Romance of the Wild

Pictures of Yosemite's Half Dome, Sargent's painting of the Delaware Water Gap, and movies like Dances with Wolves ingnite in many of us a yearning for a time before drastic human interference in the natural world. Banner Marsh is for me a window on that Eden. It is not a primeval marsh. It was once a strip mine that was reclaimed to the tune of 15 million dollars by the Army Corps of Engineers over a period of 10 years. But now you can see clear water and lots of fish. The birds fly free. Deer, muskrats, beaver, and coyotes wander at will living off the bounty of nature in the midst of our developed world.

This proximity of nature to civilization started me thinking about how I took my best picture of a Red-tailed hawk.

Red-Tailed Hawk taken near Banner Marsh, February 2006

These hawks, which I see along the highway every time I make the 15 mile trip to Banner from my house, do not mind perching next to busy highways to watch for their next meal. You spot a white blob near the top of a tree, on a fence post, near Hoerr's nursury, or on top of a highway light fixture as you wiz by. But they are elusive to photograph. The only way to get close to them long enough for a shot is to use the car as a blind and take the picture through an open window. If you are lucky, you have about 5 seconds to push the shutter release before they fly away.

I have observed many times that birds do not feel threatened by many of the trappings of civilization, including cars, highways, and power lines, but they do fear humans, whom they see as predators. This made me wonder: are these birds "wild"? Are they "living in a natural state" as the dictionary defines "wild"?

The feeling I have for the wildness of the marsh is related to the emotions I have when thinking about saving the Artic Wildlife Refuge, managing our national parks well, restoring prairies, and all the other worthy Nature Conservancy type of projects. It is emotionally necessary for me to feel that there are places that have been spared excesses of human development-- sanctuaries, places to begin anew.

This may be part of our brain's wiring, akin to the natural aversion to snakes and spiders many of us have. Everyone I know finds a little thrill in being the first to dip a knife into the fresh surface of a new jar of peanut-butter. It's fun to make the first tracks on a sandy beach or snowy hill. Before the footprints you see a wild, pure expanse of sand or snow; after footprints are made it becomes part of the known world, explored territory, and mundane.

LEFT:Snipe on snow, Banner Marsh December 2005.

BELOW: Marbled Godwit, Point Reyes , California, August 2005

Perhaps to ancient nomadic peoples, being first to mar the landscape equated with opportunity: prolific pasture, ample game, fertile soil, little human excrement, less disease, renewed vigor for the clan, and nobody to argue about territory. The economic benefits made up for having to leave familiar haunts. Perhaps people willing to venture into the unexplored were more likely to thrive during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans survived as hunter-gatherers.

Or, it may be more a factor of our national culture. Taking a chance on unknown wilderness is as American as apple pie. The Pilgrims, Daniel Boone, fur-trappers, settlers on Conestoga wagons, ranchers, farmers, and railroad men were all in their own way besotted with the Manifest Destiny of taming a new, wild land.

The downside of this strategy of always moving on to greener pastures is that there is a lot of garbage left behind. For small groups of hunter-gatherers, this was not a big deal. Deserted camps healed themselves over time, or could be used again by newcomers in later seasons or years. But slash and burn farming is an extension of this principle that can seriously degrade soil because the land does not have time to heal before it is needed again. The urban American equivalent of slash and burn occurs when we desert the inner-city neighborhoods and shopping areas and build new ones in the suburbs, allowing city centers to decay at great social and economic cost.

Photo by Hibdon Hardwood, Inc.1410 N. Broadway, St. Louis, MO

So while the idea of moving on, finding a better place, getting away from it all by losing oneself in unspoiled nature may be a natural instinct or a cultural imperative, it is one we can no longer afford. There are simply too many of us humans. We need to sustain the viability of the places we have. We cannot afford the luxury of thinking that we have wild places where we can begin anew.

Consider this. There is no place on the planet that is unaffected by human habitation. We have explored all of the land masses, and much of the oceans. Seals in the artic have been found to develop cancers due to toxins dumped in the oceans thousands of miles away from their breeding grounds. Global warming affects all life. Over grazing has converted large tracts of range land into deserts in North Africa. Midwestern and western states consume the pure water of their aquifers at an alarming rate to support agriculture that will not be sustainable in the long term.

No, I need to think about Yosemite, the Artic Wildlife Refuge, and Banner marsh not as romantic wild sanctuaries, but as models of sustainable ecosystems. If we do not learn the details of stability from these places, we will destroy ourselves and much of the life on the planet. They are not places to which we can escape from the disaster of our excesses. Instead, they contain the blueprint for our survival.

A Wider View

After a snowbound week in early December, I finally got out to Banner on a crisp cold (below zero) day, glittering with hoar frost. The marsh was utterly quiet, empty except for a few red-tails roosting with fluffed out feathers. I reveled in snow pictures for an hour, and then went home to thaw out. Coffee in hand, I warmed up by the fire and dug out some summer/fall pictures and my new used copy of the Audubon Society Encyclopedia of Birds of North America. If you’re stuck inside on a cold day, you might as well enjoy some bird pictures.



One wading bird I had shots of in September, a Lesser Yellow-legs, intrigued me. I only had seen him in fall and in spring, so clearly he was a migrant. It was time to put a little information about him with his picture. On page 807 of the Encyclopedia I found this:

“Yellowlegs, lesser, Tringa flavipes,….In summer, Alaska and across Canada; one of the tattlers.. very noisy on nesting grounds at the approach of an intruder; ..in migration seen about coastal ponds and pools in salt marshes, inland on mudflats and on wet short-grass marshes with ponds…..in spring migrating north from Patagonia, arrives in Fla. in late Mar.; moves up both coasts in Apr-May but in far greater numbers up the western side of the Mississippi Valley;…arrives in nesting grounds in Canada in Apr-May.”

Patagonia to Canada! Wow! A journey of about 8000 miles twice a year! If they take from late March to May to get from Florida to Canada, they travel a little more than 2000 miles a month. Amazing! No wonder they don’t seem to hang around the marsh very long; they are on the move.

This would have rendered me speechless, except I wasn’t talking. If my little guy was a tour guide, what could he tell us about? So I decided to fill in the information a bit. What refuges and parks would be on the northward route from Patagonia? What landscapes and animals might my little yellowlegs have seen?

When I looked at the map, I realized that I knew very little of the landscape south of the border: the Andes, Brazilian rain forest, drug farms in Columbia, and the storm tossed straights of Magellan below Tierra del Fuego. That’s it. My knowledge is limited and certainly inaccurate.






So today I began my journey on the Internet to catch up with my Yellowlegs. The first item was to learn the names of the countries of South America. Then I used Wikipedia to locate national parks and wildlife refuges, complete with photographs copied from Google images. I have to guess about the exact route, and I haven’t even begun to investigate the influence of the trade winds on their flight, but I think I can safely assume that many of the Yellowlegs follow the coast and others surely make use of one of the largest wetland areas in the world, the Pantanal, which spreads from Paraguay and parts of Bolivia into southern Brazil. Anyway, here is a map with a few possibilities located on it, accompanied with pictures of the landscape and some of the local animals and birds that are permanent residents.










1. Tierra del Fuego National Park, Argentina












2. Iguazú National Park
The Devil's Gorge, fed by the river Iguazú, is a stunning waterfall 70 meters in height, which serves as a barrier separating two National Parks, one of which is in Argentina and the other in Brazil. Both have been declared World Heritage sites.







3. The Panatanal, Paraguay











4. The Pantanal, Bolivia















5. Manu National Park, Peru













6. Parque Nacional Tayrona, Columbia









7. Parque Nacional Jaragua Dominican Republic















8. Everglades National Park, Florida











9. Wheeler Wildlife Refuge, Alabama

10. Mississippi River Valley flyway

11. Wapusk National Park, Manitoba














It’s amazing to think that this innocuous little 9 ½ to 11 inch bird is a world class traveler with experience in ecosystems that are inhabited by animals adapted to the artic, temperate zones or the tropics: parrots, jaguars, beluga whales, polar bears, and the huge variety of species found in the Caribbean. They survive the journey twice a year, and pass on their navigational techniques to each new generation. That’s adaptability!

A Shift in Focus

“Summertime, when the livin’ is easy…”

There is nothing I like more than to get up early on a June morning, grab my coffee and camera and go to Banner to walk the levee at East Point. By the time I get to the river side, I’ve heard the morning chorus of songbirds, taken some good shots (400 mm lens with fill flash and the Better Beamer) and spooked a few deer. As the morning progresses I also start to notice the little things: the fresh scents on the breeze, the green of the marsh grass, wild flowers, and on those flowers butterflies and insects… dragonflies... spider webs … ticks…ugh! Well, nothing is perfect!

The only other big problem with the summer photography schedule is that the good light occurs very early in the morning or late in the day, when a million fishermen have scuffed up a lot of dust. As I considered this I realized that if I could figure out how to avoid the insect bites, I might need to consider close-up photography of the micro world. The food chain stands on the shoulders of tiny critters, and I needed to give them their due. So I decided to do some serious micro photography.

A good flash system allows you to do macro/micro photography any time of day, although natural lighting is still preferred. The more light you have, the higher the shutter speed can be, and this gets to be important, because “camera shake” is particularly pesky with close-up pictures. If you use two small “slave” flashes on each side of the camera, the high contrast shadows you get in midday can be eliminated. And of course, your shots are helped by using a tripod, monopod, or bean bag to steady the lens.

The other technical consideration was the purchase of 105 mm macro/micro lens. I once got a good shot of a grasshopper with my 400 mmm lens, but I had to lie flat on my belly 12 feet away to accommodate the lens’ focal distance. With my new micro lens I can get within an inch of my subject, and I also can shoot good shots standing several feet away.

The shift in focus led to new adventures. I had to practice new photographic skills and learn the habits of arthropods. When is the best time to photograph a dragonfly? Midday on 105 degree F day? How do you get the butterfly to hold still? When do crayfish crawl out of their holes? How do you walk in the muck quietly when stalking crayfish? How do you get your foot out of the muck?

The more I observed of the micro world, the more I realized that although the creatures looked alien, they were still ruled by the same imperatives of the larger world: eat to grow and survive to mate and reproduce.

Monarch butterflies mating.

Milkweed bugs mating.

My favorite shot is of a battered blue dasher dragonfly resting on a grass stalk, near the end of his days.

His eyes look like they have been dented in a fight with a competing male; he is blinded and soon will die. We think of these beautiful insects as flitting from place to place over the pond in a carefree way, but their world is just as full of frenetic activities and deadly competition as that of any vertebrate on the planet. I had shifted my focus, but the life stories were the same.

Juveniles

Puppies. Kittens. Goslings. Cygnets. We respond to their charming goofiness, the fuzzy down or new fur and air of happy expectation. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a depressed (but healthy) puppy. Every spring we witness the miracle of rebirth and respond with ancient rituals celebrating the myth of eternal return in new life, such as May Day and Easter.




















Banner Marsh is a charming place in late May. Goslings trail their parents, and swans pull up weeds for their cygnets to eat. Often birds seem small, if a little downy, and are probably recent fledglings. There is a lot of to-and-fro-ing from food source to nest site. Eagles still patiently tend their young even though they are starting to flex their large wings. Adult eagles seem to regard their juveniles as we regard our teenagers: exhausting moochers! Sometimes even the most devoted parent ignores the begging.

If you are lucky, you can witness the first attempt at independence of the young bird. I spotted an odd-looking female blackbird piteously gaping at an adult male, and then I realized it was a juvenile just learning to feed independently. A flying lesson came next, ending in a pathetic crash landing. I winced, reminded of the first driving experiences with my own daughters.

I wonder that I don’t respond in the same emotional way to tadpoles or caterpillars. Perhaps it is because they are not vertebrates. Perhaps it is because they are so obviously part of a large statistical game: a great many are produced but few survive. And of course it is really hard to care that most tent caterpillars will be consumed by birds when those fuzzy larvae have demolished the leaves of a favorite tree.

That is not to say that birds and mammals are not immune to distruction. As many as 80% of some songbirds die in their first year. Even when there is long term parental care, mortality rates for the young can be high. In pre-industrial human societies, many children died before 5 years of age. We forget that only one of Abraham Lincoln’s four sons survived to adulthood, a mere one hundred and fifty years ago.

So perhaps the affection we have for young vertebrates is related to the knowledge that their freshness and exuberance is transitory and therefore precious, even with the best of care. Watching a young bird or mammal master their environment gives us a chance to view the world again with their eyes, untried, exciting, and new. For a moment we rest in the bright white drop of the eastern yin/yang symbol and we can ignore the dark side of the life story.

Pelicans

The Pelicans Arrive

In April, word spreads up river again. The Pelicans are back. They've been sighted at Chatauqua, Havana, Rice Lake, Banner, Mendenhall Road, north of the McCluge bridge, Lacon marina, Hennepin and Hopper. Even the most dysfunctional natrualist gets word; at church, from the newspaper photos, casual sightings of birds just too big to be gulls.

Peorians take pride in our pelican parade. Natives will tell you that as recently as the late 90's pelicans weren't to be seen locally. Apparently a large flock that usually migrated over Indiana got blown off course and the birds have used the Illinois River as a flyway ever since. So in our minds, their beauty is augmented by a lingering aura of stolen treasure.

The gold standard picture of pelicans was taken by Ansel Adams ( icon of modern photography). He caught a high spiral of birds half with sunset reflecting off their wings, the other half in shadow. I yearn to take a similar shot next to the delapidated factory in Bartonville, a confluence of rust belt, river, and wild things.

However, one of the rules of nature photography is to accept what you are given by the earth gods. Longing after the impossible gets in the way of seeing the spectacular that is right in front of you. I call it being alert to the surprise factor. It was April 1, 2005. I was traveling north on route 24 when I caught a glimpse of white near the Bartonville boat ramp. I made the quick decision, served onto Mendenhall Road and eased by the ponds that were on either side. There were thousands of great white pelicans stirring from the night's rest. Luckily, I had my telephoto lens, battery power,and an empty 512M card. I went to work. For four days I returned at dawn to document raft life on the Bartonville boat ramp. I did manage to get some shots of pelicans on the wing. But the best sequences captured behavior that was new to me.

Unlike the solitary feeding of heron and egrets, pelicans feed in groups. The raft moves across a pond in a parade of stately progression, occasionally augmented by the fluttering of wings that span six feet. According to Sibley's, the churning feet and wing movement drive fish forward, trapping them in shallower water, and the behavior clearly improves feeding success of most of the birds. Great blue herons and great egrets recongnize the possibilities too. They line the shores where pelicans feed, waiting to pick off the hapless fish driven before the raft.


Occasionally, group discipline breaks down and five or six birds will go after a larger fish in a little feeding frenzy. The pelican who traps the fish in its pouch has a few more logistical problems to deal with.

The fish has to be reoriented head down for swallowing.

The Pelican has to fend off the other birds going after his catch.

Then getting the fish swallowed can be a challenge,

not to mention flying after consuming one half his body weight in carp.

The water level in the ponds was slowly going down over the five days the pelicans were there. Initially, most of the catch were four inch baby bull catfish, and later bigger shad and carp were taken. As the water level dropped, the water no longer could flow freely to and from the river. The fish were trapped and gaping for oxygen.

By the last two days the birds were only taking big game. Some of these large fish had been caught in a bird's pouch and then dropped onto the road in flight. Other birds managed to scarf down a five pound shad or carp and just swim low in the water, increasing my respect for the power of their digestive juices.

On the sixth day the pelicans were gone and the edges of the ponds were lined with thousands of dead fish, victims of raft and river.