Photography Hides

Red Squirrel - Cairngorms, Scotland

We all know it is nigh-on impossible to get close to any wildlife and shoot a picture good enough to satisfy the pixel-peepers of this world. The solution of course is to use a hide.

With the explosion in wildlife photography that digital imaging has generated, photography hides have become big business. Up and down the country there are a number of opportunities to use a hide to capture many species and the standard of these hides varies wildly.

Though my preference is to capture images through personal fieldcraft, I have sampled many in the past few years, both in the UK and abroad. Indeed I have used three in the past week alone. These vary from a hole dug in the ground and covered in camo netting to a Rolls Royce standard shed complete with tea and coffee making facilities and a loo.

What you get for your money varies wildly too. In fact in one case I have declined to visit a hide purely on the grounds of cost set against likely results. On the one hand you have a set up where you are escorted to the hide at the start of the session and are then left to your own devices for the rest of the day. You decide when you want to leave and do so. The better hides and, in my experience, where the better results can be obtained are those where you have a guide in attendance for the duration of your stay. I've also visited hides where you are taken to the structure and then the guide returns every couple of hours to rearrange perches and replenish bait. The downside of this is there is a lull after the guides visit until the wildlife builds confidence to return.

Of course the fickle nature of wildlife still means you are not guaranteed success. One of the hides I used last week was to capture a particular species and not one showed up. Last year I made a 400 mile round trip and an overnight stay to photograph Ospreys fishing and had one pass. Inevitably conditions were not conducive to either tempt the birds to fish, or to get a usable image from the one visit the bird made. It's an expensive game and you pay your money and take your chance.

But there is one aspect of hides that I find hard to understand. The RSPB have a large number dotted across the country, but my travels to them around the UK virtually always leave me disappointed. A large proportion of them are just too far from the action and useless to photographers. They're fine for the birders with their scopes, who have no interest in a pictorial record of their sighting. Would it be right to believe the RSPB just don't want to appeal to the wildlife photography community? I believe they're missing a trick and with it a further income stream.

I'll continue to use hides, although I'm not bothered about pixel-peepers. But my preference will always be for images captured using fieldcraft. So many times have I seen images where I can recognise the perch and know which hide it was taken from. Of course others can do the same to my images taken from a hide.

As a final comment, the image above was captured in a hide in Scotland last week. But in my archives I have many Red Squirrel images better than this and just as close, that were shot laying in undergrowth on Brownsea Island.