Category Archives: bird photography

Earth Day, 50th Anniversary

Image

Reply

I can’t escape the irony that on this anniversary of Earth Day, humankind is forced to retreat indoors because of a raging virus and we must leave the natural world to nature. As a result, the air has become cleaner, the water clearer, the animals free and unharassed. I embrace nature as it exists in my back yard, feeding the birds, rescuing honey bees that fall into the birdbath, breathing in the plants, the vegetables and the herbs growing in pots all around our patio. And I turn to poets who have deep roots in nature, like Wendell Berry:

Mama Bird, Baby Bird

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

“The Peace of Wild Things,” Wendell Berry

Sign of Spring

Posted on by
Reply
Mama Bird, Baby Bird

Mama Bird, Baby Bird

Today, I held a fledgling finch I found sitting alone on the backyard patio, looking a bit stunned. At first, I thought he had flown into the glass back doors. His beak opened and closed and his little chest was heaving. He had been sitting in the sun, so perhaps he was overheated. I gently scooped him up in my hands and sat with him in the shade. When he looked like he was perking up a bit, I opened my hands and he hopped onto my knee, looking at me quizzically. I could see some baby feathers still poking out of his chest. Eventually, he flew off into the thick vines that cover the fence along our driveway, a place where finches and sparrows often nest. Later in the day, he and his mom were back out there, the little guy doing his little guy bird dance, begging for his mom to feed him.

It’s always a gift, this rare, intimate connection with the backyard wildlife.

The Ethics of Seeing

Image

9
Spoonbill

Spoonbill

I always have mixed feelings when visiting the zoo. On one hand, I get to see an array of amazing species, but on the other hand, they are locked behind bars. In the aviary of the L.A. Zoo, I spotted this Spoonbill in an enclosure with a couple Sacred Ibises. He (she) was hunkered over, emitting an occasional wheeze. I stood next to him for quite a long time and then snapped his picture, hoping to capture some of his dignity, his beauty, his misery. His eyes were rivetting. I’ve been taking a home study course in bird languages from the ravens, the blue jays, the mockingbirds, the mourning doves, the sparrows, and finches in my back yard. I’m still a novice, but I do notice how much they say with their eyes, speaking paragraphs through blinks and dilations. If I could, I would have told this magnificent bird, “You are beautiful,” and “I’m sorry.”

I lament the fraught relationship between humans and animals. We’re not so different from one another, and yet we humans act as if an opposable thumb grants us an oppressive dominion over everything, having the right to do what we will with other living beings. Heartbreaking stories abound resulting from abuses of that dominion.

Meerkat

Meerkat

In the research I’m doing for my doctoral dissertation on the influences between early twentieth-century women photographers and women writers, I’ve spent some time reading and thinking about the notion of an ethics of seeing, a topic Susan Sontag introduces at the beginning of her seminal book, On Photography. She writes: “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” I certainly believe that aside from the prurient, exploitative, commercial value some photographs contain, a photograph can also be a witness, find beauty that’s overlooked, and stir our compassion for beings other than ourselves.

My own animal photos are inspired by the work of Isa Leshko. I am humbled and moved by the haunting beauty of her images of animals. In particular, her images of elderly animals are incredibly poignant and compelling. If there was ever a photographer practicing the ethics of seeing, she is. She has certainly changed the way I view other beings through my lens.

Ash, Domestic White Turkey, Age 8 I

Isa Leshko’s Ash, Domestic White Turkey, Age 8 I

 

 

A Feather

Image

Reply
A Feather

A Feather

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

–Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons