Snowy Owl Irruption
Snowy Owl with Foothills
I’m not typically a birdwatcher or bird photographer, but sometimes I get curious, and a few of those times I get lucky. When Brian Williams spent a few minutes of the NBC Nightly News talking about an irruption of Snowy Owls on the coast of Washington, I made reservations, and my partner and I made the trip.
Ocean Shores is only three and half hours from my home in Portland, Oregon, but it’s a long three and a half hours of driving. Much of it is on secondary highways or rural routes occasionally snaking through streets of downtrodden timber towns.
We made our way to the state park at the southern end of Ocean Shores, and then hiked through sideways rain and shifty sand to the far end of the spit. Between the wind and the rain, the conditions were brutal and visibility was compromised. The owls were difficult to make out through the rain, but they reveled in their perches, happily camouflaged on the bleached driftwood logs. Once we saw them, however, we saw them everywhere.
Snowy Owl on High Perch
My efforts at photographing them were unsuccessful that evening. The wind rocked my tripod, and I struggled to keep the lens dry. It was dark enough that I could not use a shutter speed that would freeze the movement in the perched owls’ feathers, which fluttered in the wind despite being drenched.
The next morning, however, I made my way back, alone this time since my partner had had enough the night before. The wind was calm, the rain was gone, but the owls remained, along with a gray sky that provided still more camouflage for the otherwise showy birds.
My first feathered friend was perched on a low, disintegrating piece of driftwood. It picked and preened, fluffed its feathers, stretched its neck and alternately looked at me, winked at me, and rested its eyes behind closed lids.
As I walked across the sand and beach grass toward another owl resting on the upturned fluted roots of an ancient cedar, I heard a flutter to my left and followed the gaze of my intended subject to another owl, perched low no more than 50 feet from me.
Simultaneously excited to be so close and mortified to have broken the 150 foot golden rule, I sat down with my gear, turned sideways, and gently closed my eyes. When among owls, I thought, act like an owl. When I reopened my eyes and slowly turned to the owl, it had turned its head and closed its eyes as well. I sat sharing the morning light with this owl for at least ten minutes before moving toward my original subject.
The spit was so full of owls and photographers and birdwatchers that I spotted a young couple walking briskly toward my subject, parallel to its perch, clearly not aware of its presence. I held up two fingers and pointed toward each owl. They misunderstood, thinking I was saying “peace” and pointing to the bird closest to me. When the owl on the high cedar perch took flight, the couple stumbled back in awe, realizing they had been fewer than ten feet from an amazing creature.
An hour after I had arrived, my time was up. I had taken forty or fifty pictures and the wind was beginning to pick up. I had a two mile hike back to the car and a long drive back to Portland ahead of me. As I turned my back on the owls’ beauty, I begin missing them immediately. The owls, I know, saw me as just another human lugging a heavy burden of equipment going away as she had come. I feel sure, however, that the owls have found a new place that suits them. If birders and photographers continue to come in a widely scattered flock of a dozen or less, and if they keep their distance and show respect, the owls will return, and so will I.
Snowy Owl in Gray Skies
A View from the Bridge
Stormy Sunrise from the Bridge
On my way to work every morning, I drive across the Columbia River on the Glen Jackson Bridge crossing from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, Washington. Every morning, I want to pull to the shoulder and stop, watch the light break, the sun rise, the fog lift. The view from the bridge is breath-taking. Often it is a highlight of my day.
The bridge is a long, arching affair, and its northbound lanes tempt drivers with a stunning vista of the river, golden at sunrise, deep gray-green on cloudy days, snaking its way to Portland and then the Pacific from Mt. Hood and points far further east.
Half way across the bridge, Government Island passes beneath drivers, stretching east to west. It’s a length of land that beckons boaters to its shores but is inaccessible to motorists driving along I-205. It only takes a few minutes to cross the entire bridge and only seconds to pass over the island. Nonetheless, the marvels one can glimpse in those few seconds are compensation for their brevity.
In September, at the autumnal equinox, the sun rises behind Mt Hood, casting a shadow up into the sky. If you have never seen a mountain projecting its mirror image into the sky as the sun rises or sinks directly behind it, you are missing something. It’s a spectacle that makes even the most work-weary drivers drop well below the speed limit.
By the end of November, the island’s cottonwoods turn a warm orange that contrasts with the increasingly gray skies and green-gray waves coursing with whitecaps from gorge winds. After clear, cold nights, mornings see the fog settling on the river so low the bridge takes drivers right through the middle of its miasma, where they experience impenetrable fog and sunrise simultaneously.
Winter is my favorite season. Bare cottonwoods have given up their orange foliage, revealing an island of prime raptor habitat. For years I saw a bald eagle pair, one perching daily on a snag right at the shore, just feet from the southbound lanes of the bridge. The other was usually perched 50-100 feet away. A windstorm, or perhaps high water choked with debris and deadhead logs, took out the snag a couple of years ago. It took a month or more to spot the eagles’ new perches. In the afternoon, a snag adjacent to the northbound lanes is topped with a bald eagle a couple days a week. In the mornings, a branch jutting diagonally out over the water is the perch of choice. It must have something to do with a lack of reflections in the water, revealing the fish the raptors love so well. Sometimes, however, I have to turn my gaze a good 100 yards downstream and look for the white, baseball-sized head of the eagle against a busy background of dappled light, branches, and branch-breaks.
When Spring opens the skies for periodic sun-breaks, the fresh green leaves of cottonwoods turn lime against the gray-green skies and gray-green waters of the river. Northwest weather becomes turbulent and exciting for a season, with dramatic skies and steaming pavement interrupting the incessant drizzle of winter. On the bridge, one can see a steady stream of boaters taking their catch during the Spring Chinook season. The promise of summer begins to be palpable, but just barely and only for a moment. We know summer doesn’t really arrive until the middle of July.
During the summer, I lose interest in the bridge. It’s not just that, as a teacher, I don’t have to cross it daily until September. It’s also that the blue skies, green trees, and swift but quickly dropping water of the river reduce the drama surrounding the bridge. It becomes a bridge over a river with boaters pulling wake-boarders, a bridge over a leafy island, boats anchored at the shore and tents cluttering its banks. To appreciate any of that, you have to experience it first hand. I no longer feel like the view from the bridge is an experience in itself. Detached from the human traffic below, my view becomes mundane. The bridge no longer connects me with a rarefied natural world; it keeps me connected to the social world I see all day long. It becomes, simply, another human construct over a river of recreation and transportation.
Glen Jackson Bridge, Mt Hood, and Government Island from Marine Drive
Leopold’s Land Ethic
Ash-throated Fly-catcher Doing Its Job
I’m catching up on my reading this year. Despite my long interest in nature writing, nature photography, and American literature, I had never read Aldo Leopold’s classic book A Sand County Almanac (1949). After reading The Rambunctious Garden and several books on nature and aesthetics, Leopold’s classic floated to the top of my reading list in part because I kept seeing his name.
While much of the piece reads as a series of Leopold’s reflections on the subtle changes occurring in nature throughout the year, the last section, entitled “The Upshot” addresses more explicitly the purpose of his reflections: reestablishing in people a land aesthetic which could develop into a land ethic.
Writing after World War II, Leopold is in a unique place in American history. We have begun to establish National Parks and Wilderness Areas, and we are seeing that they are not the same, nor are they equally capable of sustaining biodiversity. We have also developed a conservation culture, including the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of the WPA, and we have seen the damage that road building does to wild areas. Leopold’s book also comes on the verge of an era of rapid economic development and technological innovation that will see great changes in everything from agriculture and highways to suburban communities.
Despite being published over 60 years ago, the book offers many interesting insights on how land relates to culture. He discusses the impact of livestock grazing on the soils of the southwest, the effect of transportation technology on relocation of species, the redefinition of recreation and scenery to include more artificial landscapes, and the distraction from our natural environment posed by gadgetry–all this before television, much less iPhones.
Most important in his discussion, however, is his plea for an ecological education that would re-acquaint us with nature (not in the form of a park or golf course) and use that aesthetic connection as a premise for a land ethic based on the biotic importance of a place regardless of its economic or private/public status. When we see land as privately owned and used for the economic benefit of that owner, we are missing a link in an important biotic chain. While we take as a given this idea of property rights, Leopold points out that, over time, we have changed our sense of ethics in other areas. Social ethics evolved to disapprove of slavery. We disapprove of a variety of methods of torture or punishment for crimes. We even have rules for war.
Just as people are part of a larger community guided by ethical standards, privately owned land is part of a larger biotic community. Consider this: We rarely have a problem asserting that one’s desire to do another harm in order to see a personal benefit is unethical. A community without such ethics would be dangerous for all, so we (most of us, for the most part, and in most situations) behave ethically in our interactions with others, and we have systems in place to punish those who don’t. While we do not all follow these ethical standards, we do agree that they exist.
The same ethical considerations should exist for landowners. In some cases, landowners’ refusals have led to government taking over both the responsibility and financial obligation for conservation of land deemed important for the biotic health of a region. However, this can have grave consequences for the land and for the nation’s economy. In my own state of Oregon, I have seen cases in which the government compensates landowners for lost functionality and economic value when restrictions on land use affect their property. The value of land remains, for most landowners, economic, and if dollars can’t be wrung from the land through agriculture or ranching or drilling, it can be wrung from the government as a kind of ransom for keeping the ecosystem intact.
Leopold’s argument, ultimately, is that people — as members of a biotic community composed of soil, microbes, flora, fauna, water, etc. — must develop an ethic that acknowledges what he calls “man’s… different order” of impact within that biotic community. Given our potential to impact the biotic community at an order of magnitude far greater than any other part (okay, floods and volcanic eruptions aside), people have an ethical obligation to prevent changes that would irrevocably damage the health of our natural world.
None of what Leopold says is new. Maybe it’s not new to you either. What is new for me is the realization of how long ago the rally cry for a land ethic began and how far we are still from having one.
“Post-Wild World”
Sweat Bee on Aster, M Diggs
I’m a big fan of High Country News, a periodical that covers a variety of issues relevant to the western United States. When they review a book that sounds compelling, I take notice. That’s how I found Emma Marris’ book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-wild World.
In my photography and nature writing, I’ve been mulling over the idea of what constitutes nature and what counts as “wild” in the environment. Indeed this blog, my photography web site, and my book in progress propose that much of what we think of as a cultivated, unnatural landscape is “Still Wild” in many ways. Marris is giving me plenty of food for thought, and so far, her book reinforces my gestalt of “wild.”
Marris regularly publishes her work in the journal Nature, so it is no surprise that the book includes a healthy dose of science. She is also an investigative journalist, which enables her to connect scientific content to “personalities” working in environmental science and ecology. I love books that teach science but still have “characters.” I am, after all, an English teacher, regardless of how far afield my reading and writing sometimes carry me.
Among the most interesting parts of the book so far is its critique of “pristine nature,” that mythical baseline presumed to have existed before European contact. Restoring nature to this baseline is the objective of national parks and many wilderness areas, but Marris notes that the faulty assumptions underlying the idea of pristine wilderness number in the dozens. For me, the most interesting assumptions are the following:
1) Native people did not alter the landscape: We know this to be false. In fact, many landscapes we presume to be natural are the results of centuries of controlled burns and “assisted migrations” of species practiced by natives.
2) Native people are more a part of nature than non-native people: If Native Americans changed the land, and they did, then nature was not pristine prior to European exploration. We can acknowledge that many native tribes used the land differently than Anglo-European settlers, but in some cases, they altered it more than early settlers did. In other cases, they hardly changed it at all. Although they didn’t create industrial farms, build paved interstate highways, or erect huge concrete dams, neither did the earliest settlers. This assumption worries me particularly because it smacks of 19th century eugenics, albeit with a positive, glorifying twist. Native Americans are the perfect stewards of the land because they were more in tune with it, or so the theory goes. However, there is a drawback to this logic. When we imply that Anlgo-European people are somehow less natural or, even worse, more representative of “human hands” on the landscape, we are suggesting that Native-American people are somehow less human. We imply that they are more like other species of flora and fauna than Anglo-European settlers were, more like other species than the human species, a form of natural history rather than human history. Clearly, that’s an offensive characterization.
3) Nature was essentially stable and “correct” before human interaction with it, and that state is the pristine state we hope to restore: Nature changes constantly through its own processes. Rivers change course, glaciers advance and recede, seeds get spread by animals, pests do damage to native species. These things happen all the time regardless of anthropogenic changes on the earth. The idea that there is any “state” that can be identified as the original or pristine state overlooks this basic fact of natural processes. Historical ecosystems are not simply different because of the lack of a human impact, but also because of the evolution of myriad species as well as cataclysmic transformations in climate and landscape that were the result of temperature shifts, volcanoes, massive floods and other events completely unrelated to human activity on earth. As a result, aiming for pristine nature requires us to speculate about what nature looked like before humans existed, and if we hoped to restore it, we would have to undo what nature itself has done.
Considering the uniquely American context of many myths about pristine nature (note that pre-European contact is a difficult concept to apply meaningfully to Europe), it’s not surprising that much of Marris’ book examines restoration projects and experiments taking place all over the world. The value of these projects rests on innovative ideas about exotic species, “assisted migration,” “novel ecosystems,” and “designer ecosystems.” All of these call into question basic assumptions about “restoration” since, as noted above, the baseline objective (i.e. to what are we restoring the landscape and its ecosystems) is ultimately neither discernible nor meaningful given nature’s propensity for changing constantly both on its own and in concert with human activity.
Rambunctious Garden is a good read, not an easy one, and not a predictable one. I’m not a scientist, not even an ecology enthusiast. In fact, my interaction with nature tends to be more aesthetic in approach, so much of this book was news to me. Reading it was like peeling back layers on conventional wisdom, allowing me to rethink the meaning of restoration, preservation, and native v. invasive species. Any book that makes the reader question traditional perspectives is a successful book. This one is very compelling.
An Oasis in the Desert
Great Horned Owl, Fields Oasis, M Diggs
I guess by definition an oasis is surrounded by its ecological opposite, a desert. Living most of my life on the rainy side of Oregon’s Cascade Range, I had ceased to appreciate the fantastic nature of a small, damp seep with creeks and dense foliage. The little oasis in the town of Fields reawakened by interest.
Fields, Oregon is a tiny town. It consists of maybe 10 buildings, four of which are a gas station/general store/cafe, a motel, and two cabins for rent. The accommodations and services in Fields are remarkable because of their isolation. There is no other gas to the north, east, or west for almost 60 miles, and to the south, one runs into the Nevada border and the slightly larger town of Denio. Given the isolation, it makes sense that the store carries an astonishing stock of goods and serves also as the post office, but the variety and quality is still surprising. Imagine walking into a tiny store in the middle of a desert along an isolated rural road connecting Oregon to Nevada only to find boutique whiskeys, gorgonzola-stuffed olives, microbrews from around the northwest, Haagen Das ice cream bars, and vegan and gluten-free frozen pizzas.
Across the road, however, is the real oasis, perhaps the only true oasis I’ve ever seen. Scruffy willows border a narrow path down an embankment. The path joins a creek that gives the willows their sustenance, and the creek empties into a small, algae topped pond surrounded and cooled by tall cottonwoods.
When we first entered the oasis, the sensation of cold, moist air was palpable. The temperature within was 15 degrees lower than the 98 degree desert heat ten paces behind us. The humidity level, while relatively low, was notable enough for our our pores and nasal membranes to drink in the difference.
For a moment, these ambient changes dulled all other senses, but then we began to hear sounds we didn’t expect. The hawk cry was expected. From the porch of our rented rock house, we had seen the Red Tailed Hawk circling the treetops, catching a thermal, and alighting throughout the day. The hoot of an owl, however, took us by surprise. Instinctively, we looked up, scanning the cottonwoods for dark masses. Another sound, a screech resembling the complaints of a large mammal, drew our eyes directly above. A barn owl, white mask and pink beak looking ghostly and surreal in the dappled light of the treetops, had landed just feet above us. Our exclamations of surprise were immediately hushed by dark, flapping movements across the pond on a downed, partially submerged branch hovering just inches above the water. A Great Horned Owl sat looking at us, unsettled by our movements and voices, but steadfast in its commitment to claiming the branch for a mid-morning nap.
Sitting down on our own branch perched just inches above the ground, we watched the owl for nearly an hour. Its eyes drifted shut as we remained still, but a movement from a hawk or the barn owl would occasionally precipitate a quick upward glance, a momentary peek in our direction, and then a return to the power nap that would make the evening hunt more productive.
Moving on to give the owl one less thing to worry about, we continued along a faint dirt-mud path, passing another hawk and another Great Horned Owl before emerging once more into the sun and the dry grassland surrounding the oasis. Turning a corner, I was startled to see a coyote looking at my partner 20 feet behind, who was still looking at one of the owls. As I raised my camera and took a photograph, the coyote looked me in the eye, surprised by a human even closer than the one he had been watching. We were less than 15 feet apart. A moment of eye-to-eye contact was followed by another look at my partner, and then by a quick trot toward a low opening in the willows. She glanced back at me once to determine whether I intended to follow; I signaled that I had other interests. Continuing along the path, I scared up a jack rabbit, whose attempts to avoid me sent him into the same willow thicket as the coyote. I chuckled to myself that he had made the wrong choice there, but with both animals feeling like prey, I being the completely uninterested predator, and the owl still snoozing behind us, I was pretty sure the circle of life wouldn’t close for any of us today.
Within a single hour, and in less than an acre of space, I had seen spectacular biodiversity living in close quarters—hunter and hunted, predator and prey, food and appetite, water and desert all in a convenient, high-density arrangement. The oasis was nature’s idea of the well-stocked general store, and the general store was constructed as an oasis of its own. Nature’s oasis; traveler’s oasis. Fields, Oregon.
Coyote at edge of Fields Oasis, M Diggs
Reflections on Photoshop’s Future
First, a confession: I have always had trouble using Photoshop. I’m not a techno-phobe, nor do I generally have trouble with image processing software. Despite my relative proficiency with technology, Photoshop has always seemed to require twice as many steps to achieve an outcome as other programs I’ve used. As a further disclaimer, I will admit that I only have Photoshop Elements, not the full version, much less the latest iteration of Creative Suite. As a result, my experience with the program is, for the most part, as a casual observer.
Although some of my best friends love Photoshop (PS) and swear by its level of control and powerful tools, but I’m increasingly wary of its future as the go-to image processing application for professional photographers. One reason is how well Adobe is doing with the development of Photoshop’s biggest competitor, Lightroom (LR). The other reason is that programs coming out of Nik fill a gap in LR’s functions.
Lightroom Is Too Darn Good: Because PS and LR are both Adobe products, this is a little like the Jetta improving to the point that nobody springs for a Passat anymore. Let’s face it: Adobe still corners the market on full-feature software. Nonetheless, LR combines the cataloging and raw conversion functions of Adobe Camera Raw with many of the most useful functions of PS: exposure and contrast adjustments, cropping and straightening, noise reduction and sharpening, adjustment brushes and graduated filters, as well as levels and curves. From a nature photographer’s perspective, the only things it lacks is the ability to swap out backgrounds (you know, replace Jake Gyllenhaal’s face with yours on in the Brokeback Mountain poster or exchange a featureless sky for a dramatic one) and the ability to hand-blend exposures for the purposes of either focus-stacking (i.e. achieving greater depth of field through multiple exposures with different focus points) or high dynamic range (HDR) photography (blending over and underexposed captures to achieve a higher range of tones from darkest to brightest).
Nik Is Filling these Gaps: Enter Nik Software’s full suite of image processing tools featuring their “Control Point” technology. Nik’s control points allow photographers to select a specific area of an image and affect only those colors and tones that lie within that area. Users can adjust the size of the area and make specific adjustments to things like saturation, structure or clarity, hue, and brightness. Multiple control points can be added, and they can overlap. The control points can be activated and deactivated, adjusted multiple times and deleted altogether, all without creating separate layers. The final image can be saved and re-imported as a Tiff directly into LR with a single click. The effect is the creation of layer masks without the layers, and the use of a powerful program as a plugin for LR.
Nik’s suite of software featuring this technology is growing constantly. They have specific noise reduction and sharpening applications as well as Silver Efex (Black and White conversion), Color Efex (creative filters for adjusting color), Viveza (powerful exposure control), and their new HDR Efex (for high dynamic range processing).
Photoshop’s Future: With LR and Nik on the scene, it’s hard to imagine the next generation of photographers investing their time and money in Photoshop to the same degree as today’s pros. Realistically, they are likely to want LR and Nik for for some unique bells and whistles anyway. Of course, Photoshop is not going to disappear. Those who have already taken the time to learn its impressive array of features will stand by it. Graphics Designers and professionals in a variety of fields will continue to find it central to their creative practice. Photographers too will be drawn to its powerful controls and to the huge number of training videos and forum posts that explain how to achieve an effect through PS rather than its alternatives. Let’s face it, if you are already proficient in Photoshop, nothing beats it for complex manipulation of images, at least not yet….
Large… Really?
M Diggs, photo by V Miller
As those who have met me know, I am not a large person. At 5’7″ and about 130 pounds (give or take), I have what most physicians consider a nearly ideal body mass index (or BMI). I’m not bragging about this or seeking kudos. It’s entirely genetic and, for the most part, effortless for me to maintain. So imagine my surprise when I shopped for jackets and sweaters at a local outdoor store. I generally start with Medium and work my way down from there because, let’s face it, clothing manufacturers have no universal standard for their size designations.
Every Medium I tried on was too small. Keep in mind, I’m trying on jackets and winter sweaters, garments that are not typically close-fitting. So, naturally, I ignore the labels and tried on size Large. Well, the L’s didn’t quite fit either. They fit well through the body, but the arm length seemed to cater to the proportions of your average orangutan. The only thing I found that fit was a skull cap. It’s good to know that at least my head is the size of the average orangutan. I had almost given up on sweaters when I decided to try on some men’s sweaters. I figured, heck, maybe a men’s “S” has the same torso girth as a women’s “L” but with shorter arms. Bingo! Apparently, I am not an average woman at all, but a very small man.
As I walked out of the store thinking about my new sense of self (part-male, part-orangutan) I nonetheless felt successful in my shopping trip. However, I still wonder how other women handle this experience. If I have to wear a Large, what do large people have to wear? And how does that make them feel? I’m guessing it’s something less satisfying than my new hybrid identity.
Nature and Aesthetics
Warm Springs Burn by M Diggs
Every few years, I find myself hungry for a new subject to study. I’m a compulsive learner, I guess, and while I have the degrees to prove that, I’ve learned as much since I finished my formal education as I did during it.
Right now I’m studying aesthetics. Yeah, aesthetics. I took a few philosophy classes as an undergraduate (Existentialism, Logic) but never any classes on aesthetics, nor any classes in art appreciation. My work in nature photography and nature writing is my inspiration for this new course of study. Lest I sound too much like Ben Franklin or Frederick Douglass, let me just jump directly to what I find interesting about my current bed-time reading.
Glenn Parsons’ book, Aesthetics and Nature (2008), is a philosophical examination of aesthetics as it relates to nature itself, not just nature photography or 18th Century paintings. It explores the concept comprehensively yet succinctly (it’s only 140 pages excluding end notes), and it offers me the background I need in intellectual movements that have become mushy in my mind so many years after college. Although the book has that analytical philosophy approach (definitions, arguments about appropriateness and whether one kind of aesthetics is better than another), I still appreciate a review of how particular disciplines discuss ideas like formalism, the sublime, pluralism, etc.
The most interesting discussion in the book so far has been the relationship between aesthetics, nature, and the natural sciences. I’ve been planning to teach a class that deals with nature and aesthetics, and the college is interested in learning communities that place students concurrently into classes in the humanities and the sciences. This book supplies the missing link for me: Parsons suggests that aesthetic appreciation is both sensual and intellectual, and as such, it benefits from the insights of the natural sciences when the object of appreciation is nature.
I’m just beyond the halfway point in this little book, and already I am stocking up on the work of Allen Carlson, Yuriko Saito, Emma Marris and other writers thinking about Positive Aesthetics, Aesthetic Preservation, Environmental Art, and the concept of a post-wild world.
