Why I Built a Bird Videography Course — And What I Wish I'd Known

Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Chukotka Peninsula, Russia, 2011. Fewer than 200 breeding pairs remained at the time of filming.

At 3:00 in the morning on July 1, 2011, I was huddled in a wind-battered blind on the Siberian tundra, listening through a hidden microphone to a nest that was about to change everything I understood about why I do this work.

I had traveled nearly halfway around the world — Seattle to New York to Moscow, across all of Russia to the remote Chukotka Peninsula — to film one of the rarest birds on earth. The Spoon-billed Sandpiper. Fewer than 200 breeding pairs remained. I was there on assignment from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to gather the first high-definition video footage ever taken of this species on its breeding grounds. Every frame mattered.

The July sun barely grazed the tundra horizon when the first chick hatched. Then another. I watched through my viewfinder as two mottled fluffballs came bubbling out from beneath their father's breast and took their first stumbling steps onto the tundra — their first attempt at foraging, on their first day of life, as members of a species that might not survive the decade.

I had good photographs from that expedition. Strong images. But it was the video — the emergence, the movement, the father's soft calls pulling the chicks back under his feathers — that told the story photographs simply could not. Intimacy, behavior, relationship. A sentient being trying to survive alongside of us in this changing world. The footage became a conservation tool in a way that stills never could have been. That realization has shaped everything about how I work ever since.

Seven days of searching the Siberian tundra before the first Spoon-billed Sandpiper sighting.

The gap nobody talks about

Bird photographers who pick up video for the first time almost always hit the same wall. The technical instincts that make you a strong photographer — quick reactions, precise exposure decisions, comfort with freezing a single moment, perfection — can actually work against you when you're trying to capture behavior as it unfolds over time. Video rewards anticipation, patience, and a fundamentally different way of composing and seeing. It requires you to think in sequences, not frames.

I know this wall well because I hit it myself, repeatedly, over years of figuring it out in the field. That process took years — but the timing was also unavoidable. When I began incorporating video into my field work, DSLR video technology was just emerging. The tools were new, the possibilities were largely uncharted, and there was no roadmap for applying them specifically to bird behavior in the field. I was developing techniques by trial and error out of pure necessity, figuring out in remote locations what worked and what didn't, with no one to ask and no course to take. In some ways I was fortunate to be working at that frontier. In most ways, it was just hard.

That process doesn't need to take that long anymore.

Filming from a blind on the Chukotka tundra, summer 2011.

What video does that photographs can't

A great bird photograph can stop someone cold. But a sequence of behavior — with sound, with movement, unfolding in real time — can change someone. It can make a person who has never thought about a critically endangered shorebird on the Siberian tundra feel the specific weight of its possible disappearance.

When I filmed those Spoon-billed Sandpiper chicks taking their first steps, I understood I might be documenting one of the last generations of this species. The footage has since been used to introduce this bird to audiences around the world — to make the abstract crisis of flyway habitat loss into something a person can actually feel. That is what video can do for conservation that a single image rarely achieves on its own.

Bird photographers are uniquely positioned to do this work. You already have the fieldcraft, the patience, the understanding of behavior and light. You know how to get close without disturbing. You know how to wait. What most bird photographers are missing isn't access or dedication — it's the specific technical and creative framework for translating those skills into compelling video.

https://vimeo.com/1182440221

The first footage ever filmed of hatching Spoon-billed Sandpiper chicks — Chukotka Peninsula, Russia, 2011.

The course

After more than 30 years of field work — at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, across the Arctic, in some of the most remote bird habitat on earth — I've built the course I wish had existed when I started.

Mastering Bird Videography is 70 lessons covering the complete workflow: camera settings and gear decisions, field technique and behavior anticipation, composition and movement, audio, and editing for emotional impact. It's designed specifically for bird photographers who are serious about adding video to their practice — photographers who already understand the field and are ready to take the next step.

It is the only course of its kind taught by someone who has spent a career doing this work at the highest level — for conservation, for broadcast, for some of the world's most endangered species.

LEARN MORE AND ENROLL IN THE COURSE

If any of this resonates

The Spoon-billed Sandpiper is still out there. Hanging on. The footage from that 2011 expedition is still in use. And somewhere on the Chukotka tundra, if we're lucky, a new generation of chicks is still emerging from beneath a father's breast in the silver light of an Arctic morning.

If you've ever watched a bird do something extraordinary and wished you could have captured it properly — the way it deserved to be captured — this course is for you.

Newly hatched Spoon-billed Sandpiper chicks on their first day — the first such footage ever recorded.