Blind History
In 1956, to photograph the short-toed eagle in its treetop nest in southern Spain, legendary British bird photographer Eric Hosking built a wood platform alongside the tree. He then placed a 5-foot-high (1.5-meter-high) canvas blind on the platform and secured the platform to the tree with a pole, so that the nest would be kept in focus as the tree swayed in the breeze.
But this was nothing. Eleven years earlier, Hosking had constructed a 64-foot-high (19.5-meter-high), five-ton (4,536-kilogram) steel platform to photograph a hobby nest in a tree on the Surrey-Hampshire border back in England.
Hosking, who may have been the best bird photographer of all time, spent a great deal of his life photographing birds from blinds on the seashore, in boats, on cliffs, in open meadows, in forests, on the banks of streams, under bridges across rivers, and at all hours of the night and day!
"If anyone asked me what it is that so fascinates me about birds, why I become so completely absorbed when photographing them, I would not be able to give a direct answer," he once wrote. "For me, one successful bird photograph makes all the waiting, the risk, the planning and scheming worthwhile."
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