Birds and Native Plants with Scott Keys

Birds and Native Plants with Scott Keys- Introduction

First, we chatted with Scott about how he first got involved in the world of Bird Photography. We are always so interested to hear how people find their way into this very specific type of art – everyone always has a unique story.

Q: So Scott, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, and how you got into the world of wildlife photography!

A: Yeah, so I live in Allentown, Pennsylvania, we call it the Lehigh Valley. It’s a magnificent spot for what I do. So geographically, I’m about 2 hours from the Jersey Shore. I can go down south for about an hour, then I’m in Delaware, and then about an hour north of me is the Pocono Mountains. I’m also at the northern breeding range for a lot of species. There’s this mountain ridge near me called the Kittatinny Ridge And it kind of flows down into the Appalachian and at elevation, there are tons of these breeding warblers that hang around here. So geographically, Eastern Pennsylvania where I live is just a gold mine. Not necessarily because it’s great for any one thing, but within an hour or so I get this tremendous diversity of birds which is obviously what I do.

I think I started in 2013. Instantly addicted. I knew nothing about photography. I wasn’t a photographer who took up birding and I wasn’t a birder who took up photography, as I know a lot of people do. So for me, it was everything at once. I was all in, self-taught. I can’t imagine how many thousands of hours of youtube videos I’ve watched on both photoshop and whatever birds or nature or wildlife is out there.

Birds and Native Plants with Scott Keys- Tips for Great Composition

Q: As an amateur, what kind of advice would you give to someone trying to incorporate the environment into their shots and create these beautiful compositions?

A: Yeah. So there are three keys, I think, that make good photographs in general for birds or songbirds.

1. Lighting– The first one is shooting in good light. Now that doesn’t matter for environmental or tight portrait. I mean, that’s just kind of the standard. Good light is good light.
2. Perspective– What is really challenging with bird photography, probably more so than any other genre is perspective.  It’s almost assumed that when you’re shooting another human or even if you’re shooting big game like Elk and Moose, your focal plane is normally right at eye level. But with birds, it’s completely different ballgame. Very rarely do you get birds in the same focal plane as your eye and so the typical perspective is to look up or to look down. So the first thing I always talk to people about when they’re talking about how to create really interesting images is think about your perspective, and can you find eye level perspective?
3. Location– I’ve become a firm believer that locations are maybe the most important thing to bird photography, finding these really nice locations where you can get eye level looks. So hills or elevation or shooting off of a mountain where you get these backdrops. Getting perspective is really, really critical.

Something else I talk about is stopping focusing on the subject, which is the exact opposite of what a birder wants to do.  So when I talk to people about this, I say, see through the bird or see through the subject. Just start looking at everything else except the bird, whatever you can see in your viewfinder. Sometimes you’re going to wait for the bird to move into a better spot but most of the time it’s about you setting up in spots that are just going to give you that. Eventually, I’ll find locations where if birds were to come through here, this would be a great area. Or I know birds hang around or breed in this part of the park, and I know this area of the park photographs much better than this area of the park.

Birds and Native Plants with Scott Keys- Native Plants

Q: So Scott, tell us a bit about your passion for native plants and how that evolved beyond just photography.

So I start looking and I’ve got wineberry, stilt grass, garlic mustard, every honeysuckle, which is another nasty invasive. I’ve got every invasive plant in the world on my property.  I just read about invasive species and native species and their benefits and all this other stuff and I decided, all right, I’m done. I’m going to rip it all out. This was three years ago. I committed to five years to see if I could transplant the invasive species into native species.  I spent two years just researching plants and buying plants, trying them out. Some go here, some go there, some work, some didn’t.  I’ve planted 120 different native species on my 1-acre property. Some species didn’t work, most of them did, though I was pretty impressed that most of the species I planted worked.

Q:  So, what kind of changes did you see on your property so far?

Birds and Native Plants with Scott Keys- Photo Story

Q: So in these interviews we sometimes like to select one photo and ask you to tell the story behind it. You mentioned that a photo you took of an Indigo Bunting on bergamot was one of your favorite photos from 2021, can you tell us a bit about that?

A: It was really neat. So there’s a field that I use to go to that’s got a mix of native and invasive plants. I hadn’t been back there in a while. I didn’t realize I was in the same spot that I was years ago because it looked much different. So before, this area was kind of an Orchard with grass, and it was nothing really pretty about it.  I was standing where they had restored the habitat. Somebody intentionally had clearly come in and tried to restore this into some kind of a meadow. They had planted two major plants that I saw were Heliopsis, which is a kind of a nice sunflower type plant. And then this Bergamot, I think they would call this one Eastern Bergamot or Monarda fistulosa. I was looking at this field, and I thought, oh, this is really cool. Somebody actually is trying to bring back native plants. Bunting and Common Yellowthroats are the typical birds that would hang around there. And so, sure enough, this guy was popping around a little bit. The cool thing about Bunting is they like to be on the top, so they like to sing from the top. It just so happened that they would hit the tallest of these things, which is great for me because I’m shooting now just over the top of the field. That was a big success story, not just for me as a photographer, but you saw the payback was now there’s a little ecosystem for birds, due to this commitment to plant native species and restore that habitat.

Wrap Up

Scott on bird photography, his connection with nature, and giving back:

So when I do this whole photography thing, at some point, I started to feel like if I’m going to take from the wildlife a little bit, I got to try to give back a little bit. The giveback was I’ll try to get a little more involved with native plants. So, I’ve got my audience on Instagram. It was like, okay, here’s the pretty birds, and by the way, you should plant Bergamot in your backyard. Or hey, here’s a hummingbird picture. Oh, by the way, if you put Cardinal flowers in your backyard, you might get some. Sometimes wildlife photographers forget that taking these pictures is about more than just taking cool photos, but about the appreciation for wildlife and the environments they’re living in.

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