Eared grebe courtship
- 📍 Location: Grands-Laviers, France
- 📅 Date: 2022
Two black-necked grebes facing each other on open water in the spring, necks straight, crests raised, at the moment when the display stops being a chase and becomes a conversation. The composition is almost symmetrical, and deliberately so: two birds, two reflections, one narrow strip of ruffled water. What breaks the symmetry is the small difference between the two postures, and that difference is the whole picture.
I worked at water level, because a grebe seen from above is a bird on a lake and a grebe seen from its own height is a bird in a world. The horizon is excluded. Nothing in the frame tells you how large the water is, which leaves the two animals in the kind of emptiness their ritual seems to require.
The light is flat and slightly cold, coming off the water as much as from the sky, and it does what no golden hour could have done here: it lets the golden ear fans and the chestnut flanks read at their true intensity instead of drowning them in a warm cast.
Courtship in grebes is not romantic, it is precise. Every posture answers another, and the birds appear to be checking the answers. I wanted the photograph to hold that attentiveness, two creatures listening very carefully to one another, and to keep absolutely everything else out of the frame.
Limited-edition fine-art print from the Skywaven Studios collection, available in several sizes, papers and framing options.
