One of my favorite roads in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater angles along the Munge River and the territory of the Munge lion pride. I have often photographed cubs playing in the field on either side of this track, so we constantly search carefully. There were no lions this time, but I saw a quick movement out of the corner of my eye. Something was popping up and down in the grass. And not just one something, but dozens! Jackson’s widowbirds! I had seen a drawing in 1986 and never thought I’d encounter one in the wild. Breeding males are mostly black, with rufous wings and long, luxurious tails. But as beautiful as they are, their breeding behavior makes them exceptional. Females are attracted to the tail feathers and quality of a male’s display.
In breeding season, dozens of male widowbirds gather at a lek and display for females. Lek derives from the Swedish word for play or dance. In the case of Jackson’s widowbirds, the dance is to jump high off the ground, float and stabilize in the air, and then land in the same spot, all the while flashing their tail feathers. After twenty or more leaps at an unseen signal, all the males fly to low perches. There, they sing and wave their gorgeous tails until there is another signal to restart the hopping dance.
Photographing these birds was like playing the Whac-A-Mole arcade game, where moles rapidly jump out of holes at random intervals. My camera and I were now in a new game of Whack-A-Widowbird. Even with a shooting set of twenty frames per second, it was easy to miss the bird so easily that my first 500 shots were entirely of grass.
I told myself not to panic, but that was the first thing I did. Was I going to miss every shot? Don’t panic, don’t panic, I kept telling myself while fumbling with teleconverters and switching lenses. Then, I figured out the timing of their jumps and focused only on birds in the best light, jumping at an appropriate distance with bodies angled sideways to the camera. The photographs are dramatic!
My next goal was to film the behavior without the camera refocusing on the grass when the birds landed in the tall grass. Stills were a challenge, but the video was impossible. That night I looked through the camera’s instruction manual and found a technique that I thought would work.
We went out the next day, desperately hoping the birds would still be displaying. We found the lek after an interminable drive through the Crater and up the sidetrack. The widowbirds were still leaping and flaunting their feathers. Now for the new focusing technique: If I found a bird in the right spot and jumped at the correct angle, I could focus on him midair and hit a button that disabled the autofocus. It worked! Every time a bird jumped and landed in the same place, the next jumps were all in focus, sometimes as many as twenty-five in a row!
Sweet victory! It was an engaging species performing a dramatic behavior in a perfect setting in great light. And the photos were executed flawlessly with professional equipment!
