I am cuckoo about birds (pun intended). I’ve been a photography nut since I sneaked and used my mother’s old Kodak Brownie to do a selfie when I was five. I loved birds too. There was something about a creature that refused to let gravity force it to keep its feet on the ground that appealed to the innate adventurer in me.
I think when I ruined one of my mother’s best sheets by using it to construct a glider when I was twelve—which I then used to launch myself off our roof—I was emulating the birds that I loved to watch. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was the Audubon’s Complete Guide to Birds, which was probably one of the most worn of the many books in my library.
I didn’t put my two loves together, though, until I was assigned to Zimbabwe in 2009, a place where politics was and still something of a mess, but that has an abundance of wildlife, furred and feathered. Trips to the countryside and the many game parks and wildlife preserves revealed a veritable cornucopia of birds of all kinds, along with the elephants, lions, and the like, so naturally, my lens began to capture them.
I discovered, though, that birds are as elusive as leopards when it comes to posing for pictures. If you’re lucky and you have a powerful enough telephoto lens, you can get some good perching and standing shots. But the holy grail of bird photography is to catch them in flight. Hard to do, and requires a lot of patience, persistence, and the capacity to accept failure with equanimity.
My obsession about birds is not understood by some of those closest to me. The reaction I get when I strap my camera around my neck before my daily walk is eye rolling and frowns, and when I stop mid-walk to get a photo of ducks swimming in the river or a hawk perched in a tree, I get more eye rolling. There’s no explaining that I’m not doing it for the money, although I do plan to publish a book of some of my photos and I hope it sells a few copies. I’m doing it for the challenge.
Taking good photos of birds is hard. I spent three months when I lived with my daughter and her family, getting up at five every morning and staking out one of their downstairs rooms with a large bay window and a hummingbird feeder just outside that window, trying to get photos of the birds that flitted in to feed. Shutting myself in so no one would come in and make noise to scare the shy little creatures away, the only members of the family who didn’t think I’d gone completely bonkers were my son-in-law and my three grandchildren. The grandchildren even joined me in my quest, keeping alert for the presence in or near the yard of birds whenever they were outside, and then running quietly to wherever I was to let me know.
In the case of the search for the elusive hummingbird, I was eventually successful. Got several good shots of this one regular patron of the feeder, including one where I froze his wings with a super-fast shutter speed.
I used to live in an area with a forest for a backyard that was visited by all manner of avian life. My current residence is on the edge of a small city, near a river that has a wooded walking path alongside it. Not as many species of birds as I had before, but not too shabby, and because of the river, there are species that you don’t usually see in the suburbs, like hawks and great blue herons aplenty.
The perfect place for someone like me with birds on the brain. – NWI
