SPECIFICATIONS

Photographer: Tom Vezo
Subject: Piping plover chick
Where: Long Island, New York
Camera: Nikon F5 with 600mm Nikkor lens
Film: Fujichrome Velvia

Go-to Guy
The photo editor of a national magazine like Audubon looks at thousands of pictures a year. They include the work of professionals, often shot on assignment for these pages, as well as submissions from accomplished amateur nature photographers who are equipped with the same (or better) cameras and lenses. In my time at this journal, it meant hours hunched over a light box, scanning color slides one by one using a 4X loupe with sharp German-made glass. These days, of course, most of the pictures are viewed on a computer monitor. The reward, however, hasn’t changed: finding an exceptional photo that demands publication. Tom Vezo’s shot of a well-camouflaged piping plover chick on a shell- and pebble-strewn Long Island beach was one such shot. Says Kim Hubbard, Audubon’s current photo editor, “It’s my favorite picture of Tom’s. For ages it hung on my wall at the office, and it always stopped people in their tracks. It’s a photo that seemed to speak to everyone.”

An internationally acclaimed wildlife and bird photographer who lived near Tucson, Arizona, the 61-year-old Vezo died of a heart attack in late July after hiking in the Rincon Mountains on an extremely hot and humid day. He had been a successful businessman in New York until trips to the Galápagos Islands and Antarctica inspired him to turn his passion into his profession. “Tom was one of the first photographers I’d call when I needed a bird picture,” says Hubbard. His work has appeared in many other prominent magazines, including National Geographic and National Wildlife, and is on display in three stunning books: Wings of Spring and Wings in the Wild (Stackpole) and Birds of Prey (Rio Nuevo). Perhaps the ultimate tribute comes from Jack Dykinga, a Pulitzer Prize–winning landscape photographer and fellow Arizonan, who told the Arizona Star that Vezo “always manages to capture peak animal behavior while still recording the most technically perfect images.”

As for our baby plover, the beach was a dangerous place even before it pecked its way out of the shell—after an incubation period of nearly four weeks—and began exploring the neighborhood, imitating the peck-and-run foraging behavior of its parents. The list of predators of plover eggs and chicks includes mink, weasels, foxes, skunks, raccoons, opossums, ground squirrels, coyotes, crows, owls, kestrels, and gulls. But with good fortune and the help of its cryptic disguise, the youngster may survive to take flight in four to five weeks, boosting by one the population of a critically endangered species.—Les Line

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