Feed the kid
- 📍 Location: Le Pecq, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
Two great tits at Le Pecq in the spring, a fledgling on the branch and the adult arriving above it with its wings open, caught in the instant before one beak reaches the other. The picture is built on that gap. The two birds make a rough diagonal across the frame, the open wing repeats the line of the branch, and the whole event fits into a space no larger than a hand.
The background is a white sky, and I used it on purpose. Overcast light is usually the enemy of small birds because it flattens them, but against pure white the silhouette becomes a drawing, and the yellow of the breast and the black of the cap are the only colours allowed to survive. Everything the eye does not need has been removed by the weather rather than by me.
Feeding takes a fraction of a second and happens dozens of times an hour. That is the strange arithmetic of spring: an act of enormous urgency, repeated until it turns into routine, performed by a bird that weighs less than a letter. I stayed a long time on the same branch, missing it again and again, and this is the frame where both birds are legible at once.
What I wanted was not a portrait of a great tit but a portrait of an obligation, and of the feeling that goes with it, the exhausted and relentless tenderness of parents in May.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
