Basic Training

One of the things I discovered that I really liked about my first experience photographing birds, and especially birds in flight, was reviewing photos of flocks of flying birds and finding interesting patterns or formations or "stories" within those random flocks. That is, sometimes really fun or amazing, even artistic groupings occurred when I would crop in on a few of the randomly arranged birds I had captured in the wider frame of the shot. In this case the original frame had nine snow geese in total, with eight of them more or less in a line and one flying just above that line. But when I cropped it in to just these four, it immediately reminded me of a military basic training drill, with a drill instructor (the top bird) squawking orders to the "marching" cadets. In the larger frame with more birds, the formation was not as tight and top bird's open bill was less noticeable because it was so much smaller. Not sure if the "basic training" metaphor works for everybody, but it sure did for me!

 

This shot was taken in the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge.

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