ONE'S THAT GET AWAY

Unlike me, my son loves fishing. After a fishing expedition, he sometimes comes home with a great catch, but more often than not, he comes home with empty hands and a sad account about the big one that got away: the heavy, fiercely fighting bass that broke his line; the giant grass carp that snapped his pole; and, of course, the huge catfish that jumped off the hook as he was pulling it out of the water to net it.

Unlike his mother, I tend to believe his stories about the ones that got away, because I’ve experienced the phenomenon of near misses too many times to ever dismiss his claims as tall tales. In fact, I just recently experience a couple of “ones that got away” myself.

Although I sometimes take my son to fish where I’ll be birding, I always stay to myself and do my birding alone. Well, on a recent June 6th occasion at Long Run Park, I had decided to take a break and sit at a picnic table. Although I was sitting and enjoying a cool drink, my cameras were still on and ready for anything that might happen. Yep, they were on and ready, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t, because the male of a couple courting in the park wanted to talk to me about cameras, printing pictures, how he attracts birds, how he deals with an eight megapixel camera, and on and on and on. I did not want to be rude, but I felt like a person who had just been interrupted from reading a good book by someone who wanted to talk about reading good books. Anyway, in the midst of that conversation, a Great Blue Heron appeared flying around the edge of the woods. It was about eighty feet up in the air and the trees rising up twice as high behind it would have made a great background. I would have had six to eight seconds to get off a shot, but the man talking about pictures was standing in my way. I didn’t even get off a bad shot. All I ended up with was the memory and this tale to tell. Unlike as with our son, however, mom believed my fish story. Well, at least, she acted like she did.

Unlike that time one got away, the time before that was at McNeely Lake. This little episode occurred on May 24th: a period during which my Canon SZ20IS had just been declared DOA, I had come to be greatly disappointed with the 55-300mm lens for my Nikon D3000, and I was conducting a failing experiment with a Nikon P300. At McNeely Lake, there is a certain Mulberry Tree that has afforded me a lot of chances to get Cedar Waxwings, American Goldfinches, Baltimore Orioles, and Indigo Buntings. I thought I had a spotted an Eastern Towhee in my P300 viewfinder. It was a little after 5:45 in the evening, the low sun was being blocked by a line of trees, the Mulberry Tree was dense with foliage and fruit, and the bird stayed deep within the tree’s relative darkness. I got three shots with the P300. Each one of those shots would turn to be embarrassingly horrendous. The camera was so difficult to stabilize when its zoom was completely extended that, in one of the exposures, I completely cut off the almost motionless bird’s head. Finally, I just gave up on the shaky thing, and switched to the D3000. I got off seven shots with it, and they all would turn out dark and out of focus.

Somewhat to my delight, however, upon uploaded the pictures to my computer I saw that I had not been shooting an Eastern Towhee, but, instead, I had been shooting at a bird that I had never actually seen before. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “so it got away this time, but I’ll get him tomorrow.” As it turned out, however, with a little immediate research, I realized that, unlike with all of the other birds I had discovered in that Mulberry Tree, I wouldn’t be getting a second chance at this one. This guy was just passing through, migrating northward.

I conveyed this saga not so much as an excuse to show bad pictures, but like my son, I wanted to tell how something fun and exciting happened, and how something really great almost happened. Unlike as with my son, though, I present the below otherwise unpresentable pictures as proof that one really did get away.

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