Tertials and Telescopes

Pica finally had a day off oil spill duty (she goes right at it again tomorrow, having to shepherd a national media crew around the Cordelia center at 8 in the morning) just in time for us to attend the Central Valley Bird Symposium down in Stockton. This event has the usual mix of field trips and indoors workshops, but we went down for two reasons — to attend Keith Hansen’s workshop on bird sketching, and for Pica to buy a new spotting scope.

Keith starts his bird sketches with two circles (or ellipses), body and head. In pencil, with eraser. I don’t even generally bring pencils when I go sketching, preferring to be bold in ink. I do see the point though. Keith worked up to an excellent overhead pencil view of a red-tailed hawk, done completely from memory. I decided maybe I should have brought the Derwent Graphitints.

Then to the optics question. It is surprisingly hard to properly compare optics when contemplating a purchase, for in general places that have a wide selection of binoculars and telescopes are few and far between. The best store in Northern California for this task (Out of This World) is way up in Mendocino. This is why one waits for events like the birding symposium because the dealer from Mendocino came down to our neck of the woods with assorted goodies. Pica quickly confirmed that the scope she was investigating was the one she really wanted (the 50mm Nikon ED Fieldscope), but tested out eyepieces before going with the 13-30x zoom instead of the 20x wide angle. She also learned to expect lots of comments saying “oh, what a cute scope!”

Once we got home, I practiced with the Graphitints a bit, but not on a bird, see above.

Baseball note — the new Stockton Sheraton where the symposium was held is right by the ballpark for the Stockton Ports, which is the Single-A minor league team for the Oakland A’s. A nice little stadium — it would be fun to go to a game there next year.