The BWD Optics Annual 2013!

Every bird watcher I know wants to upgrade their optics at some point. Even the best, top-of-the-line binocular or spotting scope can get a bit compromised over time, especially with a lot of usage. Dust, weather, lens scratches, body dings, and just plain old usage take an inevitable toll.

The advances in manufacturing technology for sports optics are incredible, giving us products today that just a decade ago were unimaginable. The $350 binocular that we can buy today is likely to be far superior in optical quality to a bino that cost $1,000 in 2003! While it may be hard to keep up with all the new makes and models, it's certainly a benefit to bird watchers and nature observers to have so many options available to us.

Over the past year or so, Bird Watcher's Digest has published several in-depth articles about birding optics. These articles are so good (in our humble opinion) that we feel they are worth sharing again, which is why we created The BWD Optics Annual.

The content highlights of the BWD Optics Annual include:

•  An optics buying guide based on an interview with birding optics guru Ben Lizdas of Eagle Optics.
• The results of BWD's field test of 8 x 42 birding binoculars.
• "Traveling with Optics" by Alvaro Jaramillo.

It's a whole lot of content on birding optics and it's available as a FREE DOWNLOAD!

Special thanks to the following organizations for their advertising support of the BWD Optics Annual.

Eagle Optics
Carl Zeiss Sports Optics
Swarovski Optik
Vanguard USA
and The Birding Optics Expo

We hope you enjoy the BWD Optics Annual! We welcome your comments, suggestions, and feedback. Please use the comments option on this blog to share your thoughts.

I'll see you out there with the birds!

—Bill

BWD Digital: NOT Scary!

It's Halloween season right now, which means there are scary things all over the place: Jack-o-lanterns, haunted houses, headless horsepeople, robo-calls about the presidential election, Old Man Jenkins from Scooby Doo...

One thing that is NOT scary, however, are the really wonderful digital options available for enjoying Bird Watcher's Digest.  

 

BWD is the magazine that I edit (and which my parents started in our living room in 1978). We're a magazine for folks who love reading about birds and birding. If you download the BWD App or use your e-mail address to log-in to eBWD our fabulous digital edition, flesh-eating zombies will NOT immediately surround you. I give you my word on this.

 

If you like reading about birds on your computer, give eBWD a try. In addition to all the great articles and columns in every issue, you'll get bird videos, sounds, audio files of authors reading their articles, and links to birdy websites all over the Internet. Just a few issues after we launched eBWD, it won a digital magazine award for being awesome. You can poke around the current issue of eBWD by visiting this link: http://www.birdwatchersdigest-digital.com.

eBWD: The digital edition of Bird Watcher's Digest

 Here is a video that we made to help our readers get maximum enjoyment out of eBWD.

 

Or, if you prefer reading on your iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook, or other digital tablet/reader, then the BWD App is a better option because it's designed to take advantage of the tablet format and interface.

You can download the BWD App here in Apple's iTunes. And if you're unsure about whether or not you'll enjoy the app, please browse the many positive comments it has received since it launched in January of 2012.

Here's the current issue of BWD as it appears on an iPad (our digest size is perfect for tablet reading!). Now if YOU get (or GIVE!) an iPad or some other whiz-bang digital gizmo for the holidays, wouldn't it just be wonderful to have some engaging, entertaining content inside it? We certainly think so.

Subscribers to the printed edition of BWD get access to the digital options for FREE! All we need is your e-mail address to verify your subscription.

If you're not a current subscriber to Bird Watcher's Digest it's just $19.99 for one year/six issues. Of course you can also subscribe to just eBWD (six issues is currently $9.99) or just via the BWD App (six issues is currently $4.99). But folks these low-low prices won't last forever...

It's a well-know fact, in these scary times, that one of the ONLY ways to keep flesh-eating zombies away from yourself and your loved ones is to subscribe to Bird Watcher's Digest.

Happy Halloween, happy holidays, happy birding, and happy reading!