November 16, 2017

How Wildlife Photographers Fool You

In the summer of 1987, having newly joined the Outdoor Writers Association of America, I drove with M. up to their annual conference, which was in Kalispell, Montana, that year.

In a corridor of the conference hotel, we encountered a man with a half-grown mountain lion on his shoulders. It slithered up and down his arms like a viscous liquid.

The lion was no pet — we quickly discovered that its owner was promoting a captive-wildlife photography operation.

I learned a few things in my five years of OWAA membership, and one was that almost no one gets spectacular photos of predators in the wild. That lynx "chasing a snowshoe hare"? It's probably chasing a rubber ball thrown by its trainer.

And here I used to think that the photographer sat out in the snow. telephoto lens in hand, blowing a "rabbit distress" call. I honestly thought that was how it was done, but very few photogs do that. (Some do use game camera photos, since the quality has improved so much in recent years.)

Of course, movies and TV shows are no exception, not to mention magazines and wildlife calendars. Most of what you see is faked.
Inspired by Disney were Marlin Perkins, host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom (premiering in 1963), and Marty Stouffer, host of the Public Broadcasting Service’s Wild America (premiering in 1982). Like Disney they were pioneers working in a standards vacuum, but they set a new bar for nature fakery. Perkins was forever having his young assistants lasso and wrestle terrified tame animals to “rescue” them. “They were totally ruthless,” Wyoming cinematographer Wolfgang Bayer told the Denver Post. “They would throw a mountain lion into a river and film it going over a waterfall.”Wild Kingdom still airs on Animal Planet.
That's from an Audubon article, "Phony Wildlife Photography Gives a Warped View of Nature." Read it, and you might learn when you too were fooled.

1 comment:

Henry Chappell said...

My old friend Wyman Meinzer has good stories about his disillusionment over trained bears and captive cats and so on way back in the 80s. But I've seen first had what he can do with predator calls and rattling antlers and patience in makeshift bird blinds. Little wonder he got out of the magazine cover game a long time ago. He's still hoping to coax an ocelot in with one of his handmade predator calls. That would be worth a few hundred hours in the South Texas thornscrub.