learning to see
Photographs like this one of a rare Geoffrey’s Tamarin do not happen accidentally. It takes hard work, patience, and skill sets that every wildlife photographer has to learn to be successful - chief among those is simply the ability to learn how to find and approach wildlife.
In a small boat, we idled along through the heavy fog that cloaked Panama’s Lago Gatun threading our way through a mind-numbing labyrinth of islands. This is a place that exudes everything you have ever conjured up in your mind’s eye of what a rainforest must look like. Sprawling cohune palms reach out over the water while giant cuipo trees, those pale barked monoliths that play an outsized role in the life and times of harpy eagles, rise from the riotous profusion of tropical life. The roar of mantled howler monkeys in the distance fills the air as so many troops sound off in their morning ritual of call and response, reminding the world they are still here, and they are still the loudest mammal on Earth. Overhead, strange and exotic birds like oropendolas, keel billed toucans, and Amazon red-lored parrots sail past with industrious intent and purpose.
We had entered an area pockmarked by smallish islands connected to each other via giant swaths of emergent vegetation that rose up from the water. Reed like in nature, but with heart shaped leaves and covered in vines, the stuff was everywhere and looked as though they could serve as a connective highway for animals. I had explored the waters of Lago Gatun before, and I knew these areas to be a favorite haunt of snail kites. This made sense, given the small clusters of pink eggs that clung to the stalks of these reeds, laid by the snail kite’s preferred food known as apple snails.
The habitat was immense, especially when islands and connective vegetation was taken together as a whole. Millions upon millions of places to look, to search, to study, in hopes of finding wildlife to photograph. The task, when broken down like this, was overwhelming.
But the overwhelm is only when we find ourselves unable to see the forest for the trees. When we try to look at everything, we see nothing. Instead, we must recognize the bigger picture with an unfocussed gaze, seeing the patterns of vegetation and the natural world around us. Then, and only then, does the small anomaly in the pattern reveal itself to us. Only then does the endemic Geoffrey’s tamarin monkey, smaller than squirrel, silently watching as our boat slipped passed, became discernable.
The recognition of a small speck of white amongst the immense sea of green changed everything. And in an instant, some of the best opportunities I have experienced with any species of monkey unfolded before my lens.
As you can see from this photograph, Geoffrey’s tamarins are very tiny. In fact, they are the smallest species of monkey in Central America. In the context of his environment, you can get an idea of scale - both in terms of the size of the monkey but also of the difficulty of finding one of these little guys in the immensity of the rainforest. If you were to set searching every reed and tree and clump of vegetation in hopes of spotting a tamarin, it would be similar to trying to find a needle in a haystack. Instead, it’s far easier to recognize the general pattern of the environment, scan that, and look for the anomalies.
One of the challenges of wildlife photography in such as place as this is this biological overwhelm. But this isn’t unique to the tropics though. Whether we find ourselves stalking our way through a boreal forest on snowshoes, pulling paddle and kayak silently around the edge of a small pond, or trying to get in touch with our inner Alexander von Humboldt by traipsing across the tropics, there is always a measure of sensory overload that we must learn to both enjoy and see past at the same time.
Some animals make this easy for us. The soft but piercing bugle of a bull elk in the rut is unmistakable from long distances. So too is the roar of the howler monkeys that overwhelm the dawn chorus of nearly every type of neotropical forest. The same can be said for the heft and mass of a bull moose pushing through a muskeg much like the flash of brilliant colors as tropical birds embark on their morning’s purpose. You can’t miss this stuff.
The large, the loud, the colorful. These are the species that are most easy to find and photograph for obvious reasons.
But what of the smaller and more secretive majority?
These animals live their lives amongst us, yet they go unseen, unheard, and unrealized by most – even observant wildlife photographers. Bobcats are a perfect example of this. In the lower 48 states of the US, there are roughly 3.5 million bobcats. This means there are more than 3 times as many bobcats living the US as there are elk. Yet, how often do we see and photograph bobcats?
While snowshoeing along the edge of a meadow in Yellowstone, I noticed the ever so slight movement in my peripheral vision. Mountain chickadees were fluttering a bout on the trunks of old Douglas fir trees, but the color had seemed different. Thinking it was a small bird such as a common redpoll I had probably seen, but needing to make sure, I pulled my binoculars up and began scanning the the area. What I did not expect to find was the shape of two little ears of a bobcat poking up above the snow from under this log.
Anyone can see the 1,500lb bull elk storming about in an open meadow, rounding up his harem of cows, plowing up the sod with his antlers, and generally making a mess of things, drunk on testosterone. But the bobcat is fundamentally different. While the elk grew large as a measure of staving off predation by simply being too big for most predators to concern themselves with, bobcats stay small, secretive, and silent for similar reasons.
Although a bobcat is a highly efficient and deadly predator, they themselves are also prey. This is what we call a meso-predator. Meso means middle. So, they are a mid-level predator. Owls, eagles, foxes, coyotes, wolves, and mountain lions all prey on bobcats. And this is why you rarely, if ever, see bobcats even though they likely live in the in the little patch of woods behind your suburban neighborhood.
The reason that we miss so much of what is actually going on around us, the reason we feel like there is no wildlife where we live, that we have to travel great distances, is the simple fact that we don’t know how to actually see what is right in front of us.
Bobcats don’t have the same sort of built in snowshoes that their big footed cousins the Canadian lynx have. For this reason, in snowy places, they tend to move down in elevation to the edges of rivers and water that don’t freeze simply because the snow depth is less in these areas. Here, they will use fallen logs and logjams along the banks of the rivers as hunting blinds, hiding, waiting, and then ambushing prey such as ducks, geese, swans, and muskrats as they float past. Finding cats in these logjams can be a real challenge. Often it’s the presence of fresh looking tracks descending into the logjams that I notice first.
Tunnel vision is epidemic in wildlife photography. You can’t see the forest if you are staring at the trees.
Distracted minds are epidemic in our society. You can’t be here if you are someplace else.
None of this has anything to do with the craft of photography itself, of course. Like so much of wildlife photography, it’s these types of ancillary and even esoteric skills that often matter more than the knowledge of the camera itself.
When we step into the woods, or whatever habitat you like to explore, we must learn how to un-focus our gaze and see the larger picture before us: patterns and anomalies of the environment. Much like my recent trip to Panama in which it was nothing more than a tiny splash of white in an immense wall of green that gave away the location of a Geoffrey’s tamarin, it’s this sort of unfocused approach to seeing that we need until there is something to actually focus on.
Looking at the bigger picture, continuously observing the patterns in nature, is what allows you to suddenly see the anomaly of a fresh print in the snow on the other side of a river that may lead to a bobcat hiding in a logjam. Seeing the bigger patterns of nature is what will allow you to recognize the flick of the ear of a bobcat laying contentedly on her day bed in a tree well silently watching the world go by. And these subtle clues are what lead to incredible photographs.
I would like to challenge everyone who reads to go out into the natural world and see if you can begin to notice the patterns within nature – with eyes, ears, and nose. Once you can recognize the pattern, you can work your way through that environment scanning until you discover an anomaly. And it’s this anomaly that will likely prove to be the next subject that graces your lens.