Though now there’s no limit to the animals he will photograph, Curtis Parypa still remembers fondly the first creature that launched his passion and led him on his current journey to becoming a full-time wildlife photographer and videographer.
It was a pileated woodpecker in Peterborough’s Jackson Park.
“It was actually the first time I’d even realized there were pileated woodpeckers here,” Parypa says. “There was just this big, giant bird on the side of a tree, pecking at it, with the bright red plumage on its head. It was just this really cool experience.”
Misidentifying the woodpecker — Parypa laughs, recalling his first thought “as silly as it is” that it must have been a tropical bird — is a far cry from where Parypa is now: both a bird enthusiast and photographer and who has spent weeks camouflaged in foliage watching and waiting for a shot of a belted kingfisher.
But at the time he saw the woodpecker in the summer of 2020, Parypa, who grew up in Bridgenorth and spent his whole life around Peterborough, hadn’t spent much time fully immersed in nature, even while at his family trailer in Lake St. Peter in Hastings Highlands.
“From my point of view, I was always outside, but not necessarily in nature,” he says. “For the most part, all I saw are robins and gulls — just your standard birds that are common and you see everywhere.”
Throughout high school, Parypa was always taking pictures, though usually it didn’t go beyond cellphone camera photos of his friends skateboarding and the occasional sunsets. But during the pandemic Parypa began taking his camera to parks around the city, saw the pileated woodpecker, and knew that nature was to become the focus of his newfound hobby.
“I started going out to Jackson Park and would just explore around there to really get into the idea of nature,” he says. “Obviously, as I got into it, I started to realize how much wildlife there actually is out there, regardless of where you are.”
Since that fateful day, Parypa can often be found with his Sony a7iv mirrorless digital camera at Jackson’s Park, Beavermead Park, the parks and trails around Trent University, and — one of his favourite spots — Miller Creek Wildlife Area in Bridgenorth.
“The birds are so friendly, so it’s fun to go over there,” Parypa says. “It’s a great place for families to hand-feed chickadees. I even had a red-breasted nuthatch land on my hand, and it was awesome.”
After spending so much time with them, Parypa jokes he has fallen into the “trap” of becoming a bird enthusiast.
“I never thought I’d be a birder, but you get stuck and fall down the rabbit hole and start discovering so many cool birds,” he says. “Even when I was up at my trailer, which is very much in nature, I wasn’t quite noticing all the different animals that are there. Now when I go, I’ll see a falcon fly by and I’m so excited, so it’s just a different appreciation I have now.”
In trying to snap the perfect photos, Parypa has gotten to know his subjects and their habits very well, using apps like Merlin ID to help him both identify and learn about birds. He often practices on the animals he sees more regularly, like the Great Blue Heron, which he says are easier to photograph because “they can be easy-going with people as long as you don’t push your boundaries.”
This newfound love of birds is how Parypa ended up squatted under a custom hide he created using a 3D camouflage net, for days on end earlier this year to get some shots of a belted kingfisher. The decision came after years of heading down to the river, only to hear the “iconic” call of the bird without getting close enough for photos before startling it away.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get photos of them so I decided I needed to do a little bit more research and improve my skills, and knew camouflage would be the best approach,” he recalls.
Parypa found a spot in the trees that the bird liked to perch on and would go early in the day and wait as long as five hours to watch and learn the kingfisher’s routine.
“I kept missing the timing or the weather would be wrong, so the bird wouldn’t come by, but I figured out his habits and managed to get a really close-up photo without disturbing the bird,” says Parypa.
Parypa recently uploaded a video to his YouTube channel documenting the time-consuming efforts taken to capture the photo. Editing together footage of his photography journeys is another activity Parypa has been doing more and more throughout the past year.
VIDEO: What it takes to photograph the Kingfisher
“For a long time, I was posting photos on Instagram, but there was more to my story of each encounter or adventure that I wanted to tell,” he says, adding that, like photography, he did some video editing back in high school.
On his YouTube channel, Parypa shares narratives and stories of his photography adventures, reviews camera gear, and documents the camping trips he takes with his girlfriend Sarah Kelly.
After their first camping trip to Lake St. Peter Provincial Park last summer, the couple made it their goal to fill out every page in the Ontario Provincial Park Passport, which encourages visitors to camp at 115 of the over 300 provincial parks in Ontario.
“I really just wanted to start seeing more places, so we thought we would start trying with this grand, ambitious goal,” Parypa says, joking that it might take as long as 15 years since they’ve only crossed a handful of parks off the list so far.
Along with seeing more of Ontario, Parypa has big goals for the future, hoping to spend more time immersed in wildlife elsewhere in Canada, with a trip to Nova Scotia during puffin season on the top of his bucket list.
He will also be spending more time using his personal printer to sell his photographs through the website he recently launched. Into 2024, Parypa hopes to participate in markets and vendor fairs around the city and county to further introduce his work to the community.
For now, Parypa continues to go in search of finding rare birds to photograph, though, in a full-circle realization, he’s also learning to appreciate those more common birds he overlooked prior to becoming a photographer. Just a few weeks ago, Parypa posted a video where he challenged himself to take a hike every day for one week and take a photo of every animal he passed just to get practice.
“You can get really wrapped up in trying to find specific animals that you forget to pay attention to all the common ones you run into,” he says, noting that he took surprising great photos of gulls that week. “The whole point of that video was to just show more appreciation for everything we have, regardless of its rarity.”
To purchase a photo from Curtis Parypa, visit curtissnapshot.com. You can also follow him on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook for more photos and videos.
