By Guest Blogger and Friend, Mike Felz of Felz Photoz
“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Imagine sitting in a blind, for decades, in front of the world’s most beautiful birds, and all the while you’re looking at them through a 50mm lens. It’s the only lens you’ve ever had, and you couldn’t be more pleased with its images. Then a photographer arrives with a 600mm lens and asks if you want a look.
The rest of your life’s been altered.
I was in that blind, with that 50mm lens, figuratively, for most of the many years that I’ve known and worked with the award-winning and renowned bird photographer Owen Deutsch.
Fortunately, I visited his Chicago studio in November 2023 to assist him and his team in switching to a new accounting firm. The infectious creativity in a studio doesn’t let you sit back and just reconcile checkbooks, so soon I was looking over shoulders as photos were processed. I observed Owen’s demanding and insightful self-critiques. Everywhere you looked, there were the most beautiful photos of the most beautiful birds. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” Owen often says. But then I knew. I had to do this, too.
So I picked up a 600mm lens and in the short while since I’ve made a few trips on my own to Costa Rica, and then to The Bahamas with Owen and Steve Huggins, his extraordinary guide and friend. I live in Colorado and have learned to find birds in the mountainous landscapes. Photographs, similar to the ones I saw in Owen’s studio, started showing up, periodically, in my camera. And then came the opportunity to visit Southeast Brazil.
I’ve been a suburbanite for nearly 50 years. I like warm showers with shampoo and conditioner. I like a little heat in my room. I don’t want my first step in the morning to be into my shoes to avoid the condensation-laden floor. The Brazil we experienced had little of these. But it did have wondrous flora, engaging people, and birds, birds, birds! I would go back, and back, and back again.
Our local guide, Hudson Martins Soares, who runs BirdsRio Birdwatching, took us on a journey through national parks, conservation areas, eco-lodge grounds, and the Atlantic shoreline. He is a master at not only finding birds, but is a very fine photographer and knows how to put his clients in a position not to just see the birds but to also properly photograph them. And he’s a nice guy. Through my career I grew to like a person not solely based on how they treated me, but in how they treated those around them. When we arrived at a location with Hudson, it was like he was arriving at a family reunion, glad-handing and laughing in melodic Portuguese with his many friends.
I was the neophyte in our group, shooting in long bursts, taking thousands of photographs a day, and then spending many hours each night backing up my cards. I am still working weeks later rejecting many of those thousands of photographs. But because the opportunities were so vast, scores of nice photos remain. I share a few of them here.
Here’s a Slaty Bristlefront, described as “fairly common but infrequently seen”. That’s true. We stalked this male and his mate for nearly an hour, waiting for them to emerge from the undergrowth long enough to get a clear photo. The Slaty Bristlefront is from the Tapaculo family, and has a short crest of narrow upright feathers at the base of its top bill. Think Groucho Marx. The “Tapaculo” family name is an amalgamation of Spanish origin, though something might have been lost in translation. Enter “tapa” and “culo” into Google’s Spanish-to-English translator and you’ll see what I mean.
This next photo is of a pair of boisterous Streamer-tailed Tyrants, taken in a field near the town of Itatiaia, located at the southern entrance of the Parque Nacional do Itatiaia, the first national park in Brazil. Streamer-tailed Tyrants display in July, and this pair put on quite a show. While calling loudly, they alternately bopped their heads up and down, raising and fanning their long forked tails, and opening their wings, repeatedly. What a treat to observe.
There were also plenty of woodpeckers to see, and it was not uncommon to see and hear the same species of woodpeckers in several locations. Less common was this White-spotted Woodpecker. We saw this one on our visit to the higher elevations of the Parque Nacional do Itatiaia. It was also at a high mountain restaurant when I first succumbed to the temptation of “made in Brazil” dulce de leche. It wasn’t the last time!
Of course, we saw many toucans and toucanets. They are quite exhilarating. One of my favorites is the Toco Toucan, pictured here. Always very well dressed, with a black body and white bib, it’s the largest species of toucans and one of the most recognized birds in the world, right up there with Fruit Loops’ Toucan Sam. We saw this one down near the Atlantic coast (a Toco is a non-forest toucan, living on the edge of forests) as we made our way west of São Paulo to the eco-lodges at Salve Floresta and Trilha dos Tucanos, both easy places to fill your CFExpress cards.
There are only so many birds one can include in a short blog. Brazil has many, many more. I’ve got many more. Thus far, I’ve processed photos of 108 species, including 18 tanager and 10 hummingbird species. That’s not counting photos of the jaguar footprints (very large!), tapirs, and other cute and cuddly mammals. A birding paradise. See more from my Brazil trip here.
Thank you Brazil, and thanks to Owen, Steve, and Hudson. I see a much bigger picture of the world through 600mms. How beautiful the birds truly are!
