By Stan Tekiela
I am often asked what is my favorite animal to photograph. They want me to answer with one distinct and definite favorite critter. Time after time I disappoint them by saying my favorite wildlife to photograph tends to be whatever I happen to be photographing at the time. I haven’t met any animal that I didn’t find amazing. It is often like asking a parent which child is your favorite. You love all of your children and I love all of nature.
However, I feel there are some critters that are easier to capture stunning images than others. For example, I photographed a large snapping turtle one time for a book project I was working on and no matter what I did I couldn’t capture a decent or worthy image for the book.
Recently I spent 10 days in Alaska leading a photo tour to capture images of our national symbol, the Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla). Now this is a wonderful example of a bird/animal that is hard to take a bad picture. It seems that just about anyway or anyhow you photograph this spectacular bird, the images always turn out to be stunning and award winning. There is just something special about Bald Eagles when it comes to photography.
When I look back at the last 40 years of my career as a wildlife biologist, author, educator and wildlife photographer, in the beginning there weren’t many Bald Eagles around. The population of the Bald Eagle tanked out in the mid 1900’s. Due to widespread habitat loss, as well as both legal and illegal shooting or trapping, and the widespread use of DDT, which caused the eggs shells of the eagle to be so thin the eggs couldn’t be incubated without the parents breaking the shell, the Bald Eagle were nearly wiped out.
In the early 1900’s it was believed that Bald Eagles would grab the legs of domestic animals such as lambs and cows and even human children, leaving them severely injured. Of course, this wasn’t true at all, and so Bald Eagles were shot by the tens of thousands all in the misguided belief in a falsehood. By 1978 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said that “the leading cause of direct mortality in both adult and immature Bald Eagles was illegal shooting”.