I’ve attended baited wildlife photography workshops – is it ever okay to bait or should you always patiently wait?

Wildlife photography is an inherently contentious topic, and baiting is arguably top of the list. I recently wrote a semi-viral article about a photographer who chased an owl around a field and refused to stop, which has caused me to analyze my own behaviour as a photographer.

Now, I’ll stop short of calling myself a hardcore wildlife photographer, because although I love photographing wildlife, it’s not something I get to do regularly. And indeed, many of the most memorable wildlife experiences I’ve had have been through my previous role working as Deputy Editor of N-Photo: The Nikon Magazine.

Each issue we would run a feature called ‘The Apprentice’. This was a fly-on-the-wall account of a workshop where one lucky reader would get the chance to be tutored by a professional photographer and while we covered all genres, wildlife photography was a regular occurrence.

Leading workshops is a key source of income for many wildlife photographers, and they cater to photographers from all skill levels and all walks of life. However, you probably wouldn’t get many returning customers, if your workshops consisted of sitting in a river for six hours, in a bid to photograph a family of otters who may or may not turn up. Inevitably, some wildlife workshops (including some of those I covered for the magazine) involve baiting.

Now, in an ideal world, no photographer would bait. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and not all baiting is created equally. Baiting is anything – although typically food – used to lure an animal. Unwanted side effects can include dependency, overfeeding, behavioral changes, and the spread of disease. With all that in mind, it seems like a cut-and-shut case, baiting is bad. But not all baiting is created equally.

I’m never going to call baiting ethical, but in some cases, there’s an argument that it’s necessary. Of the few baited shoots I’ve been on, all were in conjunction with some kind of conservation effort. Specifically, organizations that were directly contributing to protecting, bolstering, or maintaining the numbers of endangered or once-endangered species.

The workshops I attended were for red kites, red squirrels, and ospreys. Conservation has allowed red kites to bounce back from near extinction in the UK, ospreys to recolonize following extinction in Britain, and red squirrels to maintain a few small strongholds, following decimation from the invasive grey squirrel.

The red kites were photographed at Gigrin Farm in Wales. This site’s supplemental feeding was integral to the birds’ comeback from the 1990s, and opened to the public to fund its food source, with the blessing of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). The ospreys were photographed at a trout farm in Rutland Water, the heart of the osprey reintroduction project, whereby ospreys were continually raiding the farm in search of food. Rather than net each pond, the farm sought to work with the Rutland Osprey Project and now leaves one pond unnetted, so as not to prohibit this vital food source entirely.

And in the case of the red squirrels, the hides, where I photographed these little critters, is one of the few places where they still reside in England. They exist in the same area as the hides and are provided with the same nuts that they feed on naturally. With numbers already low and the area exposed to particularly harsh winters, the workshops provide vital supplementary feed for the colder months.

As I’ve hopefully illustrated, the subject of baiting isn’t quite as simple as it first sounds. My own personal feeling is that baited wildlife photography should be judged on a case-by-case basis. But it’s something I think all wildlife photographers should be aware of. Technically, feeding garden birds could be considered baiting, and while I’m not going to get into that here, even that has sparked ongoing discussions as to whether or not the pros outweigh the cons.

Ultimately, wildlife photography is always going to be inherently controversial. Heck, we now live in a world of such information overload, you could pose the question: Do we really need another ethically captured photograph of a polar bear to know that this vulnerable species’ habitat is in dangerous decline? Probably not… And yet, who would want to deny the world of up-to-the-minute imagery of these magnificent creatures we should all feel privileged to share this planet with?

I doubt there’s a wildlife photographer on the planet who has always operated entirely ethically. In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible today. The main thing is that we hold workshops, hides, reserves, and indeed ourselves to high standards. Unnecessarily and obviously unethical baiting should be avoided at all costs, everything else should be left to your discretion.

And if you’re somebody who’s experienced a clearly unethical baited experience in the past, this article doesn’t exist to point the finger. It exists to make people more aware of their impact as a wildlife photographer, and what they can reasonably do to lessen.

Perhaps you agree with the above, perhaps you have exceedingly strong opinions you’d like to share in the comments section below. Believe me, I’d love to hear your take. Just remember that it’s better to engage in healthy dialogue, that way, we can all learn and grow as photographers.

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