A bird appears. Some sense of calm and trust. I truly don't know what or how, but i know I can approach to a certain distance. Perhaps the bird or birds begin feeding or they begin to preen. Those specific behaviors indicate comfort with the situation. When too many glances at me or some other indication like a stretch- relieving tension those tell me I am about to lose this bird, or I have approached too fast, or that the bird feels uneasy with me.
Television work with birds happens completely differently than with a still photograph. Still photographers deal with much smaller lenses with much lower overall equivalent magnification than what I work with. They seem to hammer a bird with flash. Large Fresnel lenses over flashes magnify the light and hurl it at the subject. That effect looks horrible in HD so about 7 years ago I began to make it a habit to never work with still guys and flash. Once in a while you find that it is unavoidable.
Not that I find still photography offensive. There are many many photographs and photographers I deeply admire. But, It is simply a different set of skills. To get a bird to accept you for 1/1000 of a second or to grab a series of frames with the wings raised as a bird takes off requires a different mind set.
Filming Living birds is a joint project between you and the bird. A cooperative venture if you will. The moving image captures behavior. It shows everything that is going on between you and the bird or birds in those moments. Little is left to imagination. You can witness everything this bird feels, IF you are paying attention.
Now sometimes you are filming a day of migration. White-fronted Geese flying up off a central flyway resting spot suddenly bank away. This means nothing except that the birds did not see you until they reached a point where you are revealed to them. Because it is October and it is hunting season birds react differently when people are shooting at them.
But I am simply looking to show the birds in what they are allowing me to see. So when a species reacts in fear to my presence, it means that it has had other experiences involving humans where they now associate humans with the potential for harm to themselves.
This realization is why I no longer hunt or fish. In many ways I never really hunted, fishing was fun for a time but Birding has always been my sport of choice. Wild birds are to be appreciated. I can buy chicken, turkey or other meats and I just don't get hunting any more. My son finds his release in more active sports -snowboarding or hunting in the fall, and I live in Montana where a good percentage of the population find a special sense of being through hunting. I support that entirely.
But when I picked up that first television camera in 1991, when I saw a gigantic lens that fit on an entirely different sort of professional portable camera -an inner shift occurred. The tensions of the earth quietly building now revealed. Internal plate tectonics were realigning the earth's crust. Old mountains shifted to meet in strange new ways. Colors met with dust and light, creating dreams of new horizons- Birds flew from the ancient cracks in the earth calling with foreign tongues.
