If there’s anything that competes on sheer exasperation with the act of threading a needle with one’s hand, it is shooting birds in the wild. With your camera, that is.
For all the vivid fashion quotient that nature has endowed birds with, they are thoroughly disinterested about getting photographed. It makes matters worse that the prettier and the more varicoloured a bird, the more the sensitive its anti-paparazzo radar systems (crows, by that order, are the most cooperative birds to shoot.)
Often, change that to always, getting a good picture of a beautiful bird in the jungle or the mountains can take hours. No matter how stealthy you think you are, the bird, even if it is not facing you, will suddenly register your presence and fly 20 meters away to sit on the branch of a particularly difficult tree. You must, then, spend the next half hour gradually gaining distance so that you are close enough for your 300 mm lens (400 mm, if you’re luckier) to capture a sharply focused, well exposed picture without any jerks. If in the meantime the bird decides to fly off again to a neighbouring tree, you must instantly forget about this insult (not to mention two wasted hours) and start all over again with unblemished optimism, hoping to close in on the bird in the next hour, or before it gets dark. Your best hope is that the bird does not fly away to a far off area of the forest altogether. Everything else is good fortune.
In my pursuits of shooting birds in the forests of the Himalayas and the Western Ghats with my modest 300 mm lens, I have learned a lifetime’s worth of lessons in patience, hustling and stalking. Here are some of the fruits of my labour.
After making me stalk it for approximately two hours in near-zero temperatures in the wild pastures of Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur Valley, this Blue Throated Flycatcher finally granted me this shot.
This White Capped Water Shrike was kinder. On any other day, it would have made me hustle for hours to capture it. But that day, it was more absorbed in catching the feast of insects flowing down the Rupin river in the alpine Har-ki-Dun valley. I, the irritating bird photographer, was someone it could tolerate.
I fooled this Bank Myna, also in the Har-ki-Dun valley, by shooting it from below its bum, outside its largely skyward peripheral vision.
This Oriental Magpie Robin was the least fussy. Was it the chemistry between us, or just its shameless page 3 aspirations, that it actually posed for me?
In the forests of Mahabaleshwar near Pune, lives this evil White Throated Thrush, a gold medal winner in the photographer harassment olympics after having made me chase it for a marathon five hours.