Field Notes: Whitetails on the Prairie

I love the prairie in December. In the past, I could be found high up in the Northern Rocky Mountains following the bighorn sheep rut. But now, I find myself drawn to the vast emptiness and all-consuming silence of the prairies that unfurl to the eastern horizon from the toe of the frontal ranges of mountains in the west.

Last year, I scribbled this down in my journal while photographing whitetail deer in Colorado. . .

It’s cold. Windy. Often  snowing. The roads here have turned to ice and temperatures the last few mornings have begun around 5 degrees Fahrenheit. After a pandemic year of not traveling and hanging out at the beach surfing and scuba diving, stepping back into this momentary glimpse of the Pleistocene is exactly what my brain and body has needed.

On the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, the Front Range looms large along the western horizon. To the east is nothing, the endless rolling expanse of grassland that once supported a menagerie of charismatic megafauna that rivaled the Masai Mara, Serengeti, and the Svelte of Africa.  

Of all the reasons in the world to find myself here, it’s potentially one of the most mundane reasons in the world that brought me here. I could be photographing wild horses in the McCullough Peaks. I could be chasing photographs of bighorn sheep in the Wind Rivers or Absaroka Mountains. I could be in the Lamar for wolves, the Tetons for moose, or a snow coach in Yellowstone for bison – that great American thunder beast. Or even Dall sheep in Alaska. Yet, it was whitetail deer that lured me out of early hibernation.

“Deer! Really? Why?” 

That was the response from a friend I spoke with while on the road traveling to Colorado.

As wildlife photographers, it’s all too easy falling into the trap of the exotic. Why wasn’t I on a plane heading to Alaska to photograph muskox in the snow or the aurora borealis? What about island hopping around the north coast of Panama (that’s actually next month)? Or I could be in Florida, drifting along just beneath the surface of the Crystal River photographing manatees. But instead, I’m weathering windchills in the negatives on the prairie in search of deer. Deer! Of all things.

A couple months ago I was mulling over my library of images to consider what subjects I needed to catch up on photographing across North America. I do this from time to time to help me plan trips for the months or year to come. And in doing so, it dawned on me that over the last five years I had only added 4 photographs of whitetail deer to my files.

How could this be? Deer are everywhere. I see them almost every day I am in the field photographing in the lower 48 states. As the climate has warmed, whitetail deer have pushed their way into places they never existed before. And now, from Yellowstone to the Everglades, this species is so common that, like Canada geese, they are easily overlooked.

Don’t get me wrong, when a stunning composition materialized, I stopped and photographed. That’s why I added those 4 new files to my stock library over that time period. But not since 2010 had I set out with the express goal of photographing whitetails. Because they are so common, I ignored them.

From the perspective of someone in the business of selling images, this is problematic. This reminds me of the photo editor who couldn’t find a single photograph of a robin pulling an earthworm out of lawn. Despite the thousands of first rate photographers he worked with across the United States, all of which probably have robins in their yards at some point, this one image, something that should have been a dime a dozen, seemed to be completely missing from the universe.

This alone is reason enough for me to finally schedule a week or two of photographing deer. But there is more to the story. There is also the artistic challenge.

Common species are often the most difficult to photograph.  

Why?

Everyone has photographs of them. 

If there are 20 million photographs in circulation of whitetail deer, why would I want to photograph whitetail deer?

Spending time with species like this, I find myself forced to think creatively. A brown bear charging through the shallows of a river as it hunts salmon rushing upstream is exciting. The spray of the water. The claws and teeth of the greatest land predator in North America. The adrenaline of the experience is enough to keep me coming back over and over.

But a deer is different.

And in this lies the artistic challenge.

How do we make the mundane, the common place, the oft photographed, sexy again?

This very basic question pushes me back to the fundamentals of my own personal philosophy of wildlife photography: the scene is more important than the subject.

I’ve written about this before, of course. But even I have to remind myself of this from time to time.

And so here I am. Freezing my butt off on the prairie. Searching not so much for whitetail deer, but for beautiful light and compositions that just so happen to have a whitetail deer in it.