For about an hour each morning through the winter months, I sit on a chair behind a painter’s dropcloth hung over a glass-windowed door, and, through a hole in that cloth, shoot pictures of birds to use in my composites. Almost every bird has, reflected in its eyes, the reflection of the clerestory — high vertical windows inset into the roof — of my house.
In the room below and slightly to the right of those clerestory windows is the computer on which, now, in the summer, I make my composite images using the birds photographed in the winter.
A bird, a male indigo bunting, has recently begun attacking the glass in those clerestory windows. He sees his reflection and mistakes it for a rival male. Clickity-clackity-clickity-clack. Sporadically, all day long, beating against the glass with claws, beak and wings. For about twenty minutes in the afternoon, the sun comes tangentially through those high windows so that a bright spot falls on the desk to the left of where I am working. In that bright sun, the bird’s shadow capers madly.
Yesterday morning I was struggling to choose the birds for the composite I am now setting up. Trying to imagine the birds from one picture on the computer interacting with the birds already in the layout of the group setting. I could not concentrate with the bird above beating on the glass, attacking his reflection. So I got a chair from the hall — the one I sit on all winter when shooting the birds for my composites. I brought it into the room, got my camera, and stood on the chair for a better angle at the high window. The bird saw me. When he was standing on the bottom of the window, I could just see the top of his head and his eyes. He cocked his head this way and that, changed position, craned his neck and looked a little more, then saw his reflection and went back to attacking the glass. He’s very fast, like a jack-in-the-box, so I had to stand there, ready, with the camera to my right eye, left eye squeezed shut, trying to get him as he popped up and down. Periodically he left for five minutes or so, but he always comes back. I shoot, wait, shoot, wait, shoot, wait. How many will be enough?
I waited with the camera on my face. My left eye got tired of being squeezed shut. I opened it. On the wall below the high window, is a framed photo of an aerial view of my house. With my left eye, I noticed, reflected in the glass of that picture, a strange person standing on a chair with a camera stuck to her face.
-Julie
