Bosque del Apache is national wildlife refuge just one and half hours south on I-25 from Albuquerque in New Mexico. Here, in lakes and marshes along Rio Grande River is a place where tens of thousands of migratory birds including sandhill cranes, Arctic geese, and many kinds of ducks gather each fall and stay through the winter.

The most spectacular thing to watch in Bosque del Apache is the morning flyout. It occurs at sunrise when the first rays of ascending sun hit the Rio Grande valley. Exactly at this moment every morning thousands of geese wake up and take off simultaneously in one thunderous explosion of thousands of wings. It sounds like a jet fighter taking off. It is an awesome sight: the pond empties in only a few seconds, and multiple layers of geese fly low overhead at different altitudes and slightly different headings, frantically calling and honking to keep family groups together.

Bosque del Apache is prime spot for congregation of bird photographers as well. They flock here in dozens and line up every morning along the pond waiting for the flyout. With expensive cameras and huge telephoto lenses. It is a photographic subculture. Everybody seems to know everybody. They come to Bosque del Apache year after year. Oh, and if you have lens less than 400mm you are, well, not really cool.

I was there too. Following the crowd I mounted the biggest telephoto lens I have on my camera and set it up on a tripod. Made several frames waiting for the flyout. And then it came to me – the main subject is not the birds, it is the photographers. Their grotesque silhouettes and silhouettes of their tripods against the bright hues of sunrise sky created a perfect picture. I quickly changed telephoto to wide angle lens on my camera and literally started to crawl on the ground looking for the right composition. I found it with one of the photographers using his handheld medium format camera surrounded with his other two cameras on tripods. And at this moment the flyout happened. It lasted only few seconds but I’ve got my picture: a silhouette of photographer against the mass of ascending birds in the morning sky.