BIRD PHOTOS

This is a big chunk of my life. It’s rather lengthy and often not that pretty and I’m not asking anyone to read everything that has happened to  me as a photographer of birds at nests using high-speed strobes. If anyone had ever told me when I began photographing birds in 1974 that years later, 2007 to be exact, that I’d be charged with 9 criminal charges under the Migratory Birds Conventions Act, and the Species at Risk Act with a potential for $2,250,000 in fines I’d have though it absurd. Yet that’s exactly what happened because of an encounter with biologists and lawmen with the Canadian Wildlife Service at Oliver in the Okanagan Valley. Although I was not aware of it at the time, I was set up and photographing a Yellow-breasted Chat – a bird that was a Species at Risk in a small pocket of the province. It was all very traumatic and I suffered a mental breakdown - but more of that later.