On Fieldcraft

A month or so ago, I shared a photo of an immense flock of redhead ducks wintering along the barrier islands of North Carolina. I couldn’t say exactly how many there were, but it felt like twenty-five to fifty thousand. Such is the extraordinary nature of migration, when the lives of countless birds from countless places merge together like strands of rope into a single, living, breathing mass of life.

On that day, the sound was deafening. Wings and feathers stretched across the entirety of my field of view. If you’ve never experienced one of the great aggregations of wildlife that still remain, it almost defies belief. Moments like that are windows into another world, into a time before the machine of civilization devoured all.

But trace those strands backward, past the salt marshes and estuaries, over the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, beyond the guns of winter, and you’ll arrive at the birthplace of these redhead ducks. The quiet, still waters of their natal ponds, hidden among the cattails of the prairie, reveal the fragility of their lives with stark clarity.

The photograph I’m including here was made at one such cattail-lined slough in a forgotten corner of a flyover state, where life for these birds begins.

This winter’s photographic challenge was trying to convey the immensity of birds: creating order out of overwhelming chaos. The challenge of the prairie potholes was entirely different: capturing frame-filling portraits of vulnerability in places that are meant to be secret.

Photographing in the potholes demands fieldcraft. The birds here are not habituated. This isn’t a national park where elk and deer stand around stoned off so much carbon monoxide from vehicle exhaust they barely raise their head when you approach. This isn’t a bear lodge where brown bears spend their summers weaving between fishermen and photographers eager to replicate the same iconic image taken by thousands before them. This isn’t the Mara, the Pantanal, Jackson Hole, or the steppes of Patagonia’s Torres del Paine.

These birds are hunted. Relentlessly. Every adult knows the thunderous roar of a shotgun at dawn, the sharp whistle of #3 shot from a 12-gauge passing just overhead. In 2023, the last thing that 14.7 million ducks saw in the United States was the sudden presence of a human.

And ducks are far from alone. In 2024, an estimated 4 million white-tailed deer were harvested. Virtually every species of hoofed mammal in North America is hunted with similar fervor. Hunters pursue black and brown bears, mountain lions, gray wolves, plains and wood bison, badgers, beavers, bobcats, foxes, and lynx. This is by no means all of the mammals. The list stretches on into dozens of other species.

Likewise, nearly every family of bird outside of songbirds and raptors is hunted including turkeys, quail, doves, grouse, geese, swans, and even species that may surprise you such as sandhill cranes, rails, woodcocks, and snipe. Truth be told, in America, it’s far simpler to list the species that are not hunted than it is the ones who are.

This is not a polemic against hunting. My freezer is full of wild meat. I’ve never liked the idea of being a carrion eater, circling supermarket aisles like a vulture over factory-farmed animal parts. Instead, I point this out for one reason: outside of national parks, most animals across this continent have very good reasons to fear us.

For wildlife photographers, that matters.

To create compelling images, we must work with animals at close range. We must enter their world; one filled with legitimate fear. These are animals that run at the scent of humans, that flush at the sight of a movement. Many spend their lives simply trying not to be eaten or shot.

Fieldcraft is what allows us to work in that world.

I believe this is the single biggest factor holding back many wildlife photographers today. It’s easier to obsess over the technical: camera settings, gear reviews, YouTube tutorials on autofocus. But every working professional in any photographic genre will tell you the same thing: obsessing over the technical side of the craft only holds you back. Watching yet another YouTube video on autofocus isn’t going to make you a better photographer – otherwise it would have already. Setting up your camera to mirror yet another blogger or YouTuber’s custom settings isn’t going to make you a better photographer. Understanding what a double stacked sensor is doesn’t do a damn thing for your photographs. And neither does fretting over noise or which is the best noise reduction software.

Obsession with settings is the great distraction of our era.

So, let’s talk instead about the real work behind the photo.

Take this image of a redhead drake in North Dakota. I made it from a floating blind that was modified specifically for this environment. All manufactured or mobile blinds have a distinct shine, detectable from far away by sharp-eyed wildlife. Duck hunters have long used a method called “mudding up” to overcome this fact: mixing potting soil and water in a five-gallon bucket, then slathering the blind in mud with a wide brush. Once dry, the excess is brushed off. It dulls the shine and adds an organic texture. It works for a season or two.

But for my travel-heavy workflow, I use matte-finish spray paints designed to reduce reflectivity. These are readily available in hunting supply stores.

I killed the shine on the nylon blind fabric, then draped it in desert-tan military netting to both match the coloration of the surrounding environment of dead cattails and soften the blind’s obvious geometric angles. Next, I wove dried cattail stalks into the mesh, mimicking the muskrat lodges and floating vegetation scattered across the marsh. Once built, I mounted my camera on a gimbal head inside the blind, slid the rig into the water, and climbed in.

Scouting had already revealed where to go. One section of the slough consistently had more birds: western grebes nesting, eared grebes courting in full display, waterfowl arriving and departing at regular intervals. All of this was learned through a pair of Swarovski field glasses, patience, and long and quiet observation from a distance.

When the redhead drake appeared, he was about 50 yards away, preening and napping in glassy water. I began my approach slow and deliberate. Over the next 20 minutes, I covered 130 feet to bring myself with 20 feet of this bird.

If you do the math, that’s about 6.5 feet per minute on average, but the movement wasn’t continuous. I moved only when he preened. If he looked up, I stopped. When he tucked his bill under his wing, I advanced. Redhead drakes have a small oval of yellowish feathers that’s exposed when their eyes are closed. This is something of a false eye meant to fool predators. That little natural history detail became part of the strategy as it told me when he wasn’t looking.

As I approached, I typically took ten long slow steps, then paused for a minute or two. As I closed in, the pauses grew longer. The steps grew shorter.

Floating blinds present unique challenges. Every movement stirs the water, releasing clouds of silt that drift like smoke in the water behind you. Step, cloud. Step, cloud. Birds flying overhead can see the disturbance and they know something isn’t right. The blind itself also creates subtle wakes with every shift in balance. Muskrat huts don’t make waves. Drifting cattail clumps don’t leave trails.

All this mattered because it wasn’t just the redhead I had to consider. Let a hidden great blue heron croak out an alarm, and the drake would vanish. Let a pair of mallards overhead flare at the wake or my movement, and the redhead would spook. In wildlife photography, it’s not just the subject in front of you that matters, it’s the entire ecosystem around you as well.

Then there was the direction of travel. Some photographers advise never approaching a subject directly, only moving at angles to your subject. That can work, but usually only with mammals already aware of you. For most prey species, however, any lateral movement is a red flag. Lateral movement would have meant disrupting the visual flow and pattern of the environment as my blind moved in front of shadows and light gaps in the cattails triggering a flight response.

Instead, I borrowed a strategy from the playbook of predators the world over: a technique called motion camouflage.

Predators such as wolves, cougars, bobcats, and tigers, animals who make their living by stalking their prey until close enough to launch an attack all approach their mark the same way by moving directly toward an animal but always staying in line with a fixed background element. They move slowly, stopping often, creeping in closer over time. Then the target picks their head up to look around, the predator becomes motionless. When the prey becomes distracted again, they move forward.

The result is an optical illusion. Movement is hidden. Instead, what is seen is something that appeared to expand in size or grow larger. They notice it when they look up but given that the predator is completely motionless during that time, the whole of the thing is confusing but not alarming. And the pauses give prey time to accept the illusion.

That’s how I crossed 130 feet of open water to a frame filling distance one of North America’s most hunted and difficult birds to photograph.

That’s fieldcraft.

Scouting, understanding species behavior, modifying gear, blending into the landscape, approaching like a predator, interpreting visual cues like the redhead’s false eye: this is the invisible work behind the frame.

It wasn’t my autofocus. It wasn’t some esoteric button combination. I used the same exposure settings I always do when working from a floating blind: 1/2000s shutter, wide-open aperture, ISO adjusted manually to keep my live histogram pushed to the right. I used 3D tracking on my Nikon, my default for 90% of wildlife work. But none of that made this photograph happen.

What made the photo was getting close enough while keeping the bird calm enough for me to spend 30 minutes photographing this drake simply going about his morning. Fieldcraft made that possible.

Every species is different. Every place is different. There is no formula. Stalking a whitetail buck in hardwoods is not the same as finding and photographing black bears in that same forest. There are common themes, yes - but no two individuals, no two species, no two habitats, no two moments are the same.

Fieldcraft requires a synthesis of knowledge. That’s the purpose behind PhotoWILD Magazine and these free essays. That’s why I talk about natural history, ecology, biology. Why I dive into habitat, weather, behavior. Why I write about an animal’s umwelt—the unique way it experiences the world, and how it perceives us.

Because if you want to photograph a redhead duck in soft light, with long reflections and a pleasing background, you need to get close. And if you can’t get close, then all the megapixels, settings, and autofocus tricks in the world won’t matter.

Cheers,

Jared