This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue
Common Nighthawk, Cypress Hills Prov. Park, Saskatchewan, June 1996. ©William Burt
Luck: the blessing and the curse.
In finding, let alone in photographing any wild and free-willed creature able to absent itself by lying low or swimming, diving, stealing off on foot, or blasting off in flight, you need that blessing. Veer a few feet this way in your searching, and the holy grail is yours, but veer a few feet that way, and it’s lost, perhaps forever. And even if you’ve found it, and your long-sought moment with the camera is within your grasp—even then it might be snatched away before you can say Jack.
I know. My luck gave out in Maryland one night, when for the first time ever a Black Rail stepped out into my waiting viewfinder. My twin-flash apparatus was charged up and ready, but then when I fired, they failed—no light!—and at the dead sound of the shutter’s clunk the rail shot back into the grasses, never to appear again.
The odds! The cruel, impossible coincidence! After weeks of testing, redesigning, and retesting (not to say nights trudging in the marshes), this was the first time ever that my new flash system had to work.
All right, tough luck old boy…but what brought that doomed episode to mind? My plan for this piece was to cite some rare occasions of the other kind—the happy accidents—and the rare photographs to follow. So I’d best get on with it.
Years earlier, before I’d ever been within a hundred miles of a Black Rail, I’d stumbled (almost literally) on a handsome King Rail, and on that occasion every possible determinent had pulled for the photographer. The stillness, and the soft light of a leaden sky; the racing downflow of the grasses, and the big bird holding fast against it with wings out and feathers bristling…I had little else to do but focus up and fire. And as if posed in an old-time portrait studio, he’d held so still at times that I dared set the shutter at 1/16th second to expose the slowest of all color films—Kodachrome 25—and I not only got away with it, but made out the better for it. Those bristling feathers held sharp to their very barbules.
In recalling his first thrilling boyhood photograph—of a young Great Blue Heron, made with a Box Brownie camera and with the assistance of a tutor—the American master Eliot Porter described it as “one of those accidents of photography in which every variable works in favor of the photographer.” So too in large extent had been my King Rail photographs, though I might give myself some credit: I’d already had a working methodology by then, and in those moments with the rail I’d made good use of it.
In any case, my encounter with that regal rail remains one of my happiest of accidents.
More recently, I happened on another outright gift when photographing new-hatched Black-necked Stilt chicks at a nest in Florida, and the gift this time was of timing.
The nest was within 15 feet of a well-traveled boardwalk, and at 6 a.m. I found a small clump of photographers already crouched in place and snapping constantly: a situation all too populous and public for my liking, but so opportune and rare was the occasion that I couldn’t help myself, and seized a crouch space of my own.
But it was later, after all the others had moved on, that this thing happened—and I happened to be ready.
For the first time that morning a lone chick had waddled up to investigate its towering on-duty parent, and my lens had been homed in already on the little fellow; so when for a split-second he leaned back and peered up at those beanpole legs to see what he would be oneday, I needed only flick a fingertip.
That was the crucial instant, and it happened only once. But by the happiest of accidents, I had been ready.
Yet a gift happier still befell me one June morning in the lovely Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan. I’d hiked up to the top of a steep grassy hill, and stood admiring the unspooling plains below when from before my feet came a rough cat-like hiss, and there on the sparse-grassed pebbly earth, with wings held up in sham defiance, sat a Common Nighthawk on her eggs.
I stood transfixed, not quite believing what I saw. I’d recently been thinking that I might propose a magazine feature story on the nightjars, and not only was this nightjar one that I had yet to photograph, but how extraordinary it would be to photograph a nighthawk nesting not on a flat tar-and-gravel roof in Cleveland, Boston, or Chicago but in the old fashioned, natural way: on native prairie.
Stay right there, I told her…then I slowly backed away, turned round and strode off resolutely downhill for the car, and then ten minutes later I returned, huffing and puffing, with my hefty flash-and-camera outfit.
She was still there.
Nobody enjoyed more happy accidents than Roger Tory Peterson, and I still recall in awe a story he had told me in his living room one afternoon when I was just 15.
I was working on an “annotated list” of Old Lyme birds, and had screwed up my nerve to write and ask if he might talk with me sometime about the species he’d encountered locally. It was an audacious thing to do, I suppose, but he replied at once, inviting me to get in touch the next time I was “in the area,” and when we talked at last that August afternoon his tone was one of pure collegiality, as if he were addressing not a young boy but a fellow bird man.
He was working his way down through the checklist, reflecting on the birds he’d noted here and there, mostly by ear, and when he came to the Brown Creeper he stopped short to recollect a morning walk with his close British friend, James Fisher.
Fisher had been visiting the States, and staying in Old Lyme with Peterson. The two were walking down a woodland path one morning, out to enjoy a sampling of the local birds, when Fisher called out in surprise, “I see a Treecreeper.” He was alluding to his country’s own equivalent to our Brown Creeper: a slim mite of northern forests with a decurved bill like a fine dental instrument, designed for tweezing insects from the chinks of tree bark. But no, said Peterson; it couldn’t be. The month was June, heart of the creeper’s nesting season, and no creeper would be nesting this far south on the Atlantic Seaboard…so no, not possible.
But then Peterson himself called out, “I hear a creeper.” Incredulous, he paused to hold forth for his guest upon the crafty way Brown Creepers nest in North America—again not here along the coast, of course, but farther north or inland at high elevations, where they do nest. The nest itself is tucked beneath a sheaf of loosened tree bark, he explained, and he stepped a few yards off the path to illustrate the point. “It would be placed under something like this,” he said, and reached up to pull back a loose hanging sheet, and there behind his hand lay the real nest and young of a Brown Creeper.
Only Peterson. Only to Roger Peterson did such things happen.
William Burt is a naturalist, photographer, and writer with a passion for wild places—especially marshes—and the elusive birds few people see. He is the author of four books, and his traveling exhibitions have been shown at some thirty-five museums across the US and Canada.