| WorldTwitch_-_Binoculars_and_Spotting_Scopes_for_Birding Comparison of popular binoculars and telescopes used by birders, with recommendations. |
| Birding_Comparisons_-_Central_America A summary of families, species, endemics, and specialties for 7 Central American nations. |
| Mayan_Birding Information on birding in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Includes maps, site guides, photo galleries, and trip planning advice. |
| Neotropical_Bird_Club UK-based club for birds and birding in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Cotinga journal tables of contents and some feature articles, bulletin board, conservation awards, sales, news |
| Xeno_Canto Comprehensive collection of bird songs from South and Central America. Includes a database of recordings, a forum, links, and FAQs. |
| Dr__Daisy_Greenthumb Humorous advice on gardening. |
| Free_The_Gnomes A satirical protest of the treatment of garden gnomes, a popular outdoor decorative accessory. |
| Garden_Humor Includes satirical gardening headlines, jokes, and pest identifier. By author David Hobson. |
| Gnomeland Featuring a picture gallery, gnome news and the history of this popular garden ornament. |
| Humor_for_Gardeners A collection of gardening related jokes, puns, riddles, and one-liners. |
| Shady_Deals_Nursery Parody of online nursery catalogs with fictional plants and humorous gardening books. |
| Answers_to_Rhetorical_Questions Covers a wide-ranging number of subjects. |
| Before_and_After The object is to fill in the blanks. Example: "____ day ____" becomes "Sun day light", that is, "Sunday" and "Daylight". |
| Beggar\'s_Opera_and_its_Sanskrit_Wordplay Offers linguistical evidence that John Gay's classic contains wordplay based on the ancient Hindu language. |
| Bovilexics_com Humorous new words and phrases created to define various important and unimportant concepts. |
| A_Collection_of_Word_Oddities_and_Trivia Includes book of word records, palindromic words, pangrams, most beautiful and ugly words, Scrabble words, and Bible word trivia. |
| The_Collective_Noun_Page Entertaining and annotated listing of collective nouns such as 'a murder of crows' and 'a pomposity of professors'. |
| Condit\'s_Linguistical_Predicament Shows how the Latin word, "condit", typifies the political woes of Gary Condit in the Chandra Levy matter. |
| Corsinet_com Offers collections of word play, insults, riddles and jokes. |
| Dave\'s_Fun_Words Categorized list of words which are fun to say. |
| Dictionary_Of_Wordplay A collection of puns, tomswiftys, jokes, tongue-twisters, double entendres, homonyms, and homophones. |
| Dislexicon_Word_Generator Contains Dislexicon, which generates new made-up words and definitions for them. |
| Euler\'s_Day_Off Rearrange a five-by-five grid of letters to form words in crossword fashion. There is a daily puzzle with no registration. |
| Family_Travel_Games A book of family-oriented wordplay to occupy time during road trips, from easy to challenging. No additional implements needed. |
| Faulkner_or_Machine_Translation? A quiz to determine whether literary passages are the Faulkner originals or ones machine-translated from German into English. |
| The_Fictionary Contains new, made-up words which are combinations of other words. Accepts contributions. |
| Fun_With_Words Heteronyms, contronyms, eponyms, word/letter frequencies and other trivia. |
| Funny_Names_Site Contains names like Justin Credible and Mandy Lifeboats. |
| Funnyname_com A collection of amusing, interesting, strange, and occasionally rude names from the phone book. |
| Fun-with-words_com Dedicated to oddities of the English language plus various types of wordplay. |
| Gadzillion_Things_to_Think_About 10,000+ rhetorical questions. Accepts submissions. |
| Humour_Articles Collection of various forms of wordplay: puns, deft definitions and anagrams. |
| Keepers_of_Lists A large archive of amusing lists. Lists can be created, added to and voted on by the public. |
| Language_Fun Shows how English can be distorted, corrupted or misinterpreted under numerous circumstances. |
| LazrChet\'s_Rhetorical_Questions Questions designed to open one's mind, even if no answer is expected. |
| Loquacious_Lipograms Information and links on lipograms, works of fiction that omit a single letter. |
| Lost_in_Translation See what happens when an English phrase is translated by computer back and forth between 5 different languages. Confusion results. |
| The_Mother_of_All_Excuses_Place Over 900 excuses to not go to work or school, police and accidents, breaking dates, doctor, missing church, diet, and taxes. |
| Ms-Sam-Antics Oxymora, famous last words and Confucius Says are just some of the wordplay included. |
| National_Public_Radio New York Times and Weekend Edition puzzle editors present a weekly wordplay challenge. |
Let’s start with a prediction. When you look at these binoculars you will not be tempted to buy them. They are – well – plain looking. They need to go on a diet. But -- and here’s the “but” -- when you look through these binoculars you will want them. Don’t trust me on this. Go look through them! Swift Ultra Lites 8x42 - Reviewed 12/05
I began my birding career with a pair of WWII Navy binoculars that I bought in a surplus store in downtown Manhattan. They had independently focusing eyepieces and must have weighed 3 or 4 pounds. The focus was so slow that I was forced to concentrate on things that didn’t move much, so I really learned to identify waterfowl and wading birds. I never really believed that anyone could reliably identify anything that moved as fast as a warbler. Nikon LX L 8x42 - Reviewed 10/05
When Nikon introduced the Venturer LX in 1998, they set a new standard for brightness and resolution in birding binoculars. At that time it had been several years since the introduction a significant new birding binocular, and the Venturer was named as a“reference standard” by my colleague, Steve Ingraham, at Better View Desired. The Venturer should have captured a huge portion of the high end binocular market. Zeiss Victory 8x42 T*FL Binocular - Reviewed 11/05
Every so often there is a rumor in the industry that a company has produced a new line of binoculars that is supposed to redifine the state-of the art in sports optics. To be state-of-the art, a binocular must have exceptional image clarity and resolution; superior brightness; a wide field of view, and true color accuracy, free of aberrations. Pentax 65 mm Spotting Scope - Reviewed 11/05
Anyone who has spent hours trudging around the bush carrying an 80mm spotting scope and heavy-duty tripod on their shoulder knows how tiring the experience can be and how sore their shoulders can get after awhile. Yet, given the prevailing wisdom, many naturalists still choose to endure the extra weight in favor of the superior optics that 80mm scopes are supposed to provide over the smaller 60-65mm scopes. Swift HHS Audubon 8.5x44 - Reviewed 10/05
The HHS is the latest incarnation of a series of binoculars which have carried the "Audubon" designation. The Audubon line has always been well received by birders and critics, with each new version offering significant improvements over its predecessors. (As with the UltraLite, Swift offers an Audubon poro prism model which was reviewed by my colleague, Steve Ingraham, a few years ago.)<< More Reviews Cloudy Nights Binocular Forum