I hope this finds you all well in these extraordinary times. I’ve been keeping very busy despite all my international photo and filming projects being postponed. In this Wildlife Diaries, I’d like to share two things. First is the publication of a major book with Princeton University Press. Second, I will share what you might call my “discovery of my backyard birds” - a glimpse of the local Massachusetts bird coverage I’ve been working on these past couple months. I’m usually off chasing exotic birds-of-paradise and the like, but now due to Covid-19, I found that my local birds are pretty spectacular and fascinating in their own right.
Did you know that New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (after Greenland), with habitats ranging from mangroves and lowland rainforest to alpine peaks reaching 4800 meters? That it is surrounded by the world’s richest coral reefs, and also home to more than one thousand traditional human societies with unique languages and culture! You can learn about this and a lot more in a new book now out from Princeton University Press, by Bruce Beehler with photographs by yours truley. Bruce has made over 50 trips to New Guinea, and I have made over 30, and we are pleased to have the chance to share our experience of this amazing part of the world with readers everywhere. It’s available right now from my website: Tim Laman Fine Art.
One exciting thing about creating this illustrated book about New Guinea is it gave me a chance to dive into my photo archives from all those trips to New Guinea (usually concentrating on photographing birds-of-paradise) and find images that illustrated the full range of New Guinea’s amazing biodiversity, which of course also includes many other spectacular birds. This shot of a group of Ornate Fruit Doves is one example. I was staking out this fruiting fig tree early one morning deep in the forests of the Arfak Mountains in West Papua, hoping to photograph several of the bird-of-paradise species that might come to feed there, but other birds of course also showed up for this bounty, and these fruit doves were among them. New Guinea’s forests, being rich in food for fruit-eating birds, harbor a great variety of dove and pigeon species, fruit specialists that are often very beautifully patterned. So it was a real pleasure to seek out unpublished images like this, and nearly 200 others to illustrate this book, knowing that through this project, I now had a chance to share more of the wonders of New Guinea’s biodiversity that have just been hiding in my archives with those who may not get a chance to travel to that amazing island.If you’d like to listen to a podcast of Bruce and I talking about the book on “Bird Calls Radio”, you can check it out here: BirdCallsRadio.com
Discovering my “Backyard” Birds
One of the highlights of my local bird photography this spring during the Covid-19 lockdown has been discovering a nest of Piliated Woodpeckers during a bike ride from my home in Lexington, Massachusetts. I think it’s one of our most spectacular local birds here in the Northeast, and I spent a fun few mornings getting some shots of the chicks being fed before they fledged. I’ve been working on my own, and now with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to document breeding birds in the Northeast this spring, so stay tuned for more coverage of my “backyard” birds.
Piliated Woodpecker chicks stick their heads out of their nest cavity in anticipation of a parent arriving with food.
Gallery Update:
During these Covid-19 times, we have continued to work on expanding the offerings in my online print gallery, Tim Laman Fine Art. Here are a couple updates:
1) WALDEN POND COLLECTION – Now available as standard open edition prints. On the “Close to Home” theme, we have now made available my collection of Walden images, one of my long-term “backyard” projects, as standard open editions on paper. You can check out the gallery HERE.2) LIMITED EDITIONS: COMING SOON! - Another major project we are currently working on is choosing a small selection of my very best images from twenty-five years of wildlife photography to offer as LIMITED EDITION collector’s prints. These will be very large, printed on archival aluminum, framed and signed, and have an edition of only 10 or 20 prints. Right now are having test prints made, and fine tuning this unique product. Let us know if you are interested, and stay tuned for the release in the coming weeks.
Thanks for reading, and keep your eyes out for my further updates, as I continue to share my bird photography adventures from the Northeast US over the coming weeks. Hope to see you in the wilds again soon!
