John Burridge

The other day I visited the Cascades Raptor Center with my camera.  A rain front was looming, and it would be the last day of the hot and dry weather.  I figured if I waited to go, I'd be flitting from aviary to aviary, hunched over my camera while trying to take photographs of raptors huddled away against the rain.  

Some of the residents have afternoon walks or at least sessions where they are brought out.  Taking pictures of them is always easier when this is so because I don't have to contend with the mesh of their enclosures.  If a resident is mewed up and I get close to the mesh and the resident is on the other side of their aviary, it's possible to blur out the bars, but there's always some kind of interference pattern superimposed over the raptor I'm photographing.

I've become enough of a regular over the last few years -- between my long hair and long-lensed camera apparently I stand out -- and I was chatting with one of the handlers and he asked, "What do you do with all the pictures you take?"  

The question gave me a little pause.  "Oh, I said, mostly I store them on Google Photos."  I thought a little more.  "I like to tell myself that I will use them as resources for drawing birds, but I'm pretty awful when it comes to illustrating them.  I am interested in seeing how they inspire the shapes for Middle Kingdom Egyptian Hieroglyphs; if you look at their legs --" 

"--their pantaloons?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "and also how their wingtips and tail feathers come together."  And then the conversation veered onto hieroglyphs.  

Later, at home, the subject of photographs came up.  Mark said, "You know, honey, nobody is going to look at those photographs -- especially after you die.  So if you want people to see them, you'd better start arranging a funeral slideshow now."

"Why wait for a funeral?" I asked.  "Once COVID is under control (fingers crossed on that one), we can have people over for a little salon and we can have wine and cheese and set up three projectors in rotation and people can wander in little groups between the screens."  

"Honey, that's called 'a home slide show,' and people hated them back in the 1950's."

"Yes," I said, "I believe I've heard that referenced as 'The Bore Wars.'"  (And I do remember my folks having little get-togethers and bringing out Slide Carousels of Their Adventures Overseas.)

The question about that I ultimately do with the photos has lingered, especially as I uploaded them to various social media sites.  I enjoy taking pictures of the raptors for the same reason I enjoy taking pictures of MET artifacts or the Moon or other astronomical phenomenon:  the thrill of collecting.  It's more than just collection, though, it's also marking a particular time or space -- akin to the attitude behind the phrase, "what is remembered, lives."  Additionally, there are cathartic elements of being a participant-observer of something outside of oneself.   But these answer the question of why I take the photos, not what I do with them afterward.

I suppose what I do with them doesn't matter so much -- except that if that were true, I'd go through my photo collections and erase everything.  So keeping them is important; but my feeling is that they're more than just mementos validating my duration.  I suspect that this is a manifestation of the Art versus Craft question -- once you've made something creative or artistic, what are you going to Do with it?  

The other day I went to the Cascades Raptor Center.  The last time I went was just before the equinox.  

For whatever reason, the place was packed by 10:10 AM.  I was glad that I had pulled into the parking lot fairly early.  I'm guessing that it was a combination of many of the schools being out, the Olympic Trials being in town, and a recent lifting of some COVID restrictions.   There were lots of little kids, and I could tell when 11:40 hit, because (as I remember from a decade ago) that's typically when they hit the pre-lunch sugar crash.

It was peculiar to be there with so many other patrons.  

Since I've visited, the resident raptors' aviaries have moved around: Banjo has moved up the hill, Amazon's aviary is gone, Kali is living where Dante used to, and Dante lives where Archimedes was.  Other residents have moved, some have passed away, and there are new raptors on the site.

Danu is still chatty and still in her usual site.

I didn't clear my camera's memory, so I ran out of space for tons of pictures this time around.  I still managed to get a few.

The new thing I learned is that vulture's heads are iridescent.  Kali the vulture's head glimmered like the throat of a hummingbird when she was in the sun.  In the past I've either been below the vultures or the sun hasn't been out, so I've never noticed how dazzling red their head's can be when viewed at the right angle.

Saturday (1/4/2020), I went to the Raptor Center again.  The sun shone more brightly than it had the other week, and I hoped that I'd get better shots of the raptors in their mews.  I managed to get to the center fairly early and wandered around the grounds.  During previous visits, I somehow missed the barred owl and the mews next to the staff-only building, and it was cool to make new discoveries.


I managed to use as wide a aperture setting as possible so as to force a narrow field of depth, and I think the camera may have adjusted the aperture depending on the zoom of the lens -- so some of the shots may have not been with as wide an apertures as possible.  I got some relatively grille-free photos, but a number of them have the lines of the grille in front of birds prominent.  Alas, this time around I wasn't at the center when some of the birds were taken out for impromptu displays.



The best shots of the birds were when they were away from the mesh of their enclosures, or if I managed to get a good close-up of them.  My favorite shots are of Lethe the Turkey Vulture, because I never realized he had eye lashes.  I'm thinking the photos of him might make good story prompts.  I don't know if Lethe was sunning his wings or if he was displaying himself as part of some kind of greeting ritual.












 The owls tend to roost in the backs of their mews, so the best photographs this time around are of them. 



Once the weather gets a little warmer, it would be interesting to try to sketch the birds.  Photographs are nice, but sometimes I would catch myself interacting with the camera more than I would actually gazing at the birds.




I was glad that I'd gone Saturday, because Sunday was uniformly grey and rainy; we even got some hail.