41-year-old musician and college band director Michael Sanchez purchased his first digital camera only a month in the past. Last week, whereas attempting to get good dawn panorama photographs at Hug Point alongside the Oregon coast, Sanchez took pictures of a small, dark-looking chook within the dim daybreak gentle. While not initially realizing it, Sanchez had captured among the solely pictures ever of a blue rock thrush (Monticola solitarius) in North American historical past.
“I’m just a beginner photographer, and I wouldn’t consider myself a birder at all,” Sanchez tells PetaPixel over the cellphone. “I always watch [birds] when they are out, and I even had some pet birds years ago, but never thought I’d be diving headfirst into something like this.”
The “this” Sanchez refers to is a media firestorm. After returning home to Vancouver, Washington, from his roughly two-hour journey to Hug Point — his second in as many days — Sanchez regarded by his pictures and realized that the little “black” chook he photographed because the Sun was eking above the horizon wasn’t black, however blue and chestnut.
“I assumed, ‘Oh wait, this is not an average black little bird at all,’” Sanchez recalls looking at his RAW files in Lightroom for the first time. “The colors were very apparent to me. I thought, ‘Oh, well, this is something different, for sure.’”
Sanchez shared some images online, still not quite realizing what he had seen. One of his friends passed it along to a bird enthusiast they know, and everything snowballed. Sanchez’s picture has been shared by on-line birding communities, native information, and he says he’s even chatted with USA Today.
The budding photographer describes the previous week as an “uproar” he didn’t understand he was going to start out, together with his photographs sending the birding neighborhood within the Pacific Northwest into an absolute frenzy. People try to see the chook for themselves.
“We live in a beautiful world. We have beautiful birds, beautiful landscapes, and so I think if this encourages people just to take a little bit of notice of what’s going on around them, and whether it’s a little bird or something else, I think that’s a great thing,” Sanchez explains.
Sanchez’s sighting is simply the second unofficial sighting ever on document in North America, with the final in 1997 not being admitted into the official document attributable to inadequate knowledge.
The blue rock thrush, a species of chat, is native to Europe and Asia. In its official vary, Oregon and the remainder of North America are method off the map. The starling-sized male is hundreds of miles from home.
Sanchez thinks his story resonates with so many individuals as a result of it’s enjoyable and constructive, and it’s about “some guy” who “just happened” to take some of the exceptional chook pictures in Oregon’s wealthy birding historical past.
The sighting is present process typical scrutiny earlier than being accepted as an official document, though chook specialists consider it can cross muster and be admitted into the document books. Sanchez is working with the Oregon Bird Records Committee to offer as a lot element as attainable.
Sanchez describes himself as a “graduate of YouTube University” and says he likes to get out a number of occasions every week to take pictures. “You can learn all the theory, but in practice, that’s when you really learn what works and what doesn’t,” the novice shooter says.
It was partially his thirst for information and fervour for enhancing his pictures that led to his unbelievable sighting. He says that he was beneficial to go to Hug Point as a result of he advised some fellow photographers in a web based discussion board that he was headed to Cannon Beach to do panorama taking pictures, and so they pointed him towards Hug Point for panorama alternatives.
“They said, ‘There are some waterfalls there,’ so I go, ‘Oh, great. I’ll show up, I’ll do a long exposure — try to get nice silky water and all that,’” Sanchez says. “The damnedest thing about it is that none of the waterfall pictures turned out, but I think I made out in the deal.”
Michael Sanchez made out within the deal after which some, capturing a once-in-a-lifetime shot of an exquisite chook removed from home.
Image credit: Photos by Michael Sanchez
