Page:Bird-lore Vol 01.djvu/123

Photographing Shy Wild Birds and Beasts at Home 109 one on American wood birds. Whoever makes and gets laced up inside an artificial tree trunk will discover that a peculiarly dizzying sensation attends the first attempt or two to stand for any length of time so encased. For some birds we fix up a mock camera near their nests or feed- ing haunts a few days before we attempt to make a picture. This can be easily done with a small wooden box and tin canister with its lid or bottom blackened to represent a lens. For photographing ground builders, such as Larks, Plovers, and so on, we built an artificial rubbish heap, such as farmers rake up off their grass land before laying it down to grow for hay time, and cart off to form rick bottoms. This we made from an old umbrella, to the ribs of which we lashed pieces of bamboo four feet in length. The whole was then covered with brown holland. To the outside we tied innumerable wisps of straw and rubbish, and as some sort of testimony to its effi- cacy, I need only mention that we have succeeded in photographing a Lark at her nest bang in the middle of a bare field, and one of our very shyest British Plovers, quite recently, sitting on its nest within a few feet of the lens. We next come to a consideration of how to photograph the eyries, eggs and young of such birds of prey as Eagles. Falcons and Ravens, that breed, at any rate so far as Britain is concerned, in the most inaccessible cliffs. The first business is to secure a couple of climbing ropes. We had ours specially manufactured for us, from the best manila hemp, by a London rope-maker of good repute. They are each two hun- dred feet in length. The guide rope is an inch and a half in circum- ference, and the descending rope, which has three loops at one end for the photographer to sit in, is two inches in circumference. It will thus be seen that both ropes are pretty stout, some folks might say unnecessarily stout, but it is better to be on the safe side, as a break and a fall of three or four hundred feet onto jagged crags or into the sea would be likely to send the photographer into perpetual retirement. It is a curious thing, but nevertheless true, that fictionists have fixed one idea in the mind of the public in regard to the danger attending a man hanging over a precipice on the end of a rope; viz., that all his danger comes from a probability of one or two of the strands of his rope getting chafed in two over some sharp rock. I am frequently asked, after my lectures, the question: "Has your brother ever had a narrow escape from the rope nearly getting chafed in twain?" They seem genuinely disappointed because he has not