Nature

A Game of "Chicken" with a heron....

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This afternoon, north of Tacoma, out in the tidal flats of Commencement Bay, this Great Blue Heron and I played a game of "chicken."  As I carefully stepped across bright green, very slippery seaweed and broken mussel shells, the heron preened and groomed himself.  When I got within 25 feet, he stopped abruptly and went stock still, not moving a feather.  My shutter turned to quiet mode, I snapped away while he remained in his pose. 

I wondered if he didn't feel threatened because of the little stream between us, or if he was just confident knowing he could fly away.  Or was it like a dog who hides his head under the couch, thinking that if he can't see you, you can't see him.  I'll never know the answer to these questions, but for twenty minutes he didn't move and I practiced the patient zen of a photographer, just waiting for the "taking flight shot with Olympic Range in the background." 

Then some other beachwalkers came along the bird's side of the stream and the game was over.  Off he went.  And no I didn't get that flight shot, but someday......

 

Storm Sky

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This afternoon, I went to Fall River to visit a friend and it was a treacherous trip. The sky was filled with spectacular fast moving clouds that danced around the sun creating gorgeous shades of light and dark.  The danger was not the promise of rain, but my intent focus on the sky and not the road.  It's a good thing I was moving slowly on country roads. 

When it was time to return home, the clouds were delivering their payload with gusty winds and hail sized rain. I got drenched getting to my car and everyone on the highway was crawling through this waterfall at 35 miles an hour. While watching the road intently, my inner tv screen was seeing my hanging plants that had barely survived the recent heat wave, being beaten to a pulp.  But  I arrived back to Dartmouth to dry streets and a sky full of storm warnings. So I grabbed by camera and caught this view of the setting sun over the harbor.

 

Workshop Wonder

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Learning is a process of ups and downs that is littered with plateaus.

Three days of chasing the light on Cape Cod beaches and tidal flats has pushed me off of a plateau to a new way of seeing.  Before attending Ron Wilson’s Landscape photography workshop, I was being driven nuts by a picture that I knew was sitting in the empty lot at the top of my street, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work in the two dimensions of the photo.  Now I know the answer….  and so much more. 

It will take practice to put into use what I learned, but how wonderful to have this new visual language.  If only all of my education had been this satisfying….

Nauset Beach an hour before sunrise

 


Zig zagging in the tidal marsh

 

 


Copper glinting tidal swirls

The Mariposa Reserve

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Lonely Planet doesn’t list the Mariposa Reserve in Michoacan Mexico as one of the 100 places to visit before you die, but it should.  Our Audubon trip to the El Rosario Reserve last week has been the highlight of our trip to Mexico. 

We left early on a Thursday morning. By midday we were in a little canyon wonderland of an Inn called Aguablanca located on the banks of a river, lush with towering yellow ficus trees, maidenhair ferns, bananas trees, bamboo.  What a pleasure to be once again in a world of green and to hear the sound of wind through trees accompanied by the song of a fast moving river.  And the elegantly shaped hot spring pools were both restorative and beautiful with their purple jacaranda highlights.

Our education about the incredible life cycle of the monarchs began on the bus ride down with a documentary about a pilot who followed the annual migration from Canada to Mexico in an ultralight, and continued in the evening with a Nova special on the monarchs.  Millions of monarchs from the US and Canada return to the forests of Michoacan’s mountain peaks every fall where they spend the winter huddled in the treetops.  In March, they mate and then die.  Their children begin the trek back north in April.  Along the way, 2 more generations will lay eggs and it will be the third generation that makes it back to the far north.  The 4th and final generation will return to Michoacan in the fall.  Imagine returning to the forest of your great, great grandparents whom you never met.  Monarch butterflies are the only species on the planet with such a multi-generational migration.

 On Friday morning we entered a high mountain reserve where at first it appeared as though there was some kind of rust on the leaves and trunks of the towering trees.  But soon it became clear that what we were seeing was millions, and I do mean millions, of monarchs huddled together to stay warm.  As the sun got warmer they began to flutter about, clouds of golden orange.  If you sat really quietly you could hear the rustle of their wings.

I thought I would come away with incredible pictures, but swarms at a distance are beyond the ability of my camera to capture.  And the distance that I as photographer needed to capture the experience left me missing the very heart of the moment. So after some feeble attempts, I surrendered to one of the most stunning mornings of my life and will remember always the gentle whoosh of a million wings in flight.

Land Art

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At Charco del Ingenio, Mexico’s largest botanical park right here in San Miguel, there was a terrible fire last spring.  Fortunately, there has been a great recovery by many of the plants, and our year round San Miguel friends tell us that the wildflowers after the wild fire were the most spectacular in many years.


Currently there is an an exhibit of “land art” in the park.  Andy Goldsworthy type art made of natural materials.  These photos are of a burned mesquite sculpture, acknowledging and remembering that fire.