Golden-Crowned Kinglet Portrait
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Tag Archives: nature
White-throated Sparrow: a First Documentation on the Alaska Peninsula
Paradise Bend
The Tiny Kings of the Sitka Spruce Grove
Every autumn coinciding with the peak of the Coho run on the Chignik River, we’d begin to hear a new voice as we pushed through thick stands of alders or walked by the village’s scattered spruce trees. By this time, there weren’t many other passerines around, and so there was no mistaking the high, almost cricket-like call of returning Golden-crowned Kinglets. They were a new species for for us, always in motion, difficult to locate in the dense alders and dark spruce boughs they prefer, and they are not indicated on the Alaska Peninsula on any of the range maps we checked – Cornell, Audubon, Sibley – so we were very happy when we finally got binoculars on them and could make positive identification. Kinglets tended to remain at The Lake throughout winter. At some point, they presumably had cleaned all the invertebrate eggs and dormant insects they could find and moved on to other grounds, but they were there every year in those fall and winter months and should be added to peninsular checklists and range maps.
The Fox We Called Skit
The Tattler of Tattler Creek
Salmon Hooks on Cobalt Blue
Red-breasted Merganser at Dawn with Char and Scaup – 2 versions: Which do you like better?
All summer and well into fall, we could often see salmon and char from our dining table window as they migrated along the lakeshore beach. The char could be there in any season, following the salmon to gorge on eggs and then making their own spawning run. At other times the char would cruise the lake shoreline chasing down the fry, parr and smolts of Sockeye and Coho Salmon. At that time they would readily come to streamers, and even in winter you could sometimes get a couple of fresh fish for the evening meal.
More interesting than fishing for the char was watching the mergansers and otters go after them. The diving ducks often worked cooperatively, cruising along the shoreline with purpose reminiscent of soldiers on patrol. When they found a school of Dollies they’d herd them against the shoreline or sometimes against ice sheets. The otters behaved in a similar manner, and when there were a lot of char around the otters and the mergansers would set aside some of their natural caution and you could find yourself pretty close to the action if you sat still and waited.
Although it was late in the morning when I took the above photograph, the sun was just barely beginning to emerge over the mountains south-east of the lake. At first it was too dark to shoot, so I positioned myself behind a natural blind of tall, winter-brown grass and waited. There were about half-a-dozen merganser hens, or a hen and her first-year offspring, patrolling the shoreline, catching fish. Then this one came up with the catch of the day just as a flock of Greater Scaup were passing behind her.
So, what do you think? Black and white, or color?
Things are changing. Fast. Get out and shoot.
“I’ve been hoping to see you!” Sam came out to intercept me as I was walking along the dirt road past his house on my way to Sitka Spruce Grove. It was an overcast, cold November morning, the tinny smell of snow in the air. “I’ve been seeing a bird I’ve never seen out here. Batman birds. They have a dark head, like Batman’s hood. Nick’s been seeing them too. We’ve been calling them Batman birds.”
“Yeah. I’ve been seeing them too. Just in the last few days, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve never seen them before. What are they?”
“Oregon Juncos. They’re not supposed to be here. I’ve checked my books and range maps on the internet. This might be the first time they’ve ever been out here.”
Sam, in his early 70’s and not more than five-six looked up at me as he rolled the burning cigarette he was holding between his thumb and his first two fingers. For a moment nothing was said. He lifted his arm to take a drag and looked out over the landscape as he let the smoke out. Winter-brown salmonberry breaks and willows, scrub alders an even more drab shade of brown covered the country all the way to the treeline on nearby snow-capped mountains, country that in Sam’s youth had mostly been tundra.
“Things sure are changing here,” he said.
There are still people in denial, people who not so very long ago dismissed Climate Warming as some sort of hoax, who refused to believe any scientists except those who work for the fossil fuel industry. Most of those hardcore deniers have given up the tack of total denial. But they haven’t gone away, and they certainly haven’t conceded their error. Instead, the refrain now is initial agreement, “Yes, it appears the earth is getting warmer,” followed by a deflating return to denialism with, “but the world has always been changing.”
Not with this rapidity it hasn’t – the occasional meteor strike notwithstanding.
The result is that almost anywhere one lives, change can be observed in real time. This might be manifested in new species of flowers and other plants, new birds, other vertebrates, insects… or the rather sudden absence of formerly familiar species. Anyone with a camera has a chance to contribute to real-time, meaningful documentation of the change that is occurring right now all around us.
It’s not just the natural world that is undergoing rapid change. As expanding urbanization follows an overpopulated species across the globe, historic buildings are being torn down, forests leveled, rivers rerouted, lakes and aquifers emptied. Things that had remained much the same for decades, for generations even, are suddenly in a state of upheaval.
Photography is used for many things: to capture holiday moments; family portraits; events of all kinds; and increasingly, to make fine art. But some of the most compelling photographic images have always been and continue to be well-composed, straightforward documentation.
Anyone with a camera can make a meaningful contribution. Get out and shoot.
Merlin at Sitka Spruce Grove, Chignik Files #8: How important is “Tack Sharp” in Photography?
Fairly new to photography when I got the above capture of a Merlin strafing songbirds at the spruce grove in Chignik Lake, I was somewhat frustrated with my inability to get the bird “tack sharp.” I was shooting with a 200-400 mm telephoto lens at the time, to which I often affixed either a 1.4 mm or 2.0 mm teleconverter, and simply didn’t have the skills to follow North America’s second smallest falcon as it zipped around the grove at breakneck speeds in pursuit of warblers migrating south in late summer. So I climbed a small rise that put me eye level with the upper branches of the trees, chose a section that was well enough lighted, focused on a group of cones, and waited and hoped for the little falcon to enter the scene. The bird obliged, I snapped the shutter, and at least came away with what I would imagine is the only photographic documentation of Falco columbarius in the Chignik Drainage. The species had been documented there… but I think not photographed.
However, before much time passed the photograph began to grow on me. In fact, I actually began to like it. The bird is clear enough to easily identify as a merlin, and I began to appreciate that the blur, while not depicting the bird itself as clearly as I had originally hoped, captures something else: the story of the falcon’s incredible speed and maneuverability as it circled the grove. Had I been able to make a sharp, clean capture of the bird, as I swung the lens to keep up with the falcon the trees would have become a blur. But the Sitka Spruce grove, a copse of 20 trees transplanted from Kodiak Island in the 1950’s when Chignik Lake was first permanently settled, is central to the story here. I love the way the lush green trees draped with new cones anchors this photograph, thereby helping to create a fuller story.
These days, the incredible capabilities of modern lenses paired with technologically advanced cameras have created a push… a demand, actually… for ever sharper images. This has become particularly so in the field of wildlife photography. But it seems to me that sometimes… perhaps often… this insistence on “tack sharp” (and perfectly colored) images of wildlife has come at the expense of the overarching story behind the image.
Over the next several years photographing bears and birds, fish and flowers, landscapes and life at Chignik Lake, as I gradually came to understand more about photography, I returned to the above photograph many times, mulling, contemplating, turning it over in my mind. We already know, in great, tack-sharp detail, what all of North America’s birds and mammals look like. There are thousands of beautiful photographs of just about every species… in some cases perhaps millions of such images. So, how does one employ a camera to go beyond documentation, to tell a larger story? For me, the beginning of the answer to that question started with Spruce Grove Hunter.
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