When It Was Film, Part IV --Elements

Gordon Lake Cliffs, Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness                       

Date Unknown, 1996

Cliffs of Gordon Lake, Boundary Waters Canoe

 Area Wilderness, MN, USA

Gordon Lake is a beautiful and wild lake situated between three iconic Boundary Waters lakes, Cherokee Lake, Long Island Lake, and Frost Lake.  Gordon is not so much of a destination as it is a passed-through, even overlooked hub of open water between destination portages.  Reaching Gordon Lake, a traveler has most likely been traveling all day through wilderness, packing, portaging and paddling, and has just a few more lifts and a few more brisk minutes on the water before settling into a camp spot for the night.  If not that scenario, then it is the first challenge of the day, having just slipped from camp in the morning light and completed the first portage of many in a day of rugged wilderness travel.  Either way, this lake is just something in the middle, and many people run through it without purpose of seeing or feeling its beauty.

The reality of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is that beauty is found everywhere and in an endless variety of shapes, patterns, movements, and lives.  Traveling slowly through this wilderness, approaching the path more in the way of a hunter, opens the senses to the importance in the changing land forms, the different characters of water, and the diverse plant, animal, and fungal communities that change from place to place.  Sometimes, like so many others, I set a point on a map, a goal to reach, and I paddle hard with my head down.  Sometimes, like so many others, I portage the pack with relentless fury, intent only on the other side of the trail.  Mostly, though, I try to drink it all in, aware of my life and all around me, slowly stalking, smiling with the surprises around each new peninsula and rocky point. 

This photograph was a small part of the trip, but the serenity of the cliff, the complexity of the lichens, and the symbolic memory of how we took in the landscape of our travels makes it one of my all-time favorite photographs.  I like it for its lines, traveling and meandering through the rocks like our own journey through the wilderness. While the rocks are powerful, strong, and weathered, they also support small splashes of color and life.

This image was the result of a slow and steady touring pace.  Cindy and I spent around 14 hours per day traveling.  Camping was merely sleeping.  The joy was in the traveling.  We saw a few moose on this trip, including a young bull on Cross Bay Lake, a cow foraging for aquatic vegetation on Pencil Lake, and a couple of other young moose that I barely remember.  We dragged our canoe over a beaver dam, down a rocky rapid too shallow to paddle, and we paddled out into giant, clear lakes, one of which had pines that began growing before the United States Constitution was written. 

I made this image, handheld, from a canoe using a Canon EOS Elan, 100-300 kit lens, and Kodachrome 200 film.  It is the first in a series of images of rock and water that I title "Elements."

When It Was Film, Part III

The Fox with the Feather                              Date: Early May, 1996, Date Unknown

Red Fox pup with Ring-necked Pheasant feather, the Fox with the Feather, my most popular image.

When film was the medium of photographic expression, the world moved more slowly.  Images were vastly more expensive to make, and perfection was, more like pottery, nearly impossible to obtain.  So, like potters, we pursued the physical proof of our artistic expressions always a half step behind the evolving artistic vision.

To make this image, I spent a couple of hours per day over a few weeks, more than forty hours total, sitting motionless at the edge of a dirt mound.  In the middle of the mound, a red fox den grew constantly as energetic pups excavated a dozen new holes.  A den that had begun as a simple tube through the Earth had become a fragile hydra, entrance holes merging together and a settling into sagging tree roots.  Over the days the pups grew used to me, and my presence transformed from looming threat to beloved uncle.  My arrival sometimes emptied the den in a pile of frolicking pups, and one even played tug of war with my shoe lace.   Even the mother fox grew used to my presence, and, while she never completely accepted me, she sometimes nursed her pups less than fifty feet away, sure to be as far and opposite of me on the den site as possible. 

The death of a pheasant hen was surely a windfall for the mother fox, though she did not consume it at the den. Her reluctance to share the bird with her pups at the den was part of her defiance of me, her commitment to write me off as a pest and a menace.   Remains of the bird did find their way to the den site eventually, and for a brief time, the pups played in the feathers.  I anticipated this image for a few hours, but, to my surprise, what seemed so obvious would not play out.  Finally, for just a few seconds, a pup picked up a feather, pranced around with it, flattened out on the ground to chew on it, and then stood, holding the hen's feather before letting it flutter to the wind.

Film was expensive then, and pressing the shutter release was a calculated decision.  Each image was crafted, and poor planning was money down the drain.  Of the hundreds of images made at the den site, a few dozen are sharp, good, and worthy.  This sole image remains as a defining moment. It has been published in Cabin Life, Cabin Living and the Weatherguide Calendar series.

I made this image with a Canon EOS Elan, Canon 100-300 kit lens and, if memory serves me well, Kodak Ektachrome 100 or 200S.  

Enjoying the Arctic at Home -- Shorebird Migration!

Opportunity Among the Flooded Flats                     18 August 2017

Pectoral Sandpiper

Nothing captures the nervous energy of a long-distance bird migration quite so well as a mixed flock of shorebirds, actively foraging over beaches, mud flats, and flooded flats along the shores of Lake Superior.  Shorebirds are iconic symbols of cooperative conservation efforts and champions of long distance migration, some species flying nearly pole to pole twice per year.  Some of these shorebirds even attain the famed status of "Moon Bird", the title given to a bird that has flown as many miles as Earth to Moon.

Lesser Yellowlegs

Shorebirds live life on the edge, and they are dependent upon good migratory stopover sites.  Feeding at a reliable stopover provides enough food to build muscle back to flying strength and a stockpile of body fat.  Some of these birds will increase their weight by 30 to 50 percent before flying onward in their journey.  Failure to find the good stuff at a stopover site could be the bitter end!

Buff-breasted Sandpiper

Mixed flock of Sandpipers

The summer of 2017 was unusually wet in Lake Superior region.  While heading out to Park Point near Duluth, Minnesota, we were excited to see a huge mixed flock of shorebirds.  The diversity of birds heading south from the Arctic Circle had found a large, flooded ball field and had descended upon it as if it were an Arctic mudflat.  The human-made landscape, complete with exotic species of annelid worms, was a nutrient-rich and calorie-rich stand-in for wilder stopovers.  The birds eagerly mingled at the edges of shallow pools and probed the wet, black soil for invertebrate life.  Every so often, an airplane roared overhead from Sky Harbor, sending the birds scattering in flight.  Within seconds, they returned, feeding with as much enthusiasm as before.

Lesser Yellowlegs

Semipalmated Plover

Pectoral Sandpiper

Lesser Yellowlegs

All images were made with a Canon 7D Mk1 and a Canon EF 400mm f5.6 L lens.  I made the images handheld, but I was often laying prone or kneeling low to the ground.  

When It Was Film, Part II

Hyder, Alaska and the Golden Eagle Sound                  Date Unknown, 1993

Just above Hyder Alaska, sub-alpine meadows grow a luxurious bed of endless heathers.  Far below, Pacific Coast temperate rainforest trees tower over river valleys, dripping with rain, moss, and old man's beard lichens. This is a high density bear area.  Thousand-pound coastal brown bears and smaller, more tenacious black bears abound.  Up on the high mountains, there are no tall trees, no places to hang a food pack.  Up here, caution in bear country is replaced with a resignation to fate.

Following a peaceful night's camp, we were returning back down to the valley, navigating a series of high alpine pools.  I was inspired by their beauty and the spectacular beauty of the Misty Fjords National Monument in the distance.  As I set up my camera for the image, I heard a strange sound in the sky above me.  It sounded as though, somehow, someone was tearing the sky.  Like the ripping sound of fabric, the brisk tearing of paper, the sound of a windbreaker jacket giving way to an unstoppable wind, the calm and windless sky above me was tearing wide open.  The sound passed quickly overhead from west to east, painting only a picture of "where" but giving no clues about "what".  Suddenly calm again, I was left to wonder.   It would be fourteen years until I experienced the sound again and learned the identity of the "sky ripper."  The sound had been made by the primary flight feathers of a Golden Eagle at maximum flight speed, a predator on a power dive.   

The thing missing in this image is the sound.  Imagine it as you look down into the pool, and you will be there with me.

This image was made with a Minolta SRT 101 camera, a Celtic 50mm lens, and Fujichrome 100 film.  If none of those things sound familiar, I am not surprised.

When It Was Film, Part I

Mountain Goat in the High Pass                      Date Unknown, 1993

Rain clouds hung low in the Rockies for weeks on end. Each day, the rain that had fallen would simply evaporate back into the mix, form low clouds, and condense back out into another rain.  Cindy and I had hiked through endless rains and ankle deep mud, surprising wet and cold mule deer in the Bob Marshall wilderness and seeking shelter under old, ragged, leaning fir trees along the Flathead River.  

The day this image was made, we had left the trails of the Bob Marshall for more comfortable conditions in Glacier National Park.  It took only a few hours for the wet cold to wear off and the hunger for close quarter adventures with wild places and big animals to return.  While hiking a spur trail, this mountain goat suddenly appeared from the fog, only to be wrapped up and lost again in a clouded mist.  We played "cat and mouse" for the longest time, wispy arms of fog reaching out and obscuring us from each other.  Eventually, I made a move in anticipation of where I thought the goat would appear.  I was right, and she nearly walked into my lap.  As the clouds parted, she walked down the goat trail to a running stream for a drink.  

This image was made using a Canon EOS Elan and Canon 100-300 kit lens. It was hand-held with Kodachrome 200 film. 

Perfect Perches --The Old Mossy Perch

Neotropical Birds and Temperate Luxury                            14 May 2016

Baltimore Oriole and mossy perch

Gray Catbird

One of my favorite challenges in bird photography is to capture an image that reveals something about the lifestyle of the bird in the image.  Many of our birds famously engage in epic migrations spanning thousands of miles, and a vast percentage of the Great Lakes states' birds arrive from tropical forest.  From early May until mid-September, these truly tropical songbirds become breeding residents at 45 degrees North Latitude.  A couple of hundred species of birds, while spending the majority of their lives in the tropics, hatch from the egg within a short flight of Lake Superior.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

Baltimore Oriole, Female

An interesting scientific challenge is to graph climate data from a variety of biomes and search out intersections.  My favorite way to do this is to plot average temperature against average precipitation in scatter plot fashion, with a single point for each month.  When all points have been plotted for a single biome, I encircle the points.   I repeat this for each biome, and then I analyze where intersections of polygons occur.  What is truly interesting about large areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota, especially in the north country, is that over the course of a single year, the climate averages intersect with temperate deciduous forest, prairie, boreal taiga forest...and tropical rainforest.  July in Wisconsin is nearly identical to the average climate of a tropical rainforest. Suddenly, it makes more sense that tropical birds with wanderlust would find this place so much to their liking.  Since the last ice age, clouds of nervous, wandering tropical birds have learned to make this place their home.

Baltimore Oriole

Embracing the artistic challenge to capture the essence of the life of a bird in a photograph, I worked hard to get images of tropical rainforest birds utilizing luxuriously tropical-looking temperate perches.  While some may find the images to be a little bit on the side of overkill, I feel they truly share the birds' lives through an entire annual cycle. 

Gray Catbird

Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, male and female

All images were made with a Canon 7D and Canon EF 400mm f.5.6L lens, and Induro ball head and a Gitzo basalt fiber tripod.  Many of the images were made from inside an Ameristep Doghouse blind, an economical and photographer-friendly hunting blind that literally springs forth from a backpack! All work was done at the edge of a small pond near bird feeding stations where birds were abundant!

Muskrat

As the Ice Goes Off                     14 March 2017

Trumpeter Swans are settling into territories, awaiting open water. Red-winged Blackbird males have arrived on territory as well, defending spots that promise new cattail and fresh red osier dogwood.  In the distance, Sandhill Cranes bugle.  Open patches of water bring eagles and otters to investigate the old, crumpled and frozen bodies of fish that had died and were entombed in the forming ice.  A narrow channel has formed, and the muskrats are now on patrol, exploring greater freedom, venturing further from their mounds and burrows. 

Muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) on the edge of the ice- Canon 7D and Canon EF 400mm f5.6L.