Title: “Ecuador: Bird Photography Hotspot”
Bio:
I am a Professor of English at Baldwin Wallace University, currently in my last semester of teaching. I have been a lifelong trail runner, hiker, backpacker, and lover of nature, sparked in part by many trips to the Adirondacks when I was young. Yet it was only in my early fifties that I discovered a previously unsuspected passion for fine art nature photography. From the moment I took my first Nikon DSLR (a D7000) out of the box, I was hooked. Surprisingly, birds emerged early on as my favorite photographic subject, even though I had never paid much attention to them before. In the many hundreds of hours I have spent in their company since then, I have come to experience a deep love and reverence for them. Moreover, the practice of photography has taught me to slow down and to become more observant and more attuned to the beauty around me in whatever guise it may appear. I believe that the more we appreciate the natural world and all of its inhabitants, the more we will seek to preserve it.
I have been a member of CPS since 2015. In that time, I have also been privileged to hold four photography exhibitions and have won a number of awards, the most recent being the Grand Prize for the Share the View International Photo Contest. As a professor who is bilingual in Spanish and English, I used to co-direct a study-abroad program in Ecuador, where I recently returned to spend five blissful weeks devoted largely to bird photography.
Talk Description:
Ecuador is a bird photographer’s paradise, boasting the highest avian biodiversity per hectare on earth. Although neighboring Colombia has more overall species of birds (1,910 confirmed), Ecuador, at about one fourth the size, has over 1,600 species, including 140 species of hummingbirds and 143 species of tanagers, in addition to many other tropical wonders. In the five weeks I spent there in December and January, I was able to visit about twenty world-class nature refuges and bird observation lodges, both in the Mindo Cloud Forest (which lies about two hours southwest of Quito) and in southern Ecuador, including the Buenaventura Nature Reserve, which the American Bird Conservancy ranks as the second best birding site in the world. I will share the very best of the many thousands of photos I took in Ecuador and offer suggestions on where to go, what to see, and how to do it both safely and economically.
Website: https://terryjmartinphotography.com/