Wildlife photography is not easy, even if the technical issues are put aside. The subjects may completely lack self-consciousness, but they are often elusive, cautious and intolerant of being close to people, and sometimes are even dangerous, and then it is us that needs to do the avoiding! Scarcity, behaviour and habitat are other reasons why the shot you always dream of making might never happen. Nevertheless, despite the problems wildlife photographers tend in general to be creatively ambitious, fit, experienced wilderness travellers and unusually inventive when it comes to working out how best to get up close to some secretive animal. And this commitment, the focus needed to capture stills or film of evasive species, has seldom been shown more clearly than in the video dairies included in the BBC production, Planet Earth, where months were sometimes spent searching or waiting for the right shot at the perfect moment. But what about the rest of us, that is, those without a budget that enables us spend several months in the Himalayas searching for snow leopards? Well some options are obvious, and used frequently by thousands of photographers every week:
1) Use a hide
2) Employ a professional animal guide or facility
3) Wander around somewhere you know a certain animal frequents.
A hide can be anything; your own kitchen as you photograph birds in your garden or on a bird table, a specialist structure built by a local birding organisation, or the rock or undergrowth that keeps you out of sight of, say, some seal colony. There is also equipment used by hunters called tree stands. These are light, foldable structures that can be taken anywhere and in only a few minutes provide a secure based up to 15 feet off the ground hidden away in a tree. The variations around these themes are probably endless, but they all mean being stationary, quiet and hidden.
Professional services and resources includes anything from hiring a local guide, using a tour bus in, say, Africa, to the polar bear enclosure at your local zoo, or even a local raptor centre.
Wandering around known or new areas is something everyone does, but wildlife photographers, along with hunters, do it more stealthily and with, perhaps, a little more planning that would be the case with the average family out for a Sunday stroll. The key here is have some idea where certain animals are likely to be, to move quietly, be as invisible as you can be, and make sure your scent does not give you away (i.e. leave the cologne or perfume at home).
There are things that can help you achieve these goals. Firstly, you need to have intimate knowledge of the local wildlife, its habitats, habits and behaviours. Secondly, move quietly and slowly, and practice cultivating the ability to observe as much of your surroundings as is possible. We tend generally to not be too good at observing, so it takes practice. An experienced hunter and guide in the US once spent a day with a clipboard sitting just off to the side of a well-used trail. He wanted to see how many people travelling through a grizzly bear area were observant enough to see him. The answer was none at all!
Unfortunately, people in general have lost the unconscious ability to read natural surroundings. Those who would instinctively scan the street ahead for muggers, walk blindly through terrain that is home to astonishing animals, and a few dangerous ones too. As someone who spends a lot of time in the BC backcountry, where, on Vancouver Island, the bear population is dense and there are more cougars than there are tigers in India, you learn to move slowly, listen to everything and scan the forest constantly. Do that and it is amazing what you will find. To get started, all you might need to do to get you into the right frame of mind is to imagine that there is something out there that will cause you serious trouble if you don’t see it first, even if that isn’t actually true!
Of all the things just listed about wandering through a natural wildlife habitat, perhaps the most important, or at least the one that comes first, is knowing your area. Having good knowledge of every local species you are interested in; its feeding behaviour, range, distant travelled each day, scat, calls, and, lastly, its tracks.
Learning to read animal sign was probably something that was once as routine a part of growing up as anything else. It was a part of a hunting and scavenging life, a key aspect of living in the wild. Now, though, few are skilled at this ancient art, but it is one essential key to learning about the animals around you, where they are and what they do.
There is plenty written about this subject, and there are courses that can be taken, but practice in your own area is the thing that is most important. And so the next blog will take these ideas a bit further, and discuss a few key aspects of the process of becoming able to use animal sign as a means to push your wildlife photography a little further along the trail. But in the mean time, if you haven’t done so already, start a collection of books on your local habitat and begin to learn everything you can about what is happening around you. There are no shortcuts, except luck, and that is a capricious friend. More reliable are those years of learning, practice and patience that informs the best, those photographers and film-makers from the BBC Wildlife Unit or National Geographic who often inspire us.