Photo of the Month July 2013

Photo of the Month July 2013
Photo of the Month July 2013

Night time Puffin

I have been working in the field a lot in the last month, but fortunately I had planned a one week trip to Runde, Norway, together with my father. This week was totally dedicated to photography, and we wanted to portray the island in all its forms. This meant that we did not want to focus solely on the sea-birds, for which Runde is famous. However, I did choose a picture of a puffin as my photo of the month. We spend almost every evening on the cliffs waiting for the puffins to arrive from their foraging bouts on the Atlantic Ocean. In contrast to some other puffin colonies, the puffins at Runde are not present around their burrows during the day, and they only come in, in the beginning of the evening. On this particular day, I was sitting in a small gorge in the cliff side, hoping for some shots of flying puffins. I had waited for a long time, but even just before sunset there were hardly any puffins present, so I started photographing the cliffs against the blue sky. I really liked the abstract feeling of the cliffs against the sky, but something was missing. So as soon as I saw a puffin flying near the cliff, I knew which shot I wanted to make. I waited for it to pass the cliff face I had photographed before and made this shot. I was the only puffin that evening that flew in the right place, so I was happy I made a quick decision.

Canon 5D mIII, 200mm, 1/800 @ f/9, iso 400

Social interactions

Roe deer and Red fox caught on camera
Roe deer and Red fox caught on camera

Doing research with camera traps is a lot of fun, because you capture things that you would not have expected beforehand. Last month my fieldwork started with the placement of cameras in different forested areas in the Netherlands to look at the interaction between species diversity and tick densities and the infection of ticks with Borrelia burgdorferi s.l., the causative agent of Lyme disease. I do not use any bait or lure to draw the animals towards my camera, as I want to use the number of photos I take from each species as a measurement of their density. Therefore, the animals that walk in front of my camera display ‘regular’ behaviour and most of them just walk by.

However, some of the animals show special behaviour, like the roe buck in this picture. It is marking its territory with the scent glands on its head at 7:34 pm, and walks on. About 45 minutes later, a red fox walks past, it stops, and it sniffs the tree, which was just marked by the roe buck. Apparently, these scent cues are not only to let other members of your species know that you are there and that this is your territory, but it also works to let the neighbours know you are there. Even if the neighbours are from a different species.