of joint effort. Indeed, some people fa- 
miliar with the team’s work believe that 
during this time Bohlman was actually 
the more skilled artist. 
According to Finley, the pair’s first 
photography ventures of “any conse- 
quence” took place in the Pacific North- 
west on canoe trips in the summers of 
1897, 1898, and 1899. During these 
years, the two men established their 
method of working together, generally 
making exhaustive life histories of the 
birds they photographed. The first such 
project, and one that proved remunera- 
tive, focused on a pair of red-tailed 
hawks nesting in a cottonwood tree 120 
feet above the Columbia River. Finley 
and Bohlman found the nesting area in 
1898, located the actual nest in 1899, 
and finally accomplished the difficult 
climb up to the nest in 1900. Over the 
course of a month, they took a large 
number of photographs. Some, along 
with an article, were sold to Country 
Life in America. 
The rest of the decade continued to be 
In Portland. Oregon, Finley and 
Bohlman ( with moustache) posed with 
flickers in 1901, below. Two years 
later, they scaled sheer cliffs, right, 
to reach sea bird nesting grounds on 
Three Arch Rocks, large basalt 
formations off the Oregon coast. 
productive for Finley and Bohlman. In 
1901, on their first serious photography 
trek out of the Portland area, they ar- 
ranged for sea lion bounty hunters to 
ferry them out to Three Arch Rocks, 
three looming basalt formations that lie 
a mile off the north Oregon coast and 
are the nesting grounds of vast colonies 
of sea birds. The 1901 visit was short 
and produced few good photographs, 
but they returned early in the summer 
of 1903, equipped with boat, tent, and 
food for an extended stay. Rough 
weather forced them to camp on the 
beach for more than two weeks before 
wave action subsided sufficiently to al- 
low them to reach the rocks, where they 
encountered great numbers of common 
murre, pigeon guillemot, tufted puffin, 
western gull, three species of cormorant, 
and two species of petrel. Photographing 
the birds required considerable agility 
and strength. For example, to reach a 
murre colony the men had to scale a 
sheer rock face, heavy camera gear in 
hand. 
The next summer, Finley and Bohl- 
man pursued golden eagles, great blue 
herons, and night herons in California. 
Earlier efforts to photograph herons in a 
rookery near Portland had met with only 
limited success because the nests were 
high up in tall firs. Of this experience, 
Finley wrote: 
The photographer had selected the most 
“climbable-looking” stronghold in the 
heronry, where the nearest tree was a hun- 
dred and thirty feet up. But after the long, 
arduous ascent, he found that . . . fifteen 
feet away in the branches of an adjoining 
tree was a nest containing four eggs. To get 
this, the photographer strapped himself 
