Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2015 i Audubon Magazine

AERIAL EVEN JUST ONE LESSER Flamingo is camera candy. But if you don’t want to miss several hundred thousand of the birds in giant rose eddies, as seen here at their breeding grounds at Lake Bogoria, Kenya, then you’ll want to take to the skies. This picture is from 2011, but the history of aerial photography starts in 1858 with French balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon’s hot-airenabled photos of Paris. For a century the technique was used mostly for military reconnaissance, like the CIA’s surveillance pigeon program (its details remain classified). But today aerials are both a standard for landscape photography and for tracking migrations and surveying habitat (see “High-Altitude Exposure,” page 52). Now scientists are shooting even higher: The number of satellite imaging jobs in the U.S. is expected to grow…

Species: Sandhill Cranes Where: Lake Helena Wildlife Management Area, Helena, MT Camera: Canon 7D with a Canon 500mm f4L IS lens and a 1.4X II teleconverter; 1/1,500 second at f/8; ISO 800 “I waited many hours that day for a pair of nesting Sandhill Cranes to emerge from the cattails. I had just decided to give it five more minutes before packing up when this pair appeared, joined shortly by a third crane, which began to engage in a very dramatic and aggressive display with one of the others. With just a few minutes left of the evening light, I was able to capture a sequence that I had never seen before. It was an amazing glimpse into Sandhill Crane behavior, and an incredible moment for me!” Bird Lore: Several…

Species: Painted Bunting Where: Laguna Seca Ranch, near Edinburg, TX Camera: Nikon D4S with a Nikon 600mm lens; 1/4000 second at f/8; ISO 1000 “The Painted Bunting is a hard bird to photograph except in certain places, like southern Texas, where I took thousands of shots of buntings over three days in late May, studying how they drop into the water and then rise. I didn’t want just a wet bird, or one with its face in the water, which would have been easy. I wanted to capture the head up, with eye shine. I wanted water droplets in the air, but small ones that did not distract from the bird. And I wanted to show the beauty of something few people get to see in freeze frame—light shimmering on…

STOP-MOTION MOVIES WERE BORN THE day a man bet horses could fl y. In 1877 landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge wanted to see if galloping horses ever lift all four hooves at once. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, Muybridge placed rapidexposure cameras around a racetrack, each coupled to a tripwire that opened its shutter for 1/500th of a second when the horse ran past. The resulting series, “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop,” proved that horses indeed go airborne, if only for milliseconds at a time. To wow audiences, Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, a backlit rotating glass disk that blurred his freeze frames into a moving image; he presented some 100,000 of his black-and-white images—including the flying eagle seen here—on the same contraption during a 15-year world tour. The zoopraxiscope went on to…

CAMERA TRAP THE AFRICAN WOOD-OWL keeps a low profile. It sticks to the shrubbery and dense trees of sub-Saharan forests, emerging only to pluck beetles and moths out of the African wilderness. Without camera traps—whether live feeds or the motion-triggered one-snap variety that caught this individual in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley—you would have only the owl’s syncopated hoot to help track it down. When National Geographic published the world’s first trip-wire images of deer, in July 1906, two of the magazine’s board members left their seats in disgust. But the response from readers was so positive that it spurred Geographic to become the photojournalism-driven outfit we know today. African Wood-Owl, 2005…

MACRO THAT WE CAN STILL MAKE out this feather’s every ripple and fiber at five times its size is a marvel of modern computing. Digital macrophotography is the process of stacking or combining extreme close-up photos of the same object taken at multiple focal lengths, creating crisp canvases at mammoth magnifications. It’s a big help to scientists, who are usually obliged to alter specimens in some way to achieve this level of detail (the only other technique as powerful, electron microscopy, not only requires coating the sample in gold but also distorts the subject’s true color). It’s a boon to artists, too: With such powerful tools at their disposal, every cilium and strand becomes an unexplored universe. “Feather” Hickory, Pennsylvania 2014…

Species: Great Egret Where: Port Richey, FL Camera: Canon 1D Mark IV with a Canon EF 500mm f/4 IS USM lens and a Skimmer ground pod; 1/800 second at f/4.5; ISO 1600 “A friend took me to a little-known heron and egret rookery. It was dark and gloomy, and the sun would be setting soon. I cranked up my ISO to get more light on the birds flying in for the night. When I couldn’t get enough shutter speed for sharp photos of the birds in flight, I decided to do portraits of the birds that had landed. I noticed this Great Egret and his bright-green lores. He immediately began to fluff out his feathers, then went through the most beautiful series of displaying poses. Later I was struck by…

Species: Laughing Gull, Doublecrested Cormorant, Royal Tern Where: Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve, near Miami, FL Camera: Sony a700 with a Sony F4-5.6/70-400 G SSM lens; 1/2500 second at f/5.6; ISO 320 “One day on Biscayne Bay, there were several sticks placed in the water—a convenient roosting area for gulls and cormorants. Having spent the morning photographing wading birds from my canoe, I turned toward the sun and saw this ‘high key’ image. It was so appealing, especially with the raft of cormorants forming a horizontal line, that I anchored my boat and captured the scene as the birds moved through the water. The sticks are now gone, so this image truly captured a moment in time for me.” Bird Lore: Concentrations of fisheating birds are one of the most typical…

AN OPEN WINDOW ON AN AIRPLANE in flight is not a good sign—except when aerial photographer J. Henry Fair is one of the passengers. Bouncing over the South Carolina coast in a comically tiny Cessna 172—a burnt-orange interior betraying its 1975 vintage—Fair spots something that catches his eye, then jerks open the glass hatch on the aircraft’s door. A deafening roar accompanied by hurricaneforce wind fi ll the cockpit, making the plane’s rollercoaster jolts seem all the more life-threatening. Fair isn’t fazed. Shedding his seatbelt, he leans out the window, pointing his Pentax 645 at the coastal strip of Kiawah Island strung out below. As a boy growing up in nearby Charleston, he and his friends used to visit that nearly uninhabited barrier island in search of wild boar. Now…

DIGITAL MACAWS LOVE COMPANY, BUT even they need a bit of personal space. For famed bird photographer Andrew Zuckerman to approach this Red-andgreen Macaw, a resident of the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, digital photography’s precision at long distance was key. Digital imaging was already well established when Zuckerman began photographing birds in 2007. NASA had begun using it in the ’60s to turn signals from space probes into maps of the lunar surface. The technology was then turned over to spysatellite programs and, finally, adapted by Kodak in the ’70s for commercial use. The first digital print, in 1986, contained 1.4 million pixels; in 2014 a print of the moon’s north pole was 500,000 times bigger. Red-and-green Macaw, 2010…

AUDUBON HAS ALWAYS BEEN KNOWN FOR ITS STUNNING visuals. And this issue—particularly the winning shots from the 2015 Audubon Photography Awards—shows how true that is. In every issue of the magazine, you’ll see incredible images taken from across the country and around the world. While we may be captivated by images of exotic birds, it is the cardinals, chickadees, and other familiar species that remain closest to our hearts. Audubon scientists recently did an analysis of Google searches for birds. They were surprised to find that the most searched-for birds weren’t the iconic species, like Bald Eagles or Common Loons—instead they were your backyard favorites. And that’s the strength of Audubon: Birds are our common ground. You and millions of other people like you act out of love for birds,…

The defendant enters a plea of guilty to count one, violating the Endangered Species Act, which carries a maximum sentence of 1 year imprisonment, a fine of $100,000, a term of supervised release of not more than one year, and a special assessment of $25 due on the date of sentencing. —UNITED STATES OF AMERICA V. JIM NEIGER SO READS THE PLEA AGREEMENT SIGNED on January 29, 2014, by Florida nature photographer James Neiger. Four years earlier Neiger had visited Lake Tohopekaliga, on the border of Kissimmee, Florida, where his business, Flight School Photography, is located. He was guiding a group of shutterbugs paying roughly $300 per person, per day, for the chance to take close-ups of the Snail Kite, a species so rare that a recent survey showed the…

Species: Double-crested Cormorant Where: Near La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico Camera: Nikon D800e with a Sigma 15mm fisheye lens and an Aquatica underwater housing; 1/200 second at f/9; ISO 400 “Before my underwater shooting trip to La Paz, I had contacted every local dive shop and guide, asking if I would see birds diving on the Gulf of California’s famous schools of fish. Everyone told me November was the wrong season. Disheartened, I wasn’t even looking for birds and just concentrating on the fish. So when the first cormorant dived right next to me, I was ecstatic! Over the next hour, four or five of them dived repeatedly to 40 feet deep until each bird had landed a catch. Then they were gone without a trace for the rest…

Species: Black Skimmer Where: Bolivar Flats Shorebird Sanctuary, near Port Bolivar, TX Camera: Canon 1DX with a Canon 500mm f4 IS II lens and a Canon 1.4X III teleconverter; 1/500 second at f/8; ISO 1600 “My favorite way to take photos at Bolivar Flats is to lie on the wet sandbars, so I can get eye level with the birds. On this day I got to Bolivar before sunrise and met a couple of photographers who were there for some low-level photography. We were taking silhouette shots of some other shorebirds when the skimmers started flying by, right in front of us. We turned to our left, and wave after wave of skimmers were flying directly toward us. This lasted for about 30 minutes. A morning I will always remember!”…