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In the 19th century, well before modern wildlife cams, photographers and brothers Richard and Cherry Kearton had become frustrated with their inability to capture images of wildlife undisturbed.
“It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labelled "the Machiavelli of bird photography". But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell'arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into "Birdland" to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretences; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation.
Richard and Cherry Kearton were foremost among the small coterie of British nature photographers working before the end of the nineteenth century. They took the first ever photograph of a bird’s nest with eggs, in April 1892, and three years later (with British Birds’ Nests: How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them) published the first nature book illustrated throughout with photographs. But their next project — photographing the birds themselves — would be fraught with difficulties. Richard Kearton noted that birds were so disturbed by human presence, the "great eye" of the camera lens, and the click of the shutter, that it was nearly impossible to obtain natural studies.”
The Kearton brothers, then, went on to develop artificial hiding spots from which they hoped to photograph nature.
A few of those man-made hiding spots:
-An artificial tree trunk
-A stuffed sheep
-An artificial rock
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