Photographers and Birders
I just love this response from Phil Jeffrey to a cranky birder who thought photographer's were getting too close to the shorebirds at Jamaica Bay. I have often thought that, if birder's had to take photos of the birds the observed, they would become much better birders.I had to crawl about 50 yards on my stomach to get close enough to this Marbled Godwit to snap its photo.
Here is a link to Phil's excellent Web site.
Here is what Phil has to say...
Re: mud.
The north end of the East Pond at Jamaica Bay is notoriously dangerous for soft mud. Do not even think about walking across the very northern end of it. A lot of people have sunk a long way in the mud around there. Stick to the dry ground on both sides, and assume that the ground is almost invariably more treacherous than it looks.
Re: the usual thing about getting close to shorebirds
While I agree with many of Richard Guthrie's sentiments, I have the following to observe:
Jamaica Bay tends to be one of the traditional areas where birders and bird photographers get in each other's way, and as such we might as well hash it out on this list. Consider it open season on this topic, but let's try and keep it below the level of a bona fide flame war.
I do both, of course (birds and bird photography).
What bird photographers do on the East Pond is get down on the mud or sand and crawl towards shorebirds, generally. We tend to get fairly close. The only reason we are able to get fairly close is that we pay attention to how the birds react to our presence. While there's always a small proportion of dumb photographers that don't get it, the vast majority of us understand the birds sensitivity to approach better than probably the majority of birders.If we don't, then we don't get a photo. Most of us understand quite well that as long as you keep still and quiet and low the birds will not perceive you as much of a threat. It might be hard to explain otherwise why I can get Least Sandpipers to come within 10 feet of me on a regular basis. I'm not even taking photographs at that point - I'm just watching them. That having been said if you are NOT willing to get low, be patient, and be respectful of the birds (including at the point when you leave) then you should't be doing it. If you attempt to *walk* up to a shorebird, it will flush. This is bad for you and it is bad for the bird and if it is an interesting shorebird it's VERY bad for anyone else trying to find it.
A classical experience at Jamaica Bay is to lay there in the mud in the early morning, and then the birders start coming in, and then the shorebirds start flushing more. They start flushing more because frankly the birders don't care very much about flushing Least Sandpipers and Semipalmated Sandpipers, in the course of walking the shore of the East Pond looking for Wilson's Phalaropes and Marbled Godwits. Numerous times I've been doing slow and careful approaches on something mundane like a nice looking juvenile.Semipalmated Sandpiper and a few birders will walk behind me and flush them. I'm reasonably sure that they pay little attention to the fact that they've just flushed them - you would get a lot of peer disapproval if you flushed a Wilson's Phalarope or a Baird's Sandpiper or a Marbled Godwit, but I find it hard to believe anyone will take you to task for flushing a Semi. Assume, however that Semi's experience about as much stress as a Baird's under the same conditions, even if the former are an abundant species and the latter borderline rare.
Birders flush, and therefore stress, more shorebirds at Jamaica Bay than bird photographers, perhaps by an order of magnitude or more - they walk around the shore of the East Pond in search of something novel up at the Raunt and beyond and the flocks of shorebirds up along the shoreline flush back and forth as they do so - waste a couple of hours planted at the south end of the East Pond and just see what I mean. It would be nice, for once, if the non-photographer birders were even vaguely aware of that.
I'm not sure how to put the terrorization by Peregrines and the repetitive flushing by humans on the same scale. They flush because they are nervous, but you rarely see a peep that's flushed by a birder exhibit the same level of terror that it shows when there's a Peregrine cruising over the pond.
Phil Jeffrey
