My First Endangered Species Photo

Well there is nothing short of normal chaos in my work life, I do lots of travelling and usually at short notice but as I am between projects things have become a little hectic. I am waiting for my visa for Russia and while doing some home improvements to the new house last week I got an urgent call from my manager telling me I am to go back to Peru for a small maintenance job and then hopefully have no problems I will be off to Russia for my short project start up. But getting to Peru is full of problems, I had to rush to get a new passport as the last one was full of stamps and this was taking 3 days and then also trying to get a flight sorted with my company credit card, which wasn’t accepted ove the internet for some mysterious reason. Going for a visa is something I may not even bother with as I am only going for 10 days, and where I am going is remote and highly unlikely to have a immigration officer. Luckily Peru is on the same time zone as Costa Rica and this will not give me jet-lag as I am still suffering from the last flight from Italy.

Once I had been called to go to Peru I rushed to the beach last weekend to get a small holiday as I haven’t been to the beach in 5 months, even though I only live 3 hours from the Caribbean. We arrived at our favourite little beach cabins and settled, even though it rains a lot here the temperature is nice and we sat about and relaxed and I was trying out my camera to get some pics of all the local birds here, they have a different range of birds plus lots of the ones that are country wide. The next morning Jenny woke early and opened the shutter ( No windows in this cabin only wooden shutters ), as she said there were some lovely birds singing behind the cabin, we looked outside to see some of the most exotic birds imaginable, we could see there was a trail of army ants on the forest floor and these birds called antbirds were waiting for insects to be flushed out of hiding to be gobbled up by the birds.
It was a fantastic site to see and I was clicking away like merry hell on the camera trying to get lots of shots for my upcoming bird CD. So once the birds had been frightened away by my ugly mug leering at them through the window I put the shots onto the laptop to look at them and I was horrified that they were all terrible and blurred. The fact that it was early and cloudy and I was in a dark cabin looking into the forest was lost on me as I saw those fantastic birds. It was all too dark for the camera and I lost all the shots, I was miserable, I tried shooting some birds that were sat on a telephone line and I was looking skyward, lots of light I thought but what happened was the light was bouncing off the birds feathers and giving me a glare so the light parts of the birds were all over-exposed and almost white, again I had no pictures worth anything at all. So the next day we went out for a walk ino the local countryside, a mix of forest and a few fields, I was snapping away at anything with feathers we saw some fantastic birds and we even saw a small parrot sat on a dead tee stump. I got a couple of nice shots and when we got back to the cabin I checked in the guide book to see what the parrot was.

My Endangered Species





I was shocked to find I had seen and photographed an endangered species called a Red-fronted Parrotlet. This was a day to celebrate as I could post the picture on the internet to claim my first rare species. It is only supposed to exist in the mountains but this was on the coast, some of the other shots were also perfectly exposed and will make good shots for the book, I have realised that digital SLR cameras are still tricky to get good pictures from unlike the instamatic digital things that everyone gets. But at least it is a delight to have the fun of seeing a good one from the hundreds I took.