Gambel’s Quail on a Color-coordinated Perch

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A few days ago I photographed a male Gambel’s Quail perched atop some old farm equipment, apparently, pipes that are part of a well that is no longer in service. When I made the image I thought that it might make for an interesting scene, a juxtaposition of something natural and something that is man-made.

But later, when I processed my image, I did a double take. The quail’s plumage coordinates exactly with the pipes’ various colors.

It’s a bit weird: every color displayed by the quail matches perfectly with a part of the pipes. The quail’s rust-colored crest matches precisely with the rusty pipes in the image’s lower left-hand corner. The dark brown on the quail’s wings matches the dark brown portion of the pipe on which the quail perches. And so on. I spent several minutes playing a game of finding duplicate colors and I succeeded with every attempt.

The image depicts a coincidence. It’s not something that I noticed or thought about when I made the image and it’s certainly not something that the quail thought about as he perched on the pipes. There’s really no point to this coincidence except, perhaps, this: with nature photography, sometimes the most interesting images are the ones that are unplanned and unanticipated.

Image made with a Canon R5, Canon EF 400mm f4 DO II lens+Canon EF 1.4x telextender, M setting (auto ISO), ISO 2000, f5.6 @ 1/3200.

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