A Fort Worth Audubon Society

Funded by Audubon Texas

This grant was used to purchase 7 pairs of binoculars to loan to beginning birders on field trips sponsored by the Fort Worth Audubon Society (FWAS) and to loan to classroom teachers for use in school sponsored field trips. Eagle Optics matched the purchase with an additional 7 pairs resulting in a total of 14 pairs acquired.

FWAS runs a Beginning Birders program lead by experienced chapter members. Their goal is to offer an enjoyable experience while introducing attendees to the various wildlife habitats found in both urban and rural areas in the Fort Worth vicinity. Three advertised trips are held each month at a city park, at the Village Creek Drying Beds, and at a recently restored wildlife habitat.

One of FWAS’s active field trip leaders is also an elementary school teacher who arranges classroom field trips for her school’s students to visit nearby parks to use the binoculars to view wildlife and habitat. The collection of binoculars are also available to other schools when requested.

The inventory of binoculars was down eleven usable pairs which were insufficient to meet the need for binoculars on beginning field trips and clearly inadequate for school class trips where the number of students were usually over 20 students. With the new purchase the inventory is up to 25 pairs.

The Board decided on purchasing 7 pairs of Kingbird 6.5 x 32 binocular model which were matched by Eagle Optics. Instruction cards on how to focus and use binoculars were printed and laminated. The trip leaders and older chapter members were initially skeptical of these cards, but quickly came to realize some novices and even experienced birders did not know how to set-up binoculars for their eye strength and size.

As of December 21st, 2014, the chapter has led 11 field trips. Feedback from the field trip leaders has been very positive regarding new birders using the binoculars. They have reported that new birders who have shown up with cheap plastic-type binoculars or old binoculars that had been in their family for years were amazed at how much more they enjoyed looking at birds through great optics.

Some of these new birders have returned to join other birding field trips and a few have attended our chapter’s monthly general meetings. This has helped our chapter to increase the level of local environmental awareness in our communities.

The binoculars have been popular in the past Fort Worth ISD school ‘career days’ where many inner-city students are amazed at what they see and how much fun it is to look through the binoculars.