Shooting birds in the city

There is an opinion that in big cities, and small ones too, nature does not exist. “Yes, we have only pigeons and crows,” they said, “there are no birds here.” But a bird, like any inhabitant of the wild, does not like to put himself on display - because it is unsafe, and therefore there are a huge number of different feathered inhabitants in our cities, you just need to start watching. The natural, specially protected and landscaped territories of Moscow are about one and a half thousand objects, including forest and forest park areas, small protected areas, valleys of rivers and streams, dry meadows, squares, boulevards, parks, as well as territories of medical and educational institutions, etc. Together they form the ecological framework of the city, ensuring the livelihoods of citizens and the most important habitat for up to 250 species of birds! Yes, in Moscow alone there are up to 9 species of woodpeckers (yellow, bpd, spd, mpd, white-backed, Syrian, three-toed, green and gray). 

I live opposite Izmailovsky Forest Park, the largest park in Europe, a park squeezed between the eight-lane, perpetually congested Shosse Entuziastov on one side and the MKAD on the other. At the beginning of the last century wolves, badgers and foxes used to live in Izmailovo. The park’s fauna is now poorer, but several foxes still live here, as well as hares (both mountain/white and European), stoats, weasels, martens, muskrats, squirrels and hedgehogs. Three species of amphibians listed in the Moscow Red Book are found in the park: the common newt, the moor frog and the sharp‑nosed frog. The “bird kingdom” is numerous too: more than a hundred bird species have been recorded in Izmailovo, of which 75 species breed and raise chicks. Among them are raptors, owls — the long‑eared owl and the tawny owl — as well as the Eurasian pygmy owl; woodpeckers such as the black, white‑backed and grey woodpeckers; raven, jay, siskins; and winter visitors like redpolls and waxwings, among many others. There are also many songbirds — finches, nightingales, robins, warblers and thrushes — which indicates that relatively undisturbed forest communities have been preserved in the park, allowing birds to live and raise their young.

Try to take a closer look, don't make any noise. Enter the forest park and stand quietly by the tree for fifteen minutes. And suddenly you will find that some large gray-brown bird is swarming in the grass nearby. This is a mountain ash thrush. And the jumping sparrows, on closer inspection, will not turn out to be sparrows at all, but a large group of finches. Not far away, a bright red-breasted robin is carefully examining you on a bush, a warbler is chirping above you, a warbler is echoing it, a large mottled woodpecker is methodically tapping, and somewhere nearby a cuckoo is cuckooing. And suddenly everything froze: a sharp noise of wings, rapid movement — a gaping tit is carried away in its tenacious claws by a sparrowhawk. I did not describe the Russian hinterland, but a typical scene in the Izmailovo forest Park, 150 meters from the Enthusiasts highway overloaded with cars.

Shooting in the city. And so we decided to go out, as we say, "to the fields." For some reason many beginners think that to see real wild nature you need to go to the Amazon forests, not realizing that the world of wildlife is right on our doorstep. I can personally say that I took my best shots of wild birds in Moscow parks, and there are reasons for that: first, in the city a bird is much calmer around people because it is simply used to them. Second, the bird’s escape options are limited. Third, people feed birds in cities. Fourth, there are many colleagues in the city who can tell you where to find which species. And fifth, you have much more time to work with the subject. Typically in the city I spend several days with a subject that is much more tolerant of my presence, whereas on an expedition to the jungles of China or the Amazon I only have a couple of hours at best. As you can see, it’s easier to photograph birds in the city, and there are no fewer subjects to shoot—you just have to learn how to find them. And I almost forgot: in the wild birds are shot, and a duck, for example, can be so panicked by humans that it will flee from you across the field from 300 meters away. In cities shooting is forbidden, and you can even pet a duck while feeding it bread.

Subject of shooting. So, we decided to photograph birds in the city. Where should we photograph them? Birds are found almost everywhere and at any time of year. Even in Norilsk in winter you can find interesting subjects to shoot; once when I was there in April — which was still deep winter for that region, though it was already light because the polar night had ended — someone told me that right in the town you could find a snowy owl and a willow ptarmigan. The first thing we need to understand is that a bird is driven by hunger and food; its entire makeup and physiology revolve around the best way to obtain food and sustenance. For example, the woodpecker has learned to extract food from tree wood, and accordingly its whole body structure — its tongue, beak, shock absorbers between beak and skull, the specific shape of the skull, tail — all have become optimized for that method of obtaining food. That means in the city you will most likely encounter woodpeckers in forests, parks, anywhere there are trees — that is its "biotope." And then, as they say, the details: you'll find the three-toed woodpecker where there are old spruce stands, it prefers that biotope; the black woodpecker where there are large trees; while the middle spotted woodpecker likes mixed forests with oaks. Thus, by studying bird biology, you will begin to understand the "pattern" of how birds are distributed in the city and try to find them there. Furthermore, a bird is not so easy to see because it is colored so that no one will notice it — this is called protective (cryptic) coloration. But a bird is easy to hear, and some songbirds you can simply listen to for a long time. A simple example: in summer it is easier to hear a bullfinch than to see it. Yes, the bullfinch does not fly away; it lives near us in city parks but carefully hides its presence from people. In winter alone it somewhat reluctantly comes to feeders — hunger drives it there; hunger is stronger than fear of people. So how do you find a bullfinch? Just listen to its voice once, and I dare say you will never confuse it with anyone else — "the creak of that old gate." On the Internet you will find a huge number of databases with bird calls. Study them, memorize them, and then you will find birds faster than your eyes can spot them. After that comes the process of approaching, searching, and photographing. By the way, I can recommend a phone app called BirdNet — it's like a bird "Shazam." You hear a bird's call, open the app, record the sound, select an appropriate segment in the audio track and, if you have a network connection, voila — the program will identify the bird. In this way you will gradually learn to identify basic groups of birds by voice very quickly and easily. And if you happen to photograph a bird and cannot figure out which species it is, I recommend registering on the iNaturalist portal and uploading your observations there; the program will automatically suggest what you saw.

Studying biotopes and bird voices are not the only ways to find the desired object in a big city. With the development of technology and messengers, groups of photo hunters have formed in cities, who exchange messages where someone has found someone. They share their experiences and help each other. I advise you to look for such chats in your city or get to know your colleagues, then you will definitely have more opportunities to find an interesting subject to shoot. For example, in Moscow, 900 people enter such chats. 

And that’s not all: there are databases (ornithological and otherwise) where observers record their encounters with birds. Interestingly, by becoming a birdwatcher or bird photographer you can log your observations in these databases, and in that moment your hobby turns into an element of “citizen science” — you become an assistant to researchers for whom these databases are important material for their work. In turn you get statistics of your sightings, your “life list” (a life list is the total number of bird species you have seen in your life), and of course you can see the exact points with coordinates where someone saw or found a bird. Among the best-known databases where you can record your observations I can mention iNaturalist, eBird.org, and ru-birds.ru. Jumping ahead, I must note that you should be especially careful about entering coordinates of red-listed and rare species, and it is also advisable not to disclose the locations of birds of prey and their nests for everyone to see. All of these databases provide an option to hide specific data from the public, leaving it accessible only to researchers. Why is this done? First, so that bird trappers and poachers cannot find a rare bird in the database and remove it from the wild; and second, rare birds are rare for a reason, and the large influx of photographers, birdwatchers, and curious onlookers will most likely introduce a “disturbance factor” — the bird may fly away at best, or at worst simply abandon its nest or die.

In winter, on top of everything else, you can also feed birds and film them at the feeders. I’ve already noted that hunger is stronger than fear of humans, and winter is a terrible, hungry time; I once read a statistic that only one in ten small birds survives until spring — over the winter some will be killed by the cold, others by starvation, some will be preyed on by other birds like hawks and owls, and many will be taken by disease and they will fly away to the other world — beyond the rainbow. But each of us can help them survive this difficult time simply by hanging our own feeder or topping up someone else’s. Whether to feed birds in the city or not is a controversial question: some say a feeder is something unnatural, that it goes against “natural selection,” and by feeding birds we are doing them a disservice. There are studies about disease situations at feeders in London that say feeders are hotbeds of disease and viruses, in particular avian pox. Birds concentrate at feeders and pass illnesses to one another. At the moment I personally believe we’ve already interfered with the habitat of the living world by building cities: the number of places suitable for living and finding food has decreased (and in some places has incredibly increased, for example at dumps, leading to growth in predatory birds like crows and gulls), noise levels have risen, and having done all this it seems strange to debate whether feeders in the city are good or bad. For those who take an active interest in the topic I would recommend finding Vasily Alekseevich Vishnevsky’s book “Birds at Feeders: Supplementing and Attracting,” or watching the author’s videos online. As for me, I like to hang suet with the first snow, which brings all the woodpeckers of Izmailovsky Forest.

By the way, climate change, the availability of food, lead to the fact that many migratory birds stay in cities for the winter. For example, a rowan thrush stayed near my house for the winter, we became friends with him and I brought him a pear or an apple every 2 days. That's how we met each other in the morning, creating a great mood for the whole day. 

Having become friends with Stepan, I could afford to choose the composition, backgrounds and other photographic joys, in spring and summer I would not be able to do this. 

And if you have industrial facilities in your city that generate heat and warm water, then in winter a huge number of waterfowl remain to winter in non-freezing reservoirs. In Moscow, for example, these are points in Tsaritsyno, Kolomenskoye, Krylatskoye, and a number of others. Up to 20,000 mallard individuals winter here, and the most interesting thing is that here you can meet various exotic ducks for our region, which have joined the mallard flocks for various reasons and wait out the winter in relative safety. These are mandarins, sviyaz, shiloh-tails, a harlequin duck has been living in St. Petersburg for many years, and a white-browed goose in Tsaritsyno. Try to take off a mandarin in the wild in the Far East, she will run away from you headlong - a man is killing her there. And in cities it is calm, well-fed, and comfortable - that's why many ducks, like humans, begin to prefer to live in cities. 

The shooting process. Nature photography follows the same general rules as photography — light, composition, the main subject, an idea, “conflict,” and much more are important here as well, so be sure to study the basics of photography. Personally, I like soft, diffused light on cloudy or even overcast days. I try not to miss that time and I rarely go out to shoot when the weather is clear and cloudless. For me, the ideal time in summer is early morning. I sometimes start shooting at 5 a.m., when the sun has just risen, there is morning coolness, and for most birds this is also a time of activity: they’ve woken up and begin to feed actively; at that time the whole forest, field, or meadow is singing. From all sides the birds greet each other and thank the heavens for another beautiful day. Morning is also important because there are fewer people in the parks to scare the birds, but often on weekdays there is a lot of human activity very early, at 6–7 a.m.: runners, many cyclists, and people walking dogs before work. By 8–9 a.m. the number of people decreases, and the next influx comes closer to noon when moms with strollers go outside. Still, morning offers many more opportunities for bird photography. Although I love diffused light, sometimes hard light from direct sun is very important for a shot. The thing is, many birds develop an interesting metallic sheen when hit by direct sunlight, and hummingbirds only really show their colors when sunlight or flash refracts in their feathers. Yes, this is one of those moments when a flash is simply necessary for bird photography. The topic of color in a bird’s feathers is generally very fascinating; for example, you can read about it here (https://dzen.ru/a/Ye_OWayRHmVBA3IQ?utm_referer=www.google.com)