Category Archives: Photographer pieces
A sticky situation
A few years back I had a memorable journey through Sri Lanka, and I’ve had a soft spot for the birds of this magical island ever since. I’m currently busy compiling photos for our book Cuckoos of the World, and was drawn to a series of snaps of one of my favourite Sri Lankan endemics, the scarce and rather beautiful Red-faced Malkoha, taken in the famous Sinharaja rain forest by tour guide and photographer Amila Salgado.
A nice portrait, but what really blew my mind was this. Take a look.
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A bird carrying nest material? Wrong.
This cuckoo is actually feeding on a gigantic, branch-sized stick insect!
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I had to know more, so I had a look at Amila’s blog (his profile claims that he ‘holds the record as the first birder from Colombo to visit the Sinharaja rain forest in a tuktuk’ – very much our kind of chap). Amila took the photo during a trip to Sinharaja in 2004, just days after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami had hit the island. After seeing the bird in one of the mixed-species flocks (or ‘bird-waves’) that are a speciality of the forest, he took photos as the bird gave the insect a good bash, removing the limbs and the possibly defensive chemical-containing thorax, before tucking in.
Far from being any old stick insect, this is actually one of the world’s biggest insects. After an initial misidentification, an expert in the phasmid world told Amila that his malkoha was munching an adult female Phobaeticus hypharpax, one of the largest of the so-called ‘mega-sticks’, with a body length of up to 236mm. What a whopper.
This wasn’t just a great photo of a great bird doing something remarkable. It turns out that prior to the publication of these photos, the range of this insect was mysterious (with the handful of ancient specimens in collections all labelled simply ‘Ceylon’). So entomologists now know a little more about the beast, although its biology remains almost completely unknown.
Mighty though P. hyparphax is, it is some way behind the world record holder – P. chani, Chan’s Mega-stick, which lives on the island of Borneo. Formally described in 2008, Chan’s Mega-stick has a body length of up to 357 mm; its overall length with the limbs stretched out is an astonishing 567mm! Just imagine that.
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Read about Amila Salgado and his tours – and see more of his great photos – here.
Amila is a contributor to Cuckoos of the World by Johannes Erritzøe, Clive Mann, Frederik Brammer and Richard Fuller – coming soon.
“Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience”
Our guest blogger this week is David Tipling – a well-known professional wildlife photographer who for the last 20 years has travelled extensively, photographing some of the world’s most iconic wildlife. In this week’s blog, David reflects on the early days of wildlife photography and some of its pioneers.
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I was recently asked to take part in a programme for Radio 4 on Emma Turner. If you live in the Norfolk Broads and have a keen interest in wildlife you may have heard of Turner, but largely she has been forgotten. Yet a hundred years ago she shot to fame within the wildlife photography and conservation world, for it was Emma who discovered the first Bitterns breeding back in Britain since their extinction in 1868 and she took images of the young that even a hundred years on are still striking. For these photos she was awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s Gold Medal, a once prestigious award. Blowing the dust off Turner’s best-known book Broadland Birds I got thinking about those early photographers.
Bittern stalking through the marsh in autumn.
Emma Turner was very much a pioneer; she started taking pictures with a plate camera in 1900 just five years after R.B. Lodge took the first ever image of a bird, of a Lapwing on a nest. The limitations of her equipment meant she needed to be within just a few feet of her subject. Turner would get one of her helpers to cover her in reeds or any other natural material to hand and would lie prone for hours in pursuit of often just one image, because once her plate was exposed she had to reload the camera with another. At the same time the Kearton brothers were also experimenting with concealment; they tried disguising themselves in a pantomime horse, made a false tree in which to hide and employed countless other ways of getting close to birds, but neither they nor Emma had yet to start using a simple canvas tent that later became known as a hide.
Early wildlife photographers had to improvise their hides from whatever materials were to hand.
In spite of these rudimentary beginnings remarkably by the start of the First World War nearly every species of British breeding bird had been photographed. Cherry and Richard Kearton blazed a trail and became very well known, indeed Cherry Kearton’s films were screened in cinemas around the world. And by the 1920s there was an ever-growing army of photographers, many still choosing to use the plate camera as it gave such excellent image quality. Plate cameras were still restrictive, however, both in reach (as you had to be so close to your subject) and because you could only expose one image before having to remove and reload the next plate – a far cry from the 10 frames a second photographers can capture now.
It was during the 1920s that camera manufacturers started producing single lens reflex cameras for smaller formats. This was a huge leap forward for wildlife photographers and a decade later another major breakthrough came with the invention of Kodak colour film.
Today's wildlife photographers can use lenses to create the illusion of proximity with their subjects. The long lens used to photograph this resting fox helped isolate the fox's head and provide focus on its one open eye.
Since then our equipment has evolved to allow us to be able to capture the most amazing images from the natural world. But there is still one requirement of wildlife photographers that was as relevant to taking a great picture in 1911 as it still is in 2011, and that is perseverance. Kearton, Turner and the many great photographers that followed them have, of course, all experienced moments of luck when something special happens at exactly the right moment, but the harder you try the luckier you get.
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David is the author of several books and his wildlife photographs have been published widely throughout the world. The fully revised second edition of his RSPB Guide to Digital Wildlife Photography was published earlier this year and is available to buy on our website now. It’s the ultimate reference book for all aspiring and established natural history photographers.
A glimpse of a golden dragon?
This week, a guest blog from author and photographer Marianne Taylor, in search of elusive insect visitors …
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What an Easter weekend it was. Every day was wall-to-wall sunshine, and the heat was more suggestive of August than April. We’d already had one full day out, watching Kittiwakes, Fulmars and Peregrines at Seaford Head in Sussex, and now it was Sunday night and I was surfing around the wildlife websites, looking for inspiration for something to do on Easter Monday. A thread on a message board caught my eye – ‘Vagrant Emperors at RSPB Dungeness’. I read on – three rare dragonflies that were supposed to be in Africa had been found hawking over a ditch down in east Kent.
Twitching, or rarity-chasing, isn’t just for the birders. When we arrived on Denge Marsh Road on Monday morning, there was already a long row of parked cars – everyone eager to see the exotic dragonflies. People were standing on a nearby stone bridge over the ditch that had seen all the action yesterday. No Vagrant Emperors to be seen – perhaps they had flown on north, but it hardly seemed to matter. We were surrounded by wildlife.
A male Marsh Harrier soars away (Marianne Taylor)
Overhead, the local Marsh Harriers cruised and wheeled. Through the morning they shared their airspace with a mini-procession of migrant raptors – a Red Kite, another, a Hobby, a third kite. Closer to hand, a Sedge Warbler sang with extraordinary verve and exuberance. I watched as it pirouetted around a reed stem, then launched itself skywards, singing furiously all the time. Over the creek flew little Hairy Hawker dragonflies, while right below us in the water lurked a hefty Pike, regarding the humans above with a cold and disenchanted eye.
A Sedge Warbler doing its thing (Marianne Taylor)
Then a shout came from down the creek – when all hope seemed lost, someone had spotted the Vagrant Emperor. The electrified crowd moved as one, racing down the path alongside the creek, trying to control swinging binoculars and cameras and dodging ruts and furrows underfoot. We caught a glimpse of the golden-winged dragon just as it disappeared around a bend.
Vagrant Emperor in flight, Dungeness (Robert Cardell)
We waited, and eventually it came powering back along the creek, a volley of camera clicks tracking its progress. We sat in the long grass and watched it go by again, once, twice, three times, and then it was gone. Everyone began to drift away, but we stayed a little longer, watching Swallows skimming the fields around us while fat, clumsy alderflies settled on our shoes and a freshly emerged Hairy Hawker climbed slowly up a reed stem, the sunshine glistening on its brand new wings.
Hairy Hawker (Marianne Taylor)
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Marianne is the author of our brilliant new book RSPB Nature Watch – click the cover below to pick up a copy! You can read more about Marianne’s adventures on her blog, The Wild Side.
The tale of the elusive robin
This week, a guest blog from ace wildlife photographer Ramesh Anantharaman, introducing the amazing and beautiful region of Sikkim, and an encounter with a very special bird indeed …
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Sikkim is a nature lover’s paradise and, with more than 550 species, a birdwatcher’s dream. Set in the eastern Himalayas, this primarily Buddhist Indian state extends from the foothills to some of the highest reaches of the Himalayas, with habitats varying from moist deciduous forests to alpine meadows, snow-clad peaks and high-altitude deserts. As in other parts of the Himalayas, the climate is highly variable. It can rain or be nice and sunny at any time, with extremely cold winters. This makes it testing for the photographer, as the lighting and weather conditions are similarly unpredictable. But many a time the birds do oblige.
Sikkim - foothills and high mountaintops.
This winter was not great for me as a bird photographer. I had not made any major birding trips. I had reached a kind of desperation and my right index finger was itching to work on the shutter of my camera. Then the opportunity for a week-long trip to Sikkim came by! We covered just a few places around the south and west of Sikkim, mainly ranging in the altitudes of 1400m to 3000m. The forests here are mainly of moss-laden oak and sal trees, and the bird diversity is stunning.
Pygmy Blue Flycatcher
Pygmy Wren-babbler
One day on our trip, we had already seen and taken nice photos of Pygmy Wren Babbler, and were visiting the edge of a lake in western Sikkim, hoping to photograph Black-tailed Crake. My dear friend and guide Chewang Bonpo and I were scuttling around the edge of the lake, trying to find a good spot with the best light, and where we could wait in relative comfort, perhaps for a long time – the Black-tailed Crake is a very shy bird. We came across a large oak tree root, which had a depression behind it. This seemed to be a good place to stay put and start the waiting game for the crake. The sun was right behind us, and everything was painted beautifully by the light, with the large root acting as perfect cover. We succeeded in spotting the crake, but it would not come out of its hideout of reeds and bamboo clumps.
Then, suddenly to my right, a small dark shape hopped out of the dense reeds towards us. Chewang suddenly grew restless, and I could see tension on his face. Whispering, he urged me to at least get a record shot of the bird. All he said was that it was something rare. I took a few shots. The bird kept staring at us, but was continuously hopping around the reeds. We sat extremely still and quiet; my hand began to ache, as my 500mm lens felt like a ton now, because of the tension in the air. All of a sudden the bird popped out onto a broken bamboo twig. This was any bird-photographers dream. Green background, perfect light, a natural perch, and a wild bird sitting in the open! I focus-locked and the let the shutters go like a bullet.
The elusive robin.
Satisfied, I stopped and looked at poor Chewang, who was trembling with excitement. He told me that what we had just seen was a Blue-fronted Robin Cinclidium frontale, that this was the first time he had had a good view of the bird, and that this was probably the first time the bird had been photographed in the open, wild and free. He told me that people have spent months on its trail just to get a distant half-glimpse of this shy, shy fellow. Only then did the whole scene started to sink in, and I was left breathless and astonished at what nature can throw at us. We had to come out of our spot behind the root for a bit of fresh air. The excitement had been too much for us.
We’d forgotten all about the Black-tailed Crake …
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So there we go. The inside story of the finest photograph ever taken of this species, the most elusive in Asia. You can see more of Ramesh’s stunning photography here.
Brown-throated Treecreeper
A hungry mouth to feed …
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This week, a guest blog by ace wildlife photographer Martin Goodey – an amazing encounter on his patch on the Isles of Scilly …
‘Come the summer months of July and August, I like to spend an evening or two fishing for Mackerel from the shore. My favourite spot for this is on the east side of St Mary’s at Deep Point. No two visits are ever the same; one day you can fish for hours without a bite, another time you can catch a dozen in a quarter of an hour. Either way there always seems to be something to enjoy, be it a distant pod of dolphins or a curious Fulmar passing so close you feel you could reach out and touch it.
These encounters are, by and large, unpredictable and fleeting. The exposed, salty rocks are not a place to take an expensive camera, and images are captured only in the memory. One day in August last year I had finished fishing and was clambering back up when I heard the familiar peeping call of a Rock Pipit. It was perched on a rock and was close enough that even without my bins I could see it had a beakfull of juicy insects. I expected it to disappear amongst the boulders to find its waiting brood, but instead it bravely stood its ground, waiting for me to pass.
I reached the cliff top and sat down to watch where he or she might go. To my surprise the pipit flew about 50 yards to my left where it was greeted not by hungry offspring of its own but by a monster!
In a wide granite cleft warmed by the late afternoon sun sat a huge, fat Cuckoo.
Over the next twenty minutes or so I watched as both foster parents worked tirelessly to bring in a range of insects. Of course while I was enjoying every minute of this I couldn’t help ruing not having my camera to hand. Finally I cracked and decided “what the hell lets nip home and get it. If its gone when I get back then so be it.”
It took me about ten minutes to make the return trip and to my delight the Cuckoo was still there! I took a few record shots from some 50 yards away, and watched as the pipits came and went with food. I was sure they must have been aware of me but seemed unconcerned. With this in mind I started to cautiously close the gap between us.
Once I was happy I was close enough without causing any disturbance I settled down and was able to take a series of quite intimate photos.
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It wasn’t long before the sun dipped below the trees and I lost the light. I packed up and slipped away, leaving the well-fed Cuckoo with its doting ‘parents’. I saw them together several times over the following days but never at such close quarters.
Sadly the Cuckoo has suffered a significant decline across its range, and the numbers returning to Scilly are much reduced. I fear I may yet live to witness a year without that familiar harbinger of spring. But oh, I do hope not.’
Martin is one of the contributing photographers for our forthcoming Helm Family Guide Cuckoos of the World. To see more of his work, click here.
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