Submitted by Garrison Piel on the 2020 winter session program in Tanzania sponsored by the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology…
When we came across this curious looking bird, my jaw dropped, and memories I had forgotten started flooding back. When I was around 6 years old, a family friend of ours gave me a picture book of all the photos he took in Africa. He was a photographer for a magazine. I recognized all of the animals in that book: zebra, elephant, buffalo, but not this bird. Since I wasn’t using the internet yet, it remained in my memories as a mystery. Now here I was, photographing that same bird through my own lens: a helmeted guinea fowl.