Photographing Wild Things
I don’t aspire to be a wildlife photographer. I'll never work for Nat Geo. But interesting critters do keep popping up and smiling for my camera.
I am not a wildlife photographer. I am not that guy (and fortunately not related to that gal) who gets up at 4 a.m. to go stand in a freezing cold marsh in hopes of photographing a rare muskrat. My best wildlife photos reliably come from the trailcam in the woods near our house in the Oregon forest.
No, I am not immune to the Nat Geo fantasy. I have gotten myself out of bed at 4 a.m. on several occasions in hopes of connecting with large photogenic mammals or fascinating birds in their natural setting, with good golden hour light for prize-winning wildlife photography. In nearly every case I can recall, though, the animal stood me up and left me there freezing to death as the sun too slowly crept over the horizon. Fickle animals.
I have managed to see sage grouse, a chicken-size bird of the high desert whose idea of fun in early spring is to assemble at dawn at mysterious (at least to us humans) locations — called “leks” — in the sage brush. There the males puff out their chests, rattle their tail feathers, and make a sound like an old-fashioned coffee percolator while strutting around and challenging one another, all for the entertainment of the generally bored-looking females that watch from the sidelines, shopping for a mate. As with all wildlife, sage grouse can be unpredictable, so your dawn excursion may be in vain. I’d say I’m batting about one in three. At least when looking for sage grouse, you get to — and should — stay in your car, where it’s warm.
One ambitious winter morning my son, Noah, and I staked out a cougar-killed deer carcass we found in the bloody snow on top of a low basalt rim at Page Springs, near Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Not wanting to get too intimate with the owner of that stash of cougar food, we plopped ourselves down before dawn the next day at a spot just across the Blitzen River, on a ridge where we had a clear view of the recently departed deer — and a river safely running between us and the hungry cat.
Piece of cake, we thought: The cougar wakes up famished and stops by his pantry for a bite to eat before going off to find more deer to kill. We get great photos. And all we have to do is sit silently in the snow and wait — and wait — and wait, until hands and feet are so immobilized with cold that we couldn’t have pushed the shutter button if the big cat had ever showed up. Which it didn’t — not when we were anywhere nearby.
Some wild animals are relatively easy to come by. On the western flank of Steens Mountain, a little south of the tiny town of Frenchglen in eastern Oregon, you can usually see wild horses by driving a few miles up the southern end of the 60-mile loop road that takes you from Highway 205 to the top of the 9,500-foot mountain.
The Hollywood herd, as it’s called, is the most accessible of a number of bands of wild horses in the area. They often hang out near the road and are accustomed to seeing people, so they make for straightforward photography.
The coolest wildlife subject I’ve ever photographed was a coyote I encountered one afternoon four years ago on the Center Patrol Road that runs through Malheur Refuge. Probably a youngster, it saw me — and I saw it — from perhaps 100 meters away. It was walking south as I was driving north. I expected it to startle and flee into the sagebrush at any moment, but it never did. I got quietly our of the car and walked north, taking photos as I got closer and closer, while it continued to hunt mice or other prey as it worked its way south along the grassy shoulder of the road, clearly aware of me but not at all disturbed.
As we got closer to each other, I realized the coyote was nearer to me than I was to my car. I suddenly felt exposed. I’d never seen a coyote so comfortable around people. Was there something wrong here? Dark notions of rabies popped into my mind. I started walking back toward the safety of the car.
Turned out I needn’t have worried. As I reached the car, the coyote caught up with me and then sat down just a short distance away, as though it wanted to pose for a portrait. I shot a large number of frames, then put the camera down and just stood there enjoying the encounter. Finally, the coyote stood up again, gave me a friendly look, and then ambled off to the south. Before it got far away, it turned and looked at me one more time, as if to say goodbye. I’ve never, to my knowledge, seen it again, and I’ve never again had such a warm encounter with a wild animal.
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