Birds fascinate me. The more time I spend photographing them, the more I fall in love with them.
From the Cape Sparrow, the Fiscal Shrike and the Bokmakierie that commonly appear down at the Zoute River near my home, to the ones that you need to spend a little more time and patience on before you get a good photograph:
I’m thinking Night Heron, Klaas's Cuckoo and the single Phalarope at the salt pans near Velddrif.
Birders keep lists (Birding Life Lists) of all the birds they recorded throughout their birding life. There actually is a handful of people in the world who recorded more than 9000 of the more or less 10000 bird species there are in the world. This is a phenomenal achievement and you need to very carefully keep record of not only the species, but the subspecies, the look-alikes, what seasonal plumage the bird is wearing, and where the bird was found, to accurately identify them. This takes years of bird knowledge, lots of travel and almost fanatical record keeping. Of course, if all this data is shared onto the right birding databases, it is of immense value to researchers.
I, on the other hand, realised that lists are not for me:
When I decided that I need to know more about birds, I approached my good friend, Eric Herrmann for guidance. Eric knows birds. His work is about birds. He travelled all over the world birding wild places in many different countries. On a bicycle. Talk about staying close to nature.
Eric also knows the birds in my part of the world well. Very well, in fact!!
We started my (birding) education with Eric compiling a list of 183 birds that he recorded close enough to my hometown, Hopefield. This way we could keep it practical and I would have more opportunities to go out and search for them.
I, in all my wisdom, decided to add another element:
If I did not photograph the bird, it could not go onto my life list.
Every opportunity I had I went down to the Zoute River, which runs through Hopefield, to see if I could add a few more birds to my Birding (photography) Life List.
When Eric was around we would take longer trips to Rocherpan Nature Reserve, The West Coast National Park and the Bergriver Estuary.
Being able to go out into nature with someone so knowledgeable, has immense value. Eric saw birds that I would not even have looked for and as soon as he identified them, I photographed them.
In less than a year I had photographed almost all of the birds on my list.
I felt such a sense of achievement.
Then one day I reviewed all of the images I took and I was actually disappointed:
Beautiful birds, but very little soul.
I had been “photography trophy hunting.” - I photographed the birds as evidence of my Life List achievement and in the process robbed my audience of seeing a part of their souls.
I once watched Eric identify 46 birds in an hour. Yes, he is that good. Recording birds however, is very different to photographing them and serves a different purpose. It is record keeping. It is more data to improve the accuracy of the SABAP2 coverage. In contrast, I know of no photographer who captured 46 amazing photographs in an hour. A single brilliant nature photograph takes hours, weeks, months, sometimes even years to capture.
This is not about right or wrong. This is about what you are looking for. Eric is a scientist. I’m not. He thrives off data. I thrive off those 5 absolutely transcending pictures I can ad to my portfolio this year.
There is immense value to the list Eric gave me and it helped me learn so much. But only to a point. Beyond that it is about choosing one subject at a time and then putting in the hours to truly get to know that subject.
Intimately.
It is about patiently waiting. Having the determination to go back again and again until one day the magic happens and you are there to capture it. This is what keeps us going as photographers. A few images that transcended time and space every now and then and we are willing “victims” to go back and spend another month or year (who's counting anyway) patiently waiting for the next bit of magic.
I felt proud of my list. But I now know that it can never make me feel as proud as that one picture that at some stage felt almost impossible.
I quit my list.
I’m leaving that to Eric.
I bought a larger coffee flask, more memory cards and a wider hat, and you might find me somewhere in the fynbos focused on a Bokmakierie for hours.
If I’m not there tomorrow, you’ll know that magic happened.
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