Tim Laman

| Wildlife Photojournalist

Wildlife Diaries

The Wildlife Diaries newsletter is the best way to keep up to date with Tim Laman’s latest work and travels, and to learn about photography and natural history as well. Read through his recent posts here or sign up to receive the posts via email using the form on the right.

Wildlife Diaries

How We Filmed the Great Argus Pheasant

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The Great Argus pheasant is one of the most spectacular, but also most elusive birds in Borneo.  I have been doing fieldwork in the rainforest of Gunung Palung for over thirty years, and have spent a sum total of over five years of my life in the forest there.  Yet I have only seen a Great Argus with my own eyes once.  Nonetheless, I had a dream of capturing images of this bird performing its courtship display.  

Why did I think it was even possible to photograph such a rare and elusive bird?  The reason is that male Argus choose a small clearing in the forest, and clear some of the leave to make a display arena.  With enough searching in areas where we heard Argus calling, we were able to locate a number of these courts.  We then monitored them with trail cameras to see which ones were active.  Finally, using modern digital cameras in waterproof housings connected to infra-red triggers (which we call “camera traps”), we “staked out” these courts and hoped to capture footage of displaying males.

As it turned out, Argus male frequent their courts much less regularly than we expected, but never the less, as you can see in the images below, we were ultimately successful!  Read on below to learn more about the efforts it took over two years to capture footage for the full behavioral sequence in the recent BBC series “The Mating Game”.  As narrator David Attenborough says in his interview about the film on the BBC website (HERE), “I’m sure it’s the first time its been filmed in the wild”. 

Argus Male Displays to a Female

This is the moment I most wanted to capture – a male Argus Pheasant displaying to a female!  At first glance, this display may remind you of a peacock.  But look closely.  A peacock’s display is made up of its tail fan alone.  The Argus on the other hand, is spreading its wing feathers, covered in amazing eye-spots, to create this mesmerizing presentation.  The male’s head is hidden, tucked behind one of his wings, but he can still watch the female through a tiny gap in the fold of his wing.  His long central tail feathers, cut off at the top of this shot, also are being shaken and are visible to the female above the fan.
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Happy New Year 2022!

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Dear Friends,

For a little inspiration as 2022 begins, I’m sharing an image of a pair of Red-crowned Cranes performing a duet in a snowstorm.  In Japan, where I made this image, cranes are a symbol of happiness, good luck, and long life.  Despite the blizzard, this pair is thinking ahead to the spring nesting season, and calling together to reinforce their pair bond.  Looking beyond the storm to a brighter, hopeful future that we can reach through working together – these cranes seemed a fitting metaphor for getting through the tough times we are in right now and being positive about the future.

Red-crowned Crane pair in a snowstorm, Hokkaido, Japan Endangered Species (IUCN Red List: EN).A pair of Red-crowned Cranes perform a courtship duet during a snowstorm in Hokkaido, Japan.

I am exited about 2022 and all the things I have in the works.  Besides making plans to get back to shooting in some of my favorite places like Borneo, I am also hard at work on my new book of bird photography from all over the world titled “BIRD PLANET” that will be published later this year.  The images here are some of the selects being considered for my Japan chapter.  I had a great time reviewing my entire archive of bird photography in 2021, collecting my published favorites, but also finding unpublished gems that came to light during this deep dive into the archive.  If you happen to be a fan of birds and bird photography, I think you’ll enjoy the images and stories behind them that I plan to share throughout the year ahead in this newsletter and on my social channels.

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Ways You Can Help Orangutans this Giving Tuesday

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Dear Friends,

It’s Giving Tuesday today, and I hope you are giving some thought to how you can help out the causes you care about.  Here at Tim Laman Photography, we are supporting our long-term partner the “Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program” and their campaign “Save Wild Orangutans”.

Here are four ways you can be engaged:

  1. Make a one-time donation HERE.   https://www.savewildorangutans.org/donate/
  2. Join the Team!  Sign up to make a monthly donation HERE.  https://www.savewildorangutans.org/join-the-team/.   As a perk of being a regular donor, even for a small amount like $5 or $10/month, you will receive our “Orangutan Diaries” updates from the field.
  3. Buy an Orangutan print today.  It’s the last day of our Holiday Print Sale, and 50% of profits will be donated directly to Save Wild Orangutans.  Visit my gallery HERE.  https://www.timlamanfineart.com/orangutans
  4. Join my Live Art Sale & Conservation Fundraiser tomorrow, Dec 1 at 6PM Eastern.  I will be selling prints from my inventory here in the studio.  Half of profits from orangutan prints will also be donated to Save Wild Orangutans, and there are many unique orangutan prints in this collection.  Check my Instagram or FB tomorrow Dec 1 for details.

Mist in the Canopy, Gunung Palung

At SAVE WILD ORANGUTANS, the orangutans themselves are of course the key flagship species we focus attention on.  But what wild orangutans need is healthy rainforest habitat like the lowland forest of Gunung Palung, pictured above.  When we work to protect habitat for orangutans, we save the entire spectrum of biodiversity in the rich lowland forests of Borneo.  So please think about that as you contemplate how you can help this Giving Tuesday.  You can learn a lot more about all the ways the team in Indonesia is working toward this goal of forest habitat protection at the main website www.savegporangutans.org.

The Incredible Biodiversity of Gunung Palung

As one of the very best remaining lowland forests in all of Borneo, Gunung Palung harbors an incredible variety of creatures besides orangutans.  Here are just a few examples:

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Orangutan Print Sale for Conservation

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2021 has been another unusual year, but I’m still feeling thankful.  This thanksgiving holiday, I want to help raise awareness and support for Orangutan Conservation in Borneo.  I hope you will take a moment to read on.  

As those of you who have followed my work for a while know, documenting the lives of wild orangutans in partnership with my wife, researcher Cheryl Knott, has been a major part of my life’s work over that past 25 years.  Using the media I create to spread the word in National Geographic articles and films has been a big part of what I do.  But it has now been two years since I was last in Borneo in documenting orangutans.  Yet, we are fortunate that the non-profit group Cheryl founded, now run in Indonesia by an Indonesian team of over thirty people, have been able to persist throughout the pandemic in their conservation, education, and community support activities that all help to protect orangutans in Gunung Palung, one of the world’s most important remaining wild orangutan sanctuaries. 

So I’m very thankful to them and for all their efforts, and I’m dedicating this newsletter and print-sale fundraiser to the Gunung Palung Orangutan Project!

Please scan below for ways you can help this important cause.

That Special Connection
Young orangutans typically spend eight years or more with their mothers, and this is my favorite image that captures that special connection.  I think it is also worth contemplating our close connection to orangutans and their rainforest habitat.  The future of orangutans and all the diverse life on earth is dependent on good decisions being made by us humans who have taken over so much of the planet.  Our individual decisions matter, and supporting groups actively working to accomplish conservation on the ground is one small way we can help.  
This photograph is available as a print along with all the other orangutan images on sale now for my Giving Tuesday fundraiser (I will donate 50% of profits from all orangutan print sales to the Gunung Palung Orangutan Project).

Ways You Can Help Support Orangutans

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Birds-of-Paradise and Orangutan Fundraiser is Live

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As we near the holiday season I’m reminded once again of how fortunate my family and I have been to weather this pandemic relatively unscathed.  I hope you have been as fortunate, though I’m sure some of you suffered losses of loved ones, and my heartfelt sympathies go out to you.  It’s been a tough couple years.  

As we get through this, I am feeling like I want to devote some energy and resources to helping out the people and conservation activities that I care deeply about in Indonesia, where things have been especially tough.  The best way I can come up with to do that, is to raise funds by selling my art, so I want to let you know that for all bird-of-paradise and orangutan print purchases during my Holliday Sale, which is now live, I will donate 50% of profits to the two charities that I have been supporting the Gunung Palung Orangutan Conservation Program, and Papua Konservasi dan Komunitas.

Please visit my online gallery through the link below, and consider a purchase for yourself or as a gift.  You can read more about the two organizations in the links below as well.

Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise
The Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise.  The discovery that this bird had a distinct display behavior and that I made with Ed Scholes helped to confirm that it deserved to be a distinct species.  We published this in a paper in 2018, and that has been one of the highlights of our 15 year quest to document birds-of-paradise in the wild.  The reason I share this again now, is that the realization that this was a distinct species that could only be seen in the Arfak Mountains of West Papua, helped to drive an increasing number of birdwatchers to the area.  The local people who we worked with to make the discovery, and who own the land, expanded the guesthouses in their villages, and were starting to see that they could create an economy around grass-roots ecotourism.  Protecting their forests and their birds could create more long term benefits for them then exploiting the forest in the short term.  These were great developments.  And the potential is still there for this movement to grow and expand to more villages and communities across Papua and help maintain a green future.  However the pandemic has thrown a wrench into this promising development as visitors have been unable to go to Indonesia and all birding tours have been cancelled for nearly two years now.  The small NGO I work with, Papua Konservasi, has been sending donations directly to villages to help them get by during this time.  Any purchase you make of a bird-of-paradise print during my sale will help this cause, so thanks for your consideration.  Helping support these local landowners, the guardians of the forests where birds-of-paradise live, is the most direct way I can think of to help the birds.  And of course protecting these forest in Papua is also a key to mitigating climate change.  So its a win-win all around.

Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise Performing is now available for purchase in my fine art store HERE.

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Maine’s Fall Splendor

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I hope you are all doing well, and if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, have been able to get out and enjoy the fall season.  Since I’m not traveling internationally quite yet, I took the chance to spend time up in Maine earlier this month, where the fall foliage this year was quite extraordinary, and I thought I’d take this chance to share a few of my new images.  

You can also scroll down and check out my latest idea on how to share my images and spread our shared love of birds.  I’ve created a line of 5×7 inch greeting cards featuring my backyard birds-in-the-snow and other images.  Have a look and maybe you’ll find one that will make a perfect holiday card.

My timing was perfect on my trip to Acadia National Park this October, and the fall colors were at their peak.  After passing Upper Hadlock Pond and seeing the potential for a beautiful image of the hillside with the amazingly variety of color in the trees, I kept checking back to try to get the right conditions.  I actually waited till after sunset on this day, when the afterglow reflecting from clouds in the West lit the scene evenly.  The wind also died at sunset, as often happens, and I got the perfect reflection that I was hoping for.  For you photography enthusiasts who like to hear these details, I made the broad panoramic image below taking a series of seven vertical images, each about 50% overlapping, and used Lightroom to stitch them together.  Since nothing was moving in the scene, this worked beautifully, and the result is very high resolution file that I could easily print ten feet across if I wanted.  The square portion above it just a section from the center of the larger image.  I love the amazing variety of hues of yellow, orange, pink, and red that came out in the trees under this soft light.  And of course, a perfect reflection just ads a lot to an image.  
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