For me my birding was getting stale was getting too used to seeing the same birds, there was no direction.
Just ticking them off wasn't enthralling me.
Photography for me has reignited my passion for birdwatching. For example on a trip to great orme earlier this year instead of just observing them and 'ticking them off' from the lower quarry I went up to top quarry to get better pictures, I ended observing them more seeing them interact with each other on the cliff ledges from closer range, and exploring more of the area.
It was an overall much better experience it was like I was new to birdwatching again.
Also I take a fair amount of photos of the same bird, not quite 100s, and the last ones I take always seem to be the best.
I’m with you there Steve. Good post. Going out with a camera has given me too a renewed interest and drive to get out into the field again and see familiar birds through a ‘different eye’.
I also feel the ‘them and us’ thing, and really can’t understand why some feel so upset that others can enjoy birding in different ways to those defined by their own limited view of the world.
It’s also ironic that many of the ‘best’ birds in the last few years have been put in the public domain by ‘photographers’, even if they didn’t necessarily know what they were looking at when the photo was taken (Eastern Crowned Warbler, Long-billed Murrelet are examples, I could go on...) but you won’t hear many complaining once these birds are safely on ‘the list’, no matter who found them, or how.
Perhaps the people who have ‘photographer issues’ are the same ones that routinely come in after a day in the field, fire up the laptop and trawl the forums for photos of the most recent rarity (that they had un-tickable views of) just to find out what it really looked like! And how many would complain if the birding mags didn’t arrive monthly on their doorstep, complete with the latest batch of rarity snaps, illustrated ID articles and the like?
Like it or not, we are in the middle of a photography revolution which has put the ever increasing power of digital cameras into the hands of almost every ‘birder’, and long may it last!
Mike’s right though, we all need to be a bit more tolerant.
Steve