Often when I look out of my kitchen window into my backyard, where several of my feeders and a birdbath are, I'm convinced that all I see are house finches and house sparrows. Then, something catches my eye: maybe it's a bird that moves differently than the rest, or maybe the size doesn't look quite right. I grab my binoculars from my kitchen windowsill and immediately see what my imperfect eyes do not — a bird other than a house finch or house sparrow. Sometimes, it's a delicate pine siskin on my thistle feeder, with tiny beak and subtle yellow wing striping unnoticed without binoculars. Sometimes, it's a junco that I just hadn't seen among the sparrows; and sometimes, it's more out of the ordinary, like a curve-billed thrasher aggressively attacking my seed cylinder.

Watching pine siskins and lesser goldfinches cling to a mesh thistle feeder, expertly pull a tiny rice-sized grain of nyger and remove its thin shell, all within a second or two, is amazing. Only when I watched this through binoculars did I notice how quickly and efficiently they use their beaks. I still don't quite know how they remove the shell so easily, but they do. I've seen it up close.

If you don't use binoculars at your home bird-feeding setup, you don't know what you're missing. Sure, birders are used to using binoculars for bird-watching hikes, but fewer backyard birders take advantage of up-close opportunities at home. Watching birds bathe, eat, cling to trees or puff up against the cold are all more enjoyable and more interesting when you see them up close. Good birding binoculars are usually also good for watching concerts, the opera or sporting events. Monoculars can also work well and are very small and easy to carry.

A few tips when choosing binoculars:

1. Hold them in your hands. Sometimes a pair of binoculars is easy to hold and use for one person but feels awkward in the hands of someone else. This is especially true for women, whose hands tend to be smaller than men's hands. You want to be sure you can hold the binoculars steady and that they are comfortable in your hands and against your eyes. If you have close-set eyes, be sure the binoculars will fold in closely enough to fit your eyes.

2. Choose the right magnification and size binocular for you: Binoculars always have two numbers listed on them: the first is magnification and the second is the size of the objective lens. So, an 8-by-40 means you can see an object eight times closer than you could with your eyes. The second number is the size of the objective lens, the end of the binoculars closest to the object. An 8-by-40 has an objective lens 40 mm across. The bigger that second number, the bigger the lenses and the more light entering the binocular. I like to think of the objective lens as the window. The bigger the window, the more light you have. A large objective lens also makes binoculars larger, so if that second number is 35 or larger, your binoculars are pretty big. If the second number is small, like 25, then the window is smaller. They might not be as bright, but they are more compact and easy to hold and use. Good-quality small binoculars can be better than lesser-quality full-sized ones.

I most often use a 10-by-25 binocular. I prefer small binoculars; they fit my hands better and are just easier for me to grab and use. I like 10-power magnification because it brings the birds closer; but if you don't have very steady hands, this extra power boost can make the image a bit shaky. Eight power are very common and fine for many uses, including watching birds.

3. Close focus. It's frustrating to spot a cool bird sitting 15 feet away and not be able to focus on them with your binoculars.

Many otherwise-good binoculars don't have a close enough close focus. In other words, with some binoculars, you have to be more than 15 feet away, and sometimes as far as 20 feet away, from an object to be able to focus on it. Good birding binoculars should allow you to focus on objects closer than 13 feet. Some even allow you to focus on something only a few feet away, which is amazing if you can catch such a close-up view without spooking the bird. Last Saturday, a customer told me of her stealth system of slowly grabbing her binoculars and watching her birds up close from behind her blinds.

One consideration that is too complex to discuss in detail in this column is eye relief. If you wear eye glasses when using binoculars, be sure that they have an eye relief of at least 14 mm.

There are many factors to consider when choosing binoculars, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Try them out, hold them in your hands and see how they feel. Spend some time playing with them, focus on many different objects and imagine what a flicker would look like at your suet feeder 10 times bigger and clearer than usual.

Anne Schmauss is the co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited in Santa Fe. She is also the author, with her sisters, of the book For the Birds: A Month by Month Guide to Attracting Backyard Birds. Look for her articles in Birds and Blooms magazine.