AVIAN: Birds in a Changing World opened this week at Gallery Five in Oakhurst, California and runs through January 14. The gala reception is this Saturday, December 9th at 4:00-8:00PM at Gallery Five — 40982 Hwy 41, Suite 5, Oakhurst.
The juried exhibition features work by more than 60 artists, and includes two of my photographs.
I’m going to make it a full “avian day” on Saturday, greeting the dawn and a few thousand of my avian friends in the Great Central Valley before heading on over to Oakhurst for the reception. Hope to see some of you there!
You can find out more at the exhibition’s Facebook page.
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A flock of geese takes to the air above a fog bank at dawn
This might seem almost like a photograph of nothing, but I don’t see it quite that way. Arriving very early on a winter morning at one of my favorite bird areas in the Central Valley, I found it quite foggy. It wasn’t so foggy that I couldn’t see, but the atmosphere near the ground was opaque enough to limit my view to perhaps a few hundred feet, especially along the ground that was shrouded by this tule fog.
Before long a huge flock of geese lifted off from behind the low fog and streamed across by view from one side to the other, just about the fog cloud. Because of the distance to the birds their cries were muted and, oddly, everything seemed almost still and quiet even as what may have been thousands of birds were in the air. My idea for this photograph is to make it into a very large print, where the layers may have an imposing scale reminiscent of actually being there.
A great egret takes flight above San Joaquin Valley wetlands
Egrets are among the easiest birds to find — as long as you go where they are — and also among the most impressive. They are mostly individuals, rarely seen in groups, though occasionally they may collect in numbers of a few dozen in the winter. I typically find them around water, ranging from creeks and drainage canals through ponds and even the ocean shoreline. (There is one small pond not too far from where I live where I can almost always find a single egret in the area, and this has been the case for at least the last fifteen years.)
They don’t initially seem too distressed by human presence, especially if they are hunting and have found a target. However, they have clear boundaries and if you get too close they will suddenly take off, with little warning. They can be quite beautiful in flight, usually moving their wings slowly and even gliding, and they flare their wings impressively as they land. Unfortunately, most often they are flying away from my camera position — so it was special to be able to track this one as it flew past me from right to left.
I think that the sandhill cranes may have become my favorite birds in the California Central Valley wetlands. (OK, ask me again later — I may change my mind if I’ve just had a white pelican flyover or discovered a surprise group of tundra swans or photographed a bald eagle, or… ;-) On my first visit to the wetlands, the result of a set of coincidences that I’ve described before, I was completely ignorant about what I was seeing. There were lots of birds, but heck if I knew what they were. Then I became entranced by the Ross’s and snow geese, with the white bodies and black-tipped wings in huge flocks. I photographed this pair in lucky conditions — on a morning that was foggy nearby it cleared enough right here to let the sunrise light strike these birds as they flew above my position.
I saw the cranes, but they seemed on those first visits to be less interesting birds. Their color is less striking. (Though the brilliant red of their heads is attention-getting.) While they flock together, their numbers are typically smaller than those of the geese. But the pump had already been primed for potential interest in the cranes, all the way back in college when I read (but didn’t really fully understand) Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac. The main thing I recalled about that book, for some reason, was the sandhill cranes. (And if this isn’t an example of how a college experience that seemed to mean little at the time planted a seed that sprouted later, I don’t know what is.) In recent years, the more time I spent in the wetlands the more the cranes became central to the experience. In fact, their cries are my primary auditory association with these places, both when heard from birds flying invisibly in the early morning tule fog and the mass returns of these noble birds after sunset.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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