64 : Super 8

1965

Filming birds is ultimately the most accurate way of recording their movements and behaviour, no matter how good an artist or note-taker you are, and Super 8 cameras offered a portable means of recording rarities and birding trips, though digital technology would take this to a whole new level.

Capturing scenes of life on film is a way of preserving the moment, reliving it at any time in the future and keeping the details of memory clear. The invention of 35mm celluloid movie film (essentially the same as still camera film) spawned what has been termed ‘the art form of the 20th century’ by film director Martin Scorsese, and enabled the first appearances of wild birds at the cinema and later on television.

Fred Ott Holding a Bird (William Dickson, 1894) is probably the first appearance of a bird in a motion picture, the silent, black-and-white 35mm short being one of the earliest surviving movies. It was viewed by audiences on kinetoscopes, on which individuals viewed the flickering, jerky pictures on standalone boxes with a peephole.

Movie cameras were already portable enough by 1923 to be taken on the Tanager Expedition to the northernmost Hawaiian Islands, where groundbreaking ornithologist Alexander Wetmore was able to take the last ever footage of Laysan Rail before it disappeared forever, after only having been discovered in abundance on Midway and Laysan fewer than 100 years before. This ability to preserve lost species for all time is doubly highlighted by the film taken of Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 1935 by P P Kellogg; this invaluable sequence also has sound recordings. A notable failure of the 21st century claim of the rediscovery of this extinct bird was the film produced by scientists as ‘evidence’, but which actually apparently showed a Pileated Woodpecker (see pages 166-167).

It was the production of cheap and practical 8mm film and cameras that enabled people to make their own home movies, and a number of birdwatchers were quick to use the format for their own ends to record sightings and birding trips. The Standard 8 format was first released onto the market in 1932 by the ever-innovatory Eastman Kodak, though the film itself was actually 16mm wide, despite the name. The film enabled images to be captured along one 8mm side, before being flipped and recording taking place on the other. 16mm was also used in the field, notably for shooting the last footage of Imperial Woodpecker in Mexico on a Cornell University expedition in 1956.

Sales really burgeoned in 1965 with the introduction of the Super 8 format, which used easily loadable and cheaply developed cartridges for its films. Magnetic soundtrack tape was added to the edge of some later products but didn’t really catch on, though the original format is still used today by a small number of amateur filmmakers, being transferred or telecined onto video tape in the production process.

The reduction in bulk and weight of 8mm equipment started a trend that came of age with home video, a medium that really helped the everyday birder begin to record sightings as home movies, and immeasurable lengths of old footage of birds almost certainly now languish in unformatted purgatory.