On Nature Photography

I have always been a lover of nature from my earliest memories with my family. From spotting wildlife in Yellowstone National Park to the backyard bird feeder to the well-loved guidebooks in the glove compartment of my fathers truck it was always a part of my family’s life. It was just our state of being to look up bird or a wildflower as you went along the trail. It becomes a deep habit to try to know each new creature each new species you encounter.

I have not always been a photographer or a nature photographer. I remember keenly my first disappointing camera experience, I took photos of Old Faithful with a point and click camera and waited for the film to be developed only to discover how small the geyser looked and how inadequate the film was in capturing what I had witnessed. Similarly, my father took me out and taught me how to shoot on his 35mm camera, but I discovered that I waited for the film only to be uncertain why this shot was blurry or this shot was framed badly. I was only when I got a starter DSLR camera that I finally could see photos that looked like what I saw and start teaching myself what made a good photo.

A bird perching on a branch — Black-throated green warbler looking back at me.

Of course my first subjects were ones in nature. I think there is a tension between the natural world which is flux and an image which captures a moment, frozen in space and time. I know some that argue that photographs get in the way of enjoying a moment that you will continually be thinking about the photograph rather than living the experience. I find that the camera quite literally focuses me. By observing closely the extraneous drops away from me and I can be very present. This is perhaps most true when I am photographing animals because I try to become as still as possible so as not to disturb them. I don’t pretend they can’t see me, or try to use blind, but I do give them space and respect. In fact, I love capturing the moment that an animal looks at you. The moment mutual seeing that reminds one that we are part of nature not separate from it.

I recently had to test this relationship I have with photography and nature. I had problems with my 300 mm lens and then started having problems with my camera. I was able drop off to get my camera fixed, but I was without it for a week. It was just as the work from home orders were going into place and I was anxious and wanted to walk in nature places. I discovered that my experience of nature changed without the camera. I was seeing the same wildlife I would have photographed with my camera, but now I couldn’t zoom in and have that sense of closeness and wonder. I suddenly realized how much my sense of nature was tied to the images I had captured. It opened the question of whether nature counted for me if I couldn’t share it after. I found myself counting animals, narrating the things I saw as I saw them. Three red breasted mergansers diving on the Chicago river, one robin running along the path, a red-winged blackbird calling in the sedge at the end of the water, the play of light reflecting on the water. All things I would have paused to photograph. It felt a bit like losing part of my speech or not wearing my glasses. Not being able to zoom in and see the details felt like I wasn’t fully seeing the natural world around me. However, I go back to that mental list, I was just trying to catalog and hold for myself the images and experiences of being outside without the benefit of a picture. Our experience in nature is always glimpses, moments that we enter back in and realize that we are not creatures of screens and houses but part of the world. I am glad I have my camera back to give me one more way to keep that feeling of being in nature.

After I got my camera back I spent a whole cold morning on a boat launch on the Chicago river photographing swallows for about half an out. It was the most present I had felt in days especially at the during our pandemic days.

A bird flying over water — A tree swallow on the wing

A post script on good and bad behavior since I see many new people exploring nature during the pandemic. Audubon and others offer great guidelines for nature photography. Some simple guidelines: Don’t go off trails, don’t harass animals, don’t make loud noises, don’t use a flash, give animals with children or nests their space so as not to stress them, be aware of others using natural spaces – tiny trails may not be the best spot for your tripod, in these days of COVID-19 wear a mask and safely distance, and enjoy (re)connecting.

Spring in the time of Coronavirus

Spring in Chicago vacillates between shades of brown and gray, brown with blue sky, punctuated by the sudden snow storm. This season, waiting a few days for the official start of spring, the necessity of nature seems even more important. Last week, in the midst of ever changing work emails on COVID-19, the consumption of too many news sources and too many social media posts left me drained. I stopped impulsively on the way home at Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary. As I walked, all the competing voices causing me anxiety dissipated. It was a gray day and there were few people out. Many had already started working from home. I was struck by how few people I saw. There was a lone walker on the lakefront, a single jogger, a trio of birders hailed me from about 15-20 feet away and asked me what I had seen. It was a given that we were all talking about birds. They told me to look for the sandpipers and went on their way.

It is important to remember that can still go outside, at least for now, and keep a safe distance from other people. There are no doorknobs and handles in a nature preserve. Nature and walking are restorative. I picked up beach glass the color of absent glaciers and a shard of pottery from our failing civilization. I watched two red-winged black birds chase through the sky. Nature doesn’t make a pandemic go away. It does offer a moment to quiet the noise and focus on something outside oneself. I certainly have moments that I feel desperate for the future of our country and out planet, but the oak still stands, the cardinal is still red, the horsetails at the lake will exist after we are long gone. We can choose how we face things – with decency and support for all rather than more photos of empty shelves, panic and hoarding. Take a self-distancing moment away from the noise, it helps with perspective. In the midst of all the brown and gray there may be a striking sunset or the first snow drops and for now I cling to this small things.

Planning for nature in a city

“Should not the public see to it that every one may enjoy this change of scene, this restorer of bodily and mental vigor, and will not citizenship be better thereby? He who habitually comes in close contact with nature develops saner methods of thought than can be the case when one is habitually shut up within the walls of a city.” – Daniel Burnham, The Plan of Chicago

The Chicago skyline at sunset with lake and grasses in front of it. — Chicago Skyline from Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, photo: Maren Robinson

One of the most livable features of Chicago is the network of city parks and nature spaces and a public lakefront. It is remarkable because the city was designed that way by a small group of urban planners and advocates who wanted keep the lakefront public instead of filled with the houses and high rises of those who could afford the luxury of a lakefront. Daniel Burnham, the architect and urban designer, was one of the major advocates of these green spaces both for civic benefits and well as aesthetic ones. However, manicured city parks were not enough for him. In The Plan of Chicago, which he wrote with Edward h. Bennett, he advocated for nature spaces with forests and trails for public use that were not to be chopped up and tidy but big swaths nature.

“The existing public parks go far in this direction, but not far enough. The spaces to be acquired should be wild forests, filled with such trees, vines, flowers, and shrubs as will grow in this climate, and all should be developed in a natural condition. Country roads and a few paths should run through these forests, but they should not be cut into small divisions. There should be open glades here and there, and other natural features, and the people should be allowed to use them freely.” – Daniel Burnham, The Plan of Chicago

I am, of course, in favor of this view because I share it. When I first moved to Chicago I found myself looking at all the tall buildings, the architectural details and the skyline. However, I soon found that I looked at the negative spaces: the water, the sky beyond the towering architecture. There is solace in knowing that the city ends. It hits the water and can sprawl no further.

A metal pier extends into a blue lake with blue sky and a strong horizon — Lake Michigan from Loyola Beach, photo: Maren Robinson

Similarly, at first I found myself fascinated by people on trains. Their habits and variety. Soon though the pressure of living surrounded by so many others becomes overwhelming. I could see why so many commuters are plugged into head phones or staring at their screens, or staring into that middle distance with the dazed expression of having left their bodies. In the crush of noise and physical contact with strangers we retreat and we deaden our senses to preserve ourselves.

A brown speckled bird with a puffy chest sits on a branch — Hermit Thrush, photo: Maren Robinson

In nature is an antidote to having compressed oneself and one’s senses to live around others. In shutting out the noise of the siren we also seem to silence the call of the robin. When walking into a place that is more wild there is a slow release. Inhale, the smell of leaf litter and wet grasses. The shoulders drop a bit. Were they always held so tightly? The light dapples through clouds and branches. Suddenly the senses expand. Reaching out in new awareness of other living things. The buzz of an insect, the startled flight of a bird in peripheral vision, the rapid tap tap tap tap tap of a woodpecker. All around is life, throwing off oxygen and carbon dioxide. The sap moves slowly in a red willow branch waiting for the right day to burst forth in catkins. A beetle scritches in the earth beneath a dry leaf and a hermit thrush scritches in the leaves for beetles. The human is no longer first, but only part and human concerns are no more important than any other creature scritching for existence.

I think that was what Burnham hoped for, though he left out the part about beetles.

Landscape of sunlight through green tree branches with green grasses and flower — Treelight at Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary, photo: Maren Robinson

Nature in dribs and drabs

DSC_0356 (2) Much of the natural life in the city of Chicago is happening in fringe areas. Certainly wildlife use the city parks, golf courses, and cemeteries as both homes and byways and the arteries of our city, the train tracks, the river and the expressways and the scrubby land around them also provide spaces for animals to live and travel.

I have spent most time in areas bordering the Chicago river. Even though parks, houses and industrial parks back on to this waterway, and the river, though much improved, would not be considered clean by any imagination. Animals find homes and passage on the river. Several major parks have now set aside natural areas where a city park gives way to some native plants and paths along the edge of the park. In Horner Park ,south of Montrose Avenue, this takes the form of a new nature area along the river, with paths and native plants. North of Lawrence it follows Ronan Park and River Park past the sewage treatment plant along the north branch of the Chicago river and becomes the North Shore Channel trail. Popular with bikers and dog walkers and runners close to the river it is still a haven for blue herons and black crowned night herons, migratory warblers and small mammals, the passing coyote or skunk.

On Saturday I spotted the young American Opossum above not more than 10 yards from busy Lawrence Avenue (pictured above). It remained calm, almost completely unobserved from its perch in a small tree as dog walkers and a cross-country skier, pedestrians and countless cars zipped past unseeing. (Below, view of Horner Natural Area from the Lawrence Avenue bridge). 30920908127_c49969d1c2_o

Nature fills the available space along this little islands and rivulets of green that pepper the city. Even if I don’t venture to a forest preserve I can count on seeing wildlife if I am willing to go to the river and wait.

The river itself is filled with turtles, mallard ducks and Canada geese and the seasonal outlier, a showy red breasted merganser, a common goldeneye duck diving for food or a red-tailed hawk watching for prey. I once stood well into dusk on the Wilson bridge and watched a pair of American beavers climb the bank, pick choice branches from a backyard hedge, carry the branches back to the river and strip them bare. Around humans and in spite of us, they have found and filled the gaps we have left them. (American Beaver on the Chicago River below).

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Other writers have written of “edgelands,” the places where the city gives way to wilderness amidst a jumble of the detritus of humans and almost wilderness. These narrow patches within a city are even smaller and it is worth taking the time to explore them.

I am often asked by friends who follow my photography where I go on the weekends to see all this wildlife and they are surprised when I tell them it is in the city and often not even in a nature preserve but the dead-end of a street by the river. Discovering nature in a city is about being willing to look for it and listen for it in the most unexpected places until you know where and how to see it. I was walking with a friend in Hyde Park and almost automatically when I heard a call said, “Oh that’s a cardinal.” Then looked until I spotted it on a nearby branch and pointed it out. A block or two later it was a chickadee. He asked what it was like to be attuned to all the life that was around me. I am not sure I know what it would be like not to notice the birds, or the movement of a rabbit in the brush, but I know that I feel more alive when I am aware of these other lives.

Nature and wildness may come in these dribs and drabs in the city, but it is there if we are willing to work to see it.

Amateur Naturalist, Humanist Scientist

35172966040_6396ec9093_o The term naturalist is most often used in a historic sense to describe famous contributors to science: Charles Darwin, John James Audubon or Rachel Carson. In fact, these are natural scientists, biologists. The naturalists who have always interested me are those who are close observers of the natural world in their spare time. The Anglican Curate Gilbert White who closely observed the nature in and around Selborne, in Hampshire England over twenty years and wrote The Natural History of Selborne. Children’s book author Beatrix Potter was also a close observer of nature as shown in her illustrations as well as in the hundreds of detailed illustrations of mushrooms she produced and the paper she attempted to have submitted to the Linnean Society of London at a time when women were not admitted.

Perhaps I enjoy these enthusiastic amateurs because I am one. However, I stake a claim to value of the amateur. It is often amateurs who sustain a wide variety of service organizations for parks and nature areas, who spearhead clean ups and bird counts. The newly popular term is citizen scientists. Volunteers who help collect data or review data. I have participated in several of these projects. Frog and toad monitoring at West Ridge Nature Preserve, bird counts and photos in ebird, and reviewing photos for the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute.

I enjoy contributing in all these projects, but the reason I do it is tied to a deep desire to observe and connect to nature that I learned in my childhood. I grew up in the American west in a family of birders and nature spotters. My father loved nature photography and always had a field guide in the glove box of his pick up truck.

My first science project was a study on the winter feeding habits of house finches (male house finch pictured above) and Cassin’s finches at our back yard feeder. It involved daily bird counts and measuring the amount of food consumed, tracking the temperature, barometric pressure, snowfall, finding the metabolic rates of both finches and finally accounting for a data glitch when a Cooper’s hawk killed a bird and stalked the feeder for a few days suppressing food consumption at the feeder.

So why not become a scientist? I had other loves, literature and theater. As faculty members at university advised me to do science and love these humanistic pursuits on the side and I always retorted why couldn’t I do humanities and pursue science on the side. This is exactly what I have done. As each branch of science becomes more and more technical folks like me step into the breach and bridge the distance between the technical and the beautiful in nature. I know nature in a different way when I have observed it myself. The first time I watched barn swallows removing the poop from the bottom of their chicks and flying out and dropping it far from the nest it answered a gross but necessary question about how the nests stayed clean. (Below is a barn swallow on the nest while not removing poop from a chick.) 36563553085_64cae03c06_o

Perhaps most importantly in these moments of observation I am outside myself. The creature I am observing is more important than me or my concerns and that empathy for nature seems more necessary to me than ever before. Nature has the ability to make us better humans so perhaps a humanist scientists is not so far off. Here is to all the budding naturalists, citizen scientists and humanists who do science on the side.

Chicago nature

35755313220_62648f1ccf_o When I moved to Chicago my greatest sense of lost was the mountains and easy access to nature trails I grew up with in Idaho and Montana. I soon found that Chicago is speckled with nature spots and Chicago wildlife thrives in parks and cemeteries. The past four years I started haunting parks and nature preserves around the city with my camera. All my western wildlife spotting skills meant I learned where birds had nests, or coyotes their dens, or a herd of deer was likely to be found. As I posted photos friends started asking me where I was going to see all this wildlife and I told them I was often within Chicago city limits.

As more and more of the world’s population lives in cities, this blog is a chance to better document the breadth of wildlife that thrives in Chicago often in spite of human encroachment and offer others ways to connect with the nature and wildlife and wild spaces right around the corner. (West Ridge Nature Preserve pictured above)