Since I vowed to do so a few months ago, I have been spending about half an hour per day living in the moment
-- focused, getting outside my head (and away from the PC), learning to
pay attention. Some of that time is spent in meditation. Some of it is
spent sitting in our indoor hot tub a few feet (through the picture
window) from our bird feeders. Some of it is spent at night with
Chelsea the dog, out on the back hill, just listening, sniffing, in the
dark. And sometimes, as I did yesterday, I take my camera and look
carefully, closely, for something to capture on film.
The North
Pond connects our back yard to the Albion Hills Conservation Area, and
since it is sheltered by trees on all sides it is a popular hangout for
shyer wildlife -- deer, foxes, birds that shun the feeder, and even
occasionally wolves and coyotes. You can pull up a deck chair and peer
through the trees unobserved, and if you look closely, and if you are
patient, you will often be rewarded. It took a while staring at the
scene in the first picture below before I noticed the motionless
creature right in the middle of the frame. If you don't see it, look at
the second picture. It was accompanied by a set of three creaking
sounds, a song I'd heard before. But it was white! Not a great blue
heron, which we'd seen before, but an immature little blue heron,
before it gets its remarkable slate-blue feathers and red-brown neck.
The full neck extension indicated high alert, and I tried desperately
but vainly to catch it on film as it rose magnificently into the air,
flapped its enormous, graceful wings, and disappeared into the curve of
the pond.
Frustrated
by my inability to catch the heron in flight, I started paying
attention to other bird movements around the pond. I learned that
catching a bird in flight on film is a bit like playing hockey -- you
need to anticipate when they're going to fly and also guess correctly where they are going and position your camera there,
not where they are currently perched. It took several failures before I
finally figured this out -- and caught a common tern in flight, below:
Pumped
by my success, I then tried to capture an insect -- ideally a dragonfly
-- in flight. I'd posted my photo of a dragonfly at rest before:
But
I learned to my chagrin that insects don't fly at one speed or in one
direction -- they stop, and veer, on a dime. So finally I had to settle
for another insect that had landed, a paper wasp:
More on my Flickr page. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
