Figure 1 – An impressionist canvas, early spring on the marsh. (c) DE Wolf 2021

Spring emerges like a painting from a canvas primed with winter’s white. And our eyes slowly adjust and revel in the glory of colors. Yesterday I found a spot on the marsh with a brown and ancient beaver chew, verdant water lilies, and the reflection of purple flowers. It struck me so much like an impressionist painting. Certainly it is reminiscent of Claude Monet’s Garden at Giverny. Rejoice the sun has come and it seems all the more precious this year!

Cloe’ as official art critic is pretty bored by all of this reveling. She gives this blog a big yawn.

Figure 2 – The art critic gives a big yawn.

Figure 1 – Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6L LS USM lens at 150 mm, ISO 800, AF Aperture Priority 1/250th sec at f/8.0 with no exposure compensation.

Well, Hati and Skoll has moved from the Massachusetts North Shore back to Metrowest. Cloe’ the official mascot of H&S protests and is torn between the novelty of new smells and sights blended with old and kinda well, you know, it is all so scary! Here she is hiding in a mountain of crunchy packing paper.

Figure 1 – The ambiguity of the move. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

The upshot of all of this is that I return, though I have never really left, from daily walks along Salem’s waterfront to daily walks through the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. My friend’s dog keeps tasting me with kisses, excitedly wondering about the 18 months of isolation, “Where have you been?”

Along the marsh, spring has indeed sprung. The pulse of spring, a demanding incessant rhythm, is always to be found in the behavior of birds. Among birds there is a curious attraction to the elegant long-legged waders, to the herons and the egrets. They speak to and of wild creatures. They are both throwbacks to the Jurassic days of imagined lumbering dinosaurs and the studied and choreographed beauty of a ballet dancer.

This year I was delighted to find that the great blue heron  of Figure 2 has set up her nest on a plot of the marsh with greater accessibility and closeness to your intrepid photographer. I happily and greedily snapped photographs of her brooding her eggs with my big lens and am really looking forward to soon seeing little fuzzy heads popping out over the rim of the nest. Hopefully, a photo to come.

Figure 2 – Great blue heron brooding her eggs on the marsh. May 2021. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

I am left to wonder at this strange yet beautiful creature, who seems in a moment to have escaped time. She has borne witness to the ages and, perhaps, if we listen closely and receptively enough she has a story and advice for us.

“Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?”
― Annalee Newitz, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Figure 2 – Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6L LS USM lens at 285 mm, ISO 800, AF Aperture Priority 1/640th sec at f/7.1 with +2 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Dragon Kite – Good Harbor Beach, Gloucester, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

Well, spring is everywhere, and I have been out with my cameras. Huge trepidation continues, but like the Ichthyostega of some 364 Mya, we venture forth. Indeed, if we had remained troglodytes much longer, we might be evolving in different directions!

Where to begin? I thought that perhaps a good starting point would be this marvelous dragon kite that I encountered high above Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, MA a few weeks ago.

Dragons are both marvelous and complex. Who cannot but love them?  In the Orient (this is an oriental dragon), the dragon is a symbol of great magical power. He is wisdom. He is strength and possesses much wisdom and secret knowledge. This dragon was all teeth. He was green and orange against a perfectly azure sky. He flew high, a king amongst the sea birds. He mocked the puny damsel that held him tethered and captive, and he demanded to be set free!

For us today, he is a symbol of the world.

Figure 1 – Next Spring’s Waterlilies, Punkatasset Pond, Concord, MA, October 12, 2020. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

Following on the themes of season changes and rebirth, Figure 1 entitled “Next Spring’s Waterlilies,” was taken in late October at Punkatasset Pond in Concord, MA. In summer the pond is a dazzle of waterlillies.  It shows the stems of last summers waterlilies bent over and back in the water presumably to enable the dropping of seeds to the bottom of the pond – rebirth. I have accentuated this theme by enhancing, not creating, the light in the center of the plants.

I have returned of late to using duo or tritones as my modus operandi for toning black and whites. Here I love the velvety chocolate effect that the process creates. To me it seems almost edible.

Canon T2i with EF 70-200 f/4L USM lens at 122 mm, ISO 800, Aperture priority AE Mode, 1/400th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Leaf of autumn in the snow of winter, Audubon Habitat Wildlife Refuge, Belmont, MA. October 31, 2020. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

The seasons are symbolic of transition and passage. Spring waxes to summer, summer to fall, and then the waning of fall to winter, and finally rebirth winter to spring, then spring back to summer. It seems so appropriate to think of this in “Our winter of discontent.” Figure 1 is an image that I took after our first real snow back in October – it shows the precise instant of liminal passage from glorious autumn to a beautiful winter. It was an image taken in the muffled quietude of fresh snow at the Habitat Wildlife Refuge in Belmont, MA on October 31, 2020; so really still fall technically, although there is a discrepancy between astronomical and meteorological fall.

The golden leaf seems to shiver in the cold. Perhaps it was left behind to remind us of summer’s glory by Persephone on her journey to her winter in the underworld. It is a journey that she must endure for eating in desperation a few pomegranate seeds, which are a symbol of the indissolubility of her marriage to Hades.

Now that I am starting to see the buds and twig colors and the first robins that augur the coming of spring, I am thinking back three months to the moment of passage captured in this photograph. 

Figure 1 – Red-tailed hawk looking for lunch, Belmont, MA, January 21, 2021. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

My friend has five bird feeders on her deck – ready to attract any kind of bird except, this time of year, hummingbirds. In a sense her deck represents a smorgasbord for the birds. Today there were suddenly non birds and no squirrels at the feeder. Even the ravenous starlings were gone. All was quiet except for the fellow of Figure 1, a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis). He was there for his own smorgasbord!

So much discussion about long lenses for bird photography! All I had at the ready was my iPhone XS. But since the house acted as a bird blind, I was able to get quite close. In the immortal words of Louis Pasteur.

“Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.”

“Chance favors the prepared mind!”

Figure 1 – Rocks at Wingaersheek Beach, Gloucester, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

A very special favorite place is Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester MA. The secret about New England beaches is that they are often best visited in winter when there are no clouds and there is a certain raw ruggedness to the sea. The image of Figure 1 was taken shortly after Christmas with my iPhone “view camera.” It was a black and white kind of day and, as always a tribute to Edward Weston. 

Figure 1 – Great Horned Owl, male, Audubon Habitat Wildlife Refuge, Belmont, MA, January, 15, 2021. (c) DE Wolf 2021.

Since some point in July we have been looking for a well-known pair of great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) at Audubon Society’s Habitat Wildlife Refuge in Belmont, MA. There has been not a hoot and we feared that they had been frightened away by nearby construction – bang, bang, bang instead of hoot, hoot, hoot. The last couple of weeks they have been freshly sighted in their preferred grove, vey high up in a pine tree. On Sunday I was rewarded and big lens clumsily in hand as I tried to hold everything steady I obtained the image of Figure 1.

Owls are variously associated with knowledge, darkness, and the underworld. Most profoundly they symbolize illumination and guide us from the darkness. Seems hopeful and perhaps appropriate to the day.

Canon T2i with EF 100-400 f/4.5-5.6L IS  ISM lens at 300 mm, ISO 3200, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/320 sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.