Unwanted Perspective
One of my hobbies is nature photography. The bird-with-a-fish photo is something of a fixture in this space, the basic accounting being something like: bird in a branch = fine, bird in flight = better, bird with fish = best. The photo of the bird, soaring majestically through the air, proudly showcasing its prize, is simultaneously the photographer’s prize; sort of like a meta-version of the photo of the hunter next to the buck. Our prize is a captured moment of something else showcasing its prize. This photo is at Barr Lake in Colorado, back in 2019.
Almost nobody ever roots for the fish, despite being unquestionably the underdog here. They seem to be on the short list of animals that can be torn to shreds by another animal without eliciting much sympathy, though it is acknowledged that, in having complex nervous systems, they very much do feel pain. In fact - and I enjoy fishing, so I say this more with a sense of an ironic musing than any kind of moralizing - we have so little sympathy for fish that there is a multi-billion dollar industry in which a great many of them are caught and subsequently released in a severely agitated and mutilated state, much worse off for the encounter, for the sheer relaxing pleasure of the fisherman. I don’t know of any other animal that is tormented for the sake of instilling a zen-like state of mediation in the practitioner.
Back to the photo. I think about this photo often, and I like trying to imagine it from the perspective of the fish. Of course, not being a fish, it’s hard to avoid applying some aspects of human cognition to the experiencing of the experience, but let’s forgive that for a moment. Just imagine, swimming lazily beneath the calm surface of the lake, the rays of the sinking March sun sparkling atop the cool water. The kinetic dancing of water bugs on the surface attracting other fish in a clockwork-like ritual involving all aspects of the food chain* (as you are about to discover).
Perhaps if it's within your field of attention, you notice the sudden dimming of the light, a curious partial eclipse. The feathered mass descending upon the water’s surface and blocking out the light all happens very quickly though, and depending on the trajectory of the bird maybe there is no warning at all.
At any rate, it is impossible not to notice what happens next: A crash. Frothing bubbles. Impact. A piercing sensation as something sharp and decidedly not part of your body almost instantaneously comes to occupy the same space within your body previously occupied by some rather important parts of your body. Maybe there is no immediate sensation of pain, but only impact and shock. Assuming the talons left your spine and nervous system mostly intact, maybe there is a lot of pain.
And now, securely impaled on one or more talons, attached to and bound by a will that is no longer your own, there is subsequently a most unpleasant - though likewise brief - dragging sensation of resistance as your skewered body is rolled and torqued upwards through the water, fighting the weight of it until - that particular form of resistance suddenly ceases. In its place, there is a brand new sensation of resistance, even newer than the milliseconds-old sensation of pain. There is now a new sensation of a loss of rigidity; a complete loss of form.
The introduction of a part of the world in which mobility and sensation are not guided by ballast and buoyancy. The sudden awareness of the weight of your own body, something heretofore never even experienced, as it is introduced to gravity. The portions lanced by the eagle become the center of your mass, and those not local to the site of impalement slacken accordingly, having become weighted, and tugging on the parts tightly gripped; they drag on the rest as your entire being is plucked from its crystal blue womb and birthed into a resplendent new universe of shining horror.
All this is happening very quickly. Simply acknowledging all these new sensations, let alone independently identifying, cataloging, and processing them with any degree of accuracy is probably a tall order at this point. But, unfortunately, if you still have your fish-wits about you, there are still a few more new sensations to add to the list of the many new ones you have had the displeasure of discovering in the last few moments. Yes, it gets worse, and it will really only continue to get worse, but you still have some time to figure out how much worse.
The next one maybe you could be aware of is scaly, crushing strength gripping you oh so tightly. Not that you have any yardstick of “gentle caresses” to compare it to; maybe at one point in your life you escaped from the jaws of a larger fish, but there are no other analogs available. It is new, and, like the lancing, it is not nice.
Following that is the awareness of the sudden stunning radiance, a new heat unlike any other surrounding you, but not in the comforting aspect that the water once did. A brightness never before known. Outside the cover of the water, there is - the shock of another world. One that fully encompasses and contains the water. How small your world was in actuality! How limited! And yet it maybe seemed so large and limited.
This shocking new world above a world is someone else’s water; and it is decidedly less hospitable than the water you took for granted until very recently. There is something wrong with this water; namely, you can’t breathe. The temperature of this stunning, brutal, all-too-unbelievable new world affects the rate at which that matters; the warmer it is, the quicker you asphyxiate - something you probably never even realized you could do. Since this is still winter, you’re on the higher end of the spectrum, which is actually worse for you, but regardless the total flight time from initial hooking to a nearby tree branch is way quicker than the ~4 minutes, give or take, you have until that happens. Before then, something even worse will commence. But oh until then, how fast your world recedes and how bigger and brighter and more terrible this new one is revealed to be.
Reader, you can guess what that is, and we can effectively stop there. We know what starts to happen next.
That wasn’t all meant to sound morbid. I have a healthy respect for the circle of life and all the violence and relative unpleasantness it necessarily entails. Part of what I love about photography is the perspective that it brings by virtue of being able to capture moments like these and reflect on them. The fact that they, when you think about it, really are very common moments - i.e. how many bald eagles eat how many fish every single day - gives an added layer of appreciation.
On one level, hanging out by a lake and watching eagles pluck fresh fish out of the water and carry them off to a devour them on a nearby tree branch is no different than hanging out at a food court and watching diners buy sandwiches at Arby’s and waddle over to a nearby table to likewise devour them. Both processes are the culmination of millions of years of evolution into respectively specialized forms, and on other levels the sheer complexity of the human scenario is way more impressive from a technological & logistical standpoint, though arguably a hell of a lot less graceful & dramatic. Somebody who had never seen such a sight before might find it way more interesting than the eagle though. But that is just another aside.
More appreciated is the fact that not all perspective gets to be appreciated. Here, the eagle gives the fish perspective it might prefer not to have; in raising it high above the water, showing it a view of the world that, if it could live to relate it to another fish, it would never believe him (some fish obviously are dropped, and do live to “tell” the tale). The fish won’t benefit from it. Likewise, in our world, so many lessons are lost, simply from not having the time to properly contemplate and apply them.
We live in a world in which we are so bombarded by different media types, each shrieking for our attention as loud as it can, that it is almost impossible to establish a nourishing “information diet” from which we can extract lasting practical and actionable lessons, and not just empty calories. This is not to say there are not worthwhile things to digest, only that it’s very difficult to find time to sit and think clearly about them and extract their lessons completely.
Using the camera as an extension of the eye in order to isolate and extract a small, highly localized and discrete slice of time from an endless stream of information that often comes to us entirely too fast to process and fully appreciate, allows us to take a step back however, and take the necessary time to contemplate a world that is subsequently revealed to be less familiar and richer than we knew.
We can freeze time such that it becomes possible to properly appreciate the tiny details that the naked eye can and always will miss in real-time (I did not know the eagles at Barr Lake were tagged until I saw this photo, for instance), and temporarily immerse ourselves into new and alien worlds, hidden in plain sight within the one we thought we knew so well and took for so long for granted. The camera, like a more benevolent version of the eagle, raises our ability to discover and examine new perspective beyond what we are capable of achieving on our own.
And with this frozen slice of time, I have the ability to travel back to that day at Barr Lake two years later. It was a special place I would go to often to shoot photos, and, no longer living in Colorado, I miss it immensely. That particular day, I remember being on the boardwalk that runs out over the lake, tracking another pair of eagles slightly further away, circling over the rippling deep blue food court in search of meals of their own, when this one flew just overhead, seemingly out of nowhere, and without warning, a prize firmly clutched in its talons. The resulting photograph, representing a 1/4000 of a second piece of frozen time, is a window back to that day at Barr Lake, as well as an opportunity to vicariously experience the highly unpleasant though nevertheless horizon-expanding discoveries of that particular fish, courtesy of that particular bird.