski Optik for this year's "Digiscoper of the Year" competition. Swarovski has offered this competition for several years, and each year the images submitted get more and more interesting.

You can read the rules here.
And you can see some of the images uploaded so far for the competition by visiting the DOTY homepage.

The good news is this: If your image is chosen, you could win some sweet Swarovski binoculars. Images taken using ANY spotting scope and camera combination are eligible (in other words, you don't have to be a Swarovski user).

Here's one of my digiscoped images: a Savannah sparrow in New Mexico.

The not-so-good news is: The deadline for entries is October 31, 2009. You can upload your images in a jiffy online using the form at this link.


Winners of the North American competition will automatically be entered into the international Digiscoper of the Year competition, also sponsored by Swarovski.