Finding Wildlife part 1: The empathetic animal
Photos and Text by: Jared Lloyd
What could be more important for wildlife photography than the ability to actually find wildlife? This really is the single most important part of the equation. All of the technical knowledge, all of the artistic vision, all of the fancy equipment that collectively costs more than a new Range Rover does us absolute no good if we have nothing to aim our cameras at.
The above paragraph probably sums up my entire philosophy to wildlife photography. Understanding how to consistently plant yourself in front of animals is information that every wildlife photographer must possess. There is nothing subjective about this. This topic is not up for debate in online forums. The ability to predictably find wildlife is not a matter of opinion that waxes and wanes with the ebb and flow in popularity of this month’s new “sage” of wildlife photography.
Without the ability to find and approach wildlife to within a workable distance, you will be hard pressed to take your photography beyond what I like to call roadside photography. That’s to say, shooting from car windows, stopping at bear and moose jams in national parks, following the flocks of other photographers, etc. . .
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of photographs you see in magazines that were created this way. However, if you want to consistently find yourself in great wildlife opportunities without depending upon others to do the work for you, then you will need to step up your game and learn how to do this sort of stuff on your own.
The vast majority of my bestselling images have not come from standing in crowds of photographers. These images come from time and patience, and the ability to slowly work the animals on their time – not mine. Knowing how to find and approach wildlife is the first step in being authentic with your photography.
Sitting here considering all of this, I fully understand that it’s something of a rabbit hole. The range of topics really is infinite. You can earn PhDs in this stuff.
With so much information out there on this subject, a discussion of this topic could easily turn into many hundreds of pages worth of paragraphs, diagrams, instructional photographs, etc. And to be honest, over time that’s what will happen here with PhotoWild.
But when it comes to understanding how to apply biology and ecology to our photography, we have to find something that resembles a starting place. Each animal carries their own biography, and there is no end to the detail you can lose yourself for just one single species. But where to begin?
Like everything else, to begin building a working knowledge of something, we have to establish a baseline of information that is not only practical to know but applicable to all situations – the stuff you can put to use immediately, regardless of where you live, or what species you wish to photograph.
Let’s call this article a 10,000 foot view of wildlife biology for photographers.
Bear with me, cause it might get a little deep for a moment.
Becoming Animal
In his book The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that one of the truly unique traits that distinguishes us from other primates, and thus other mammals in general, is our empathic abilities. This isn’t to say that we are the only empathic beings. In fact, every animal who cares for offspring is empathic by nature and experiences a rich tapestry of emotions just as we do. But we seem to take our empathy to whole new levels.
Empathy, in its most basic definition, is the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another.
Generally, we tend to only think of humans when we think of being empathetic to another. Yet, we do it all the time with our dogs and cats. If we can “understand and share the feelings” of our dogs or cats, then can’t this be applied to other animals? Can’t this extend beyond recognizing and empathizing with happiness or sadness or pain?
At the foundation of empathy is imagination. And it is this imagining that also allows us to step into another’s “shoes,” to understand what motivates them, what scares them, what their sensorial experience of the world is like, and thus know them.
This, many argue, is the foundation of our creativity.
Thus, to be empathetic, we must have a sort of intellectual and emotional out of body experience. To imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s “shoes,” we must imagine what it is like to experience the world as them. We must imagine being them.
So, when a hunter from the San tribe of the Kalahari, or the Yanomamo of the Amazon, explains that you must become the animal you wish to hunt, this is not an esoteric statement. Sure, all of our cosmologies are a little different as well as our world views. But the general meaning of this is quite logical. It’s simply a matter of knowing our subject and trying to see the world through their eyes.
What drives them? What habitat will they be found in? How and why will they move through this place? Where will they pause and why? Where are they coming from, and where are they going? What fears do they have, and why? These, and many other questions, are the things that we must consider.
The leopard wields powerful muscles attached to large claws. The eagle has the power of vision so extraordinary we can only say that it’s similar to a pair of 8x binoculars. The bighorn sheep has hooves that are tacky and soft like a rock climbers’ shoes to help them cling to sheer rock walls like Spiderman. The grizzly has a sense of smell 500 times more powerful than a dog. The list goes on. Every animal on the planet has its superpower, that one evolutionary tactic for being able to survive in this world. Compared to other animals, and especially predators, we are weak, and we are frail. But what we do have is our creativity.
Our success as a species, as hunters and gatherers, has always been based upon our creativity and our imagination. Consider this: most animals have an ecological niche. That is to say, a particular type of habitat they live, a particular type of food they prefer, etc. Long before our species learned to harness the power of wind to travel the world (creativity), we had already fully encompassed the planet. We exist in every habitat. From the artic to the tropics, from deserts to rainforest. Everywhere you go, there is us. And whether it was learning to wield fire, to throw atlatls, create bows and arrows (the first actual machine), stich together hides for clothing, shift our food base from one species to another as we encircled the globe, or came to understand the extraordinary power of plants for medicines, weapons, and drugs, all of this, every step of the way, was the power of our own imagination and creativity.
There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel here. As wildlife photographers, we are a modern continuation of hunters and gatherers. And maybe, just maybe, wildlife photography appeals to you and I for that very reason – we have 2 million years’ worth of genetic memory telling every neuron in our body that this is exactly what we are supposed to be doing.
Of course, our lives today look a little different from those of hunter – gatherer societies. We are removed from the natural world. We are disconnected. Cut off. Very few of us are afforded the opportunity to learn about the world around us from direction observation as our species has always done.
But we do have books. And the internet. And dare I say, the very best resource of them all, the Journal of Wildlife Photography!
Serendipitous opportunities will always present themselves, of course. But devouring everything that you can find on the subjects you wish to photograph is what allows you to, in part, become the animal.
As the saying goes, chance favors the prepared mind. The better naturalist that you are, the better wildlife photographer you will become.
To be continued . . .
ESSENTIAL GEAR WE RECOMMEND FOR FINDING WILDLIFE
Learning to find wildlife to photograph can be one of the most challenging parts of being a wildlife photographer. But there are books and gear that can help make this job easier. From a good set of binoculars to an in-depth guide on tracks and behavior, these are the three key pieces of gear that we don’t leave home without when we are scouting. Purchasing these items through the links below helps keep this part of PhotoWILD Magazine a free resource for wildlife photographers.
