While I was able to capture some nice shots of other spring newborns this year, as usual the most ubiquitous and easy to photograph chicks were Canada Geese. Between April and early June these goslings are just about everywhere around the Bay, as evidenced by the goose pellet landmines strewn along miles of shoreline. When running along the bay trail, I sometimes feel more like a triple-jumper than a jogger.
A Canada gosling eats large quantities of short grass
However, as annoying as these geese can be, you can’t deny the cuteness of their offspring! Here are a group of four heading across the road to (literally) greener pastures.
Four Canada goslings cross over the center yellow line of a road
In all I probably saw about ten different groups (gaggles?) of chicks with precocious trouble makers running off by themselves. Each group was accompanied by at least two adults, and some families would group together with four or five adults and as many as twenty little ones. The watchful parents had their work cut out for them, but all in all, this is a relatively safe environment.
A Canada Goose watches over its chicks as they eat short grass
Recently when I lucked out by capturing four different grebe species in one day at Shoreline Lake in Mountain View, I witnessed something new for me – two eared grebes who had paired up for season were not only showcasing their courtship behavior, but were also mating. I was surprised to see this because usually the grebes head north for the summer before mating, and as a result I had never seen this behavior before.
Their courtship seemed to have several stages of intimacy. First, they swam close to each other across the lake as seen above. Suddenly, they would run side by side across the surface of the water (essentially flying very low over the water) and quickly make it to shore, only to turn around and swim slowly back to their starting location.
Part of the eared grebes courtship display is to fly low across the surface of the water together. Once they land nearby, they swim back to their starting location, and proceed to mimic each other. They repeat this cycle of mimicking and flying together until they (usually) mate.
Once they had performed this flight several times, they stayed out toward the middle of the water and proceeded to mimic each other, a behavior seen frequently in other grebe courtship displays.
A mating pair of eared grebes court one another by mimicking one another’s movements. Here the rise out of the water belly to belly and synchronize their head movements.
As I said before, I was surprised to see actual mating behavior. I have not heard of eared grebes successfully nesting in the area, so I assume this couple soon headed north for a more traditional breeding season together.
Lately I’ve been going through my backlog of unprocessed photos, and I happened upon a collection I took one day at Shoreline Lake in Mountain View. A theme of “grebes” jumped out at me right away, as I had captured on camera four of the five common grebe species in the SF Bay Area, within just a few hundred yards of each other, and all in their breeding plumage.
First up were the beautiful eared grebe (above) and the horned grebe (below). At the peak of their breeding plumage, they are quite easy to differentiate, but in their winter colors, it takes a sharp eye to tell the species apart.
A horned grebe dries itself off after bathing by rising out of the water and shaking vigorously from side to side.
As usual, the eared grebes greatly outnumbered the horned grebes, but both species were mingling and fishing together quite happily.
Closer to shore in a sheltered corner of the lake were several pied-billed grebes. While the eared and horned grebes usually migrate north to breed and raise young, many pied-billed grebes raise their chicks in the Bay Area. When they enter their breeding colors, they gain a thick black band around their bill. In the winter, the bill is a solid bone white color.
A pied-billed grebe in breeding plumage swims through calm water
Finally, a clark’s grebe made a brief appearance in the lake, most of which seemed to be under water. Clark’s grebes look similar to the region’s last common grebe, the western grebe. Clark’s grebes also migrate north to mate, however a persistent couple has been trying to raise young over the last few years in another location within Shoreline Park. So far, they have been unsuccessful, with either no chick hatching at all, or the newly hatched young dying within days. A successful nesting would be of great interest to the local birding community, as many have kept watch over this pair’s nest over the last couple of years.
A clark’s grebe flaps it wings to reshuffle its feathers as part of its preening routine
I was happy at the variety of grebes that day, and that I caught some of these species at just the right time: after they had molted into breeding colors but before the left for their journey north.
I took this photo last year of a black-necked stilt and her three young chicks. I had set up in my usual position, with my lens close to the water surface in order to achieve a more intimate eye-level perspective. I was happy with the shoot and this shot in particular, showing all three chicks together with the mother standing protectively over them.
The only thing that bothered me each time to looked at it was the out-of-focus mud bank just peaking up into the frame. It had not been a concern when I was shooting the mother by herself, but once the chicks were introduced to the scene, the mud cut off parts of their reflections and became a distracting element.
The original image included a distracting mud berm obstructing the reflections of the chicks.
This week I took another look at the shot and realized I might be able to pull off digitally removing the mud feature, and finally fulfilling my original vision. The result is below.
I digitally removed the entire mud bank across the bottom of the photo, and restored portions of each chick’s reflections to rebuild what had been hidden behind the mud. While I was at it, I removed a distracting out-of-focus blade of grass from the left hand side of the photo.
I was able to digitally remove the mud, restoring a close approximation of what the chicks’ reflections looked like behind the mud.
Was my change acceptable? Ethical perceptions of photography range wildly. Each photographer and photo critic sits somewhere on the spectrum from thinking that photography is merely a form of art so it is up to the artist’s vision, to thinking that any changes to what was captured by the camera is unethical and not acceptable.
In fact, ethics in photography cover topics other than just post-processing manipulation (which probably gets 80% of the attention). Even when a photograph represents accurately what a camera captures, it does not mean that the scene wasn’t artificially created by the photographer.
I think the judgment lies in how the photograph is presented to the audience. Is this presented as a work of art created in the mind of the photographer? Is it a natural history image, meant to accurately depict a natural scene or behavior? Do the digital edits in any way change the fundamental portrayal of that natural scene or behavior?
For example, in the digitally altered image presented in this article, if I had artificially inserted any of the chicks into the scene with the mother in order to create more emotional impact, that would go beyond what I consider an ethical representation of my work. It would be depicting a behavior in a species that never actually took place. However, the edits I have made fall inside what I consider ethical. I have not changed the position or behavior of any of the subjects of the photo. I have only removed an aesthetically distracting element in order to create a more pleasing photo.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your opinions on the matter.
