Though now there’s no restrict to the animals he’ll {photograph}, Curtis Parypa nonetheless remembers fondly the primary creature that launched his ardour and led him on his present journey to changing into a full-time wildlife photographer and videographer.
It was a pileated woodpecker in Peterborough’s Jackson Park.
“It was actually the first time I’d even realized there were pileated woodpeckers here,” Parypa says. “There was just this big, giant bird on the side of a tree, pecking at it, with the bright red plumage on its head. It was just this really cool experience.”
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Misidentifying the woodpecker — Parypa laughs, recalling his first thought “as silly as it is” that it should have been a tropical hen — is a far cry from the place Parypa is now: each a hen fanatic and photographer and who has spent weeks camouflaged in foliage watching and ready for a shot of a belted kingfisher.
But on the time he noticed the woodpecker in the summertime of 2020, Parypa, who grew up in Bridgenorth and spent his entire life round Peterborough, hadn’t spent a lot time totally immersed in nature, even whereas at his household trailer in Lake St. Peter in Hastings Highlands.
“From my point of view, I was always outside, but not necessarily in nature,” he says. “For the most part, all I saw are robins and gulls — just your standard birds that are common and you see everywhere.”
Throughout highschool, Parypa was all the time taking footage, although often it didn’t transcend cellphone digital camera pictures of his associates skateboarding and the occasional sunsets. But throughout the pandemic Parypa started taking his digital camera to parks across the metropolis, noticed the pileated woodpecker, and knew that nature was to turn into the main focus of his newfound interest.
“I started going out to Jackson Park and would just explore around there to really get into the idea of nature,” he says. “Obviously, as I got into it, I started to realize how much wildlife there actually is out there, regardless of where you are.”
Since that fateful day, Parypa can usually be discovered together with his Sony a7iv mirrorless digital digital camera at Jackson’s Park, Beavermead Park, the parks and trails round Trent University, and — one among his favorite spots — Miller Creek Wildlife Area in Bridgenorth.
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“The birds are so friendly, so it’s fun to go over there,” Parypa says. “It’s a great place for families to hand-feed chickadees. I even had a red-breasted nuthatch land on my hand, and it was awesome.”
After spending a lot time with them, Parypa jokes he has fallen into the “trap” of changing into a hen fanatic.
“I never thought I’d be a birder, but you get stuck and fall down the rabbit hole and start discovering so many cool birds,” he says. “Even when I was up at my trailer, which is very much in nature, I wasn’t quite noticing all the different animals that are there. Now when I go, I’ll see a falcon fly by and I’m so excited, so it’s just a different appreciation I have now.”
In attempting to snap the right pictures, Parypa has gotten to know his topics and their habits very properly, utilizing apps like Merlin ID to assist him each determine and find out about birds. He usually practices on the animals he sees extra recurrently, just like the Great Blue Heron, which he says are simpler to {photograph} as a result of “they can be easy-going with people as long as you don’t push your boundaries.”
This newfound love of birds is how Parypa ended up squatted beneath a customized disguise he created utilizing a 3D camouflage internet, for days on finish earlier this 12 months to get some pictures of a belted kingfisher. The determination got here after years of heading all the way down to the river, solely to listen to the “iconic” name of the hen with out getting shut sufficient for pictures earlier than startling it away.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get photos of them so I decided I needed to do a little bit more research and improve my skills, and knew camouflage would be the best approach,” he recollects.
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Parypa discovered a spot within the timber that the hen preferred to perch on and would go early within the day and wait so long as 5 hours to look at and be taught the kingfisher’s routine.
“I kept missing the timing or the weather would be wrong, so the bird wouldn’t come by, but I figured out his habits and managed to get a really close-up photo without disturbing the bird,” says Parypa.
Parypa just lately uploaded a video to his YouTube channel documenting the time-consuming efforts taken to seize the photograph. Editing collectively footage of his images journeys is one other exercise Parypa has been doing increasingly more all through the previous 12 months.
VIDEO: What it takes to {photograph} the Kingfisher
“For a long time, I was posting photos on Instagram, but there was more to my story of each encounter or adventure that I wanted to tell,” he says, including that, like images, he did some video modifying again in highschool.
On his YouTube channel, Parypa shares narratives and tales of his images adventures, evaluations digital camera gear, and paperwork the tenting journeys he takes together with his girlfriend Sarah Kelly.
After their first tenting journey to Lake St. Peter Provincial Park final summer time, the couple made it their aim to fill out each web page within the Ontario Provincial Park Passport, which inspires guests to camp at 115 of the over 300 provincial parks in Ontario.
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“I really just wanted to start seeing more places, so we thought we would start trying with this grand, ambitious goal,” Parypa says, joking that it’d take so long as 15 years since they’ve solely crossed a handful of parks off the listing to date.
Along with seeing extra of Ontario, Parypa has large targets for the long run, hoping to spend extra time immersed in wildlife elsewhere in Canada, with a visit to Nova Scotia throughout puffin season on the highest of his bucket listing.
He may even be spending extra time utilizing his private printer to promote his pictures by way of the web site he just lately launched. Into 2024, Parypa hopes to take part in markets and vendor festivals across the metropolis and county to additional introduce his work to the group.
For now, Parypa continues to go in the hunt for discovering uncommon birds to {photograph}, although, in a full-circle realization, he’s additionally studying to understand these extra frequent birds he neglected previous to changing into a photographer. Just a couple of weeks in the past, Parypa posted a video the place he challenged himself to take a hike every single day for one week and take a photograph of each animal he handed simply to get observe.
“You can get really wrapped up in trying to find specific animals that you forget to pay attention to all the common ones you run into,” he says, noting that he took stunning nice pictures of gulls that week. “The whole point of that video was to just show more appreciation for everything we have, regardless of its rarity.”
To buy a photograph from Curtis Parypa, go to curtissnapshot.com. You can even observe him on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook for extra pictures and movies.
