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More photos & Products from Michael L. Smith
Story Of The
Mad Bluebird
By Lisa Pollak/The
Baltimore Sun
Picture of a bluebird, that's all he was after. Not money and fame, not admirers and accolades, not the chance to quit his day job and take pictures full-time. Photographing birds was his passion; it always would be. One good shot out of 100 was worth it. And so it was that on a cold February day in 1979, Michael L. Smith set up a tripod in his back yard, pointed his camera toward a fence post and waited. And waited. And waited.
He wasn't trying to change his life. He wasn't trying to buy the house of his dreams. He wasn't trying to become Michael Smith, the guy who took that bluebird photo. He was just trying to take a photo of a bluebird. And here came his chance. A male Eastern bluebird flew into the back yard and landed on the fence post. It hunkered down. It fluffed up its feathers. It fixed its black beady eyes on the long lens of the camera. Sixty feet away, Smith couldn't see any of this. He sat in his house, holding a remote camera trigger, watching the bluebird through a glass door. All he could see was that the bird was facing the camera. Click. The bird flew away. The man went on with his life. Neither, it seems safe to say, had any idea what they'd done. More than 20 years later, Smith still can't entirely believe it. If you owed your fortune to a bird, you might not either.
As it turned out,
that was no ordinary bluebird. It was a grumpy bluebird. A
ticked-off, glowering, down-in-the-beak bluebird. Or so it
appeared to humans, and that's what mattered, because at last
count humans have bought more than 102,000 signed prints of
"The Mad Bluebird" -- a phenomenal number by most
photographers' standards. In other words, a man who
has spent his life taking intimate portraits of birds -- a
photographer who has slept in duck blinds, spent 13 years of
summer weekends documenting the habits of a single osprey and
crawled through his yard with a blanket over his head to avoid
disturbing his subjects -- achieved his greatest success with a
photo he didn't especially like the first time he saw it and
still doesn't list among his very best.
"It has put me
in a whole new world financially," says Smith, "I was
an electrician for 32 years, and I made good money, but nothing
like this." When he says it, he doesn't sound like
he's gloating. He sounds proud, grateful and still plenty
stunned. When Smith moved into his new home in fall 1998, a copy
of "The Mad Bluebird" was the first possession over the
threshold; today, a giant print above the kitchen table reminds
him every day who he has to thank. He feels indebted to the bird
not just for his home, but also for his girlfriend, Marci
Krishnamoorthy, whom he met while delivering prints to the nature
store where she worked. Despite the volume of prints sold,
Smith still signs each one by hand -- he bought a signature
machine, but it felt too impersonal.
There you have it. But what difference does it
make? That once-anonymous bluebird -- who bird sources say surely
died years ago -- has become "The Mad Bluebird." He has
attained a level of fame that few humans can hope for.
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