Hello: As head of field trips and one of the coordinators of the Sax Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival I thought about doing several workshops and one of them was photography. My intent for doing a photography workshop was to help those like myself be able to take better images of birds either by digiscoping or SLR cameras. It never crossed my mind that any workshop in photography was to help address issues between birders and photographers but to just teach a 101 basics in photography at some feeders.
Anyway I decided to cancel out on workshops and instead focus on field trips instead. There is only so much daylight to work with and its pretty tough to schedule workshops and field trips when you only have a handful of leaders to work with. I did add a evening Great Gray Owl Search Trip and hopefully next year we can get some more leaders and workshop teachers in photography to work with us. So far we have 130 registered people for the 2009 festival. Here are my only thoughts about baiting owls: Sometime ago a Boreal Owl was found in Springbrook Park in the Twin Cities. The staff at the park were concern about the owl after hearing about how Boreal Owls are stressed since it was a irruptive season for Boreals. So the staff decided to feed the owl mice and then the crowds came to view the owl from all over the United States. The park was delighted to have so much attention that they had to control the crowd of people coming to see the owl. So they roped off certain parts of the park where the owl roosted but they also were still concern if the owl was getting enough food so they scheduled a feeding time for the owl and even had a nice artificial turf platform where the owl could come down and grab the mouse in front of the crowd of birders and photographers. Soon the park staff gave a name to Boreal Owl and even had T shirts of the image of the owl. The feedings went on and on into late March. I made a post on the listserv that I thought that enough was enough with the feeding. These owls should be heading north, calling for females and looking for nesting sites and etc.. but this owl was getting fat on free mice and it never made it north. Now the arguement was " This was great experience for the park and using this owl for education purposes and bringing awareness to owls" Baiting owls up north for photography leads to one question; is it okay ethically to use a wild animal/bird as bait to lure another wild animal/bird for photography? I am not talking about banding just photography because that is thread here not banding. Also back in 2004/05 owl irruption a Northern Hawk Owl in Atikin Co. was getting baited so much that I was emailed by a serious photographer who arrived at the area where this Hawk Owl was hanging out. No sooner when he parked the car and shut the doors the owl flew across the field and landed right above the parked car on a tree looking down at him The emailer told me the owl looked at him as though the owl was waiting for a free mice to be placed on the ground. In other words the owl was doing what Laura Erickson mentioned in her reply that owls after continuing baiting will look at people as free food. Its just not owls either in Illinois(?) this year a photographer was tossing fish out so he can achieve close up images of Bald Eagles nabbing the fish off the surface of the water. I suspect that this fish baiting is going on in southern Minnesota as well by some photographers. I have money saved to purchase a nice SLR camera and lens and I am learning a lot about what kind of photographer I want to be and I am fairly certain I am not the type to bait owls for flight shots, use playback tapes for songbird photography, deface a spruce tree on public land for photography, toss fake mice out or sausage mice for photography, take photos of pen in wild animals and claim them to be taken in the wild, trespass on private property to achieve photos, disturb roosting areas of Long-eared owls for photos, cut down branches of roosting areas of owls to achieve better images and etc.. I just want to take photos of birds and nature on how I see them. Maybe its time bird magazines that publishes ABA code of ethics and preach in their articles about how to approach nature or photograph nature to only use photos that were not baited in any way by food or by tapes. Mike Hendrickson Duluth, Minnesota Website: http://webpages.charter.net/mmhendrickson/ Blog: http://colderbythelakebirding.blogspot.com/ ________________________________ From: "sc...@aol.com" <sc...@aol.com> To: MOU-NET@LISTS.UMN.EDU Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 5:41:58 PM Subject: [mou-net] Birding and bird photography.... Normally I shy away from these type of threads because of the emotions that are involved, but like someone I know says "You gotta stand for something in life, otherwise you're gonna stand for nothing." :) Let's face it, there are reasonable and sound opinions on both side of the (baiting) issue in raptor photography. It's a gray world. I have followed these types of threads before and find myself agreeing with both sides of the argument, to some extent. I have never baited an owl, but I've certainly thought about it, and can understand why one might do it. I have seen ALOT of owl images through my participation in an online nature photography website, and what I really like is when the photographer denotes if the subject was baited or not. Then, depending on your stance, you can make your own value judgements with full knowledge of how the image was created. I have seen many AWESOME and DRAMATIC images of owls, (that if the photographer is to be believed), did not result from baiting the subject, but rather through time spent, knowledge of the subject, dedication, and LUCK! I have also seen many AWESOME and DRAMATIC images of owls that were a direct result of baiting. I was really hoping that this year's Sax/Zim birding festival was going to have some type of photography component to it, with knowledgeable instructors that could lead a field trip focused on bird photography, (I heard rumors that it might last year), in order to build understanding and mutual respect between "birders" and "bird photographers" and everything in between, as well as promote how much fun bird photography can be in conjuction with birding. We have some very talented bird photographers in this state, that are members of this MOU community, as well as many talented birders, all are no doubt caring and ethical folks to varying degrees. Personally, I think MOU does an excellent job of bringing bird watching and bird photography together for an excellent well rounded website experience. There will always be individuals, who for whatever reason, go a little to far (ethically), and Sparky is right, there needs to be dialouge with those folks to promote mutual understanding from both sides of the "debate". Just as an aside, I put up an image in the showcase section of MOU that is part of a series of images that I took of a hawk owl hover hunting in the bog. No bait was used. I watched the owl for three hours while standing in knee deep snow and had the great luck of the owl hover hunting close by. Bird photography is similar to birding from the aspect of "time spent equals results". Anyway, I'm starting to ramble, take care out there, and good birding to ya! Shawn Zierman. **************Inauguration '09: Get complete coverage from the nation's capital. 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