But if travel to exotic locales is what turns you on, birding offers a perfect excuse.
Birding reacquaints you with that joy of discovery, with the sensation of being born.
They were in New Zealand to write an article for an ornithologists' website, Swarovski Birding.
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Swarovski also sells two pocket birding binoculars and several kinds of telescopes, also known as spotting scopes.
"It's the Paris-Dakar rally of birding, " says spokesman John Bianchi, of the National Audubon Society, with a straight face.
We talked further as we walked around the museum, pausing at several birding hot spots alas, all the specimens were taxidermied.
Partly that's because the brand is new to the U.S. Its birding binoculars, the EL class, were introduced only in 1999.
While I admittedly have zero knowledge about it, birding is also a big tourist attraction here, but I know more about beer.
Birding is one of the lowest-cost hobbies around and continues to boom.
Lee, 55, started birding three years ago, and now rises before dawn Wednesday mornings to join a weekly bird walk through Central Park.
But my dirty little secret is that I don't particularly enjoy birding in Central Park and have only done so once or twice.
Also, the one time I joined a birding group in the park they counted birds merely having heard their song in some distant tree.
Or contact the nation's largest bird-watching group, the American Birding Association (www.americanbirding.org), or one of 530 Audubon chapters, most of which offer outings and tours.
The most macho birders compete in events like the World Series of Birding in New Jersey and the Great Texas Birding Classic, where teams vie to spot the most species.
At rustic riverfront accommodations like Ambunti Lodge, knowledgeable guides escort early-morning birding expeditions to spot indigenous hornbills, Papuan harriers, Victoria crown pigeons and various birds of paradise in the leafy jungle overhang.
There are few greater thrills, especially in your dotage, than spotting a bird you've never seen before, the effort you put into remembering its plumage and behavior, and then consulting your birding guide and being able positively to identify it.
Some of the best birding spots turn out to be smack in the middle of the most peopled places, like Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and New York's Central Park, where well over 200 of America's 750 bird species pass each spring and fall as they migrate.
I've articulated the pleasure of birding, in much the same way, and if only to myself, when I'm alone in the woods and trying to dissect my ability to spend hours with my binoculars focused on something 6 inches long a thousand feet away, my glasses fogging over, and my neck and arms aching.
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