One morning I was sitting by the garbage dumpsite on one end of the Pilerne lake hoping to photograph some White breasted waterhens. There are usually about four or five of them scrounging around for food in this spot. Local women are often washing their clothes in the trickle of a small stream that opens into this lake and the birds are fairly accustomed to the women even as they noisily smash their clothes on a rock.

Since the birds were already accustomed to the women I figured that they would pay no heed to me sitting close by. But as it turns out I was wrong, for every single water hen on that day suspiciously watched me from a distance and refused to come within reach of a photograph.

An hour and a half into my shoot I cussed the birds as I usually do when they play hard to get and wrote off my morning as another one of my many unproductive ones. About fifteen minutes before my scheduled end time I noticed a strange looking bird boldly making its way out towards me. Several seconds later i was still staring at the moving bird trying to figure out whether my eyes were playing tricks on me. Was it an ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill bird that simply looked rare from where I was looking at it?

As i snapped pictures of it it slowly began to dawn on me that I was indeed looking at some kind of rare snipe. I had never seen this bird before. After 30 seconds of moving purposefully the bird suddenly stopped to stand behind a small bush. Only its head and the front portion of its body could now be seen. I hung around for another thirty minutes waiting for it to do something interesting but the bird didn’t move once. At times when I looked back to find it I couldn’t see it all all. That is until my eyes finally separated it from the bushes and I realized that it was still right where it had been all along! Made me realized that if I hadn’t first seen the bird walking I’d have never noticed it even though it was standing in broad daylight less than seven meters from me!