Today’s image is actually a short slide show; so please be sure to watch the whole set. I had the privilege yesterday of encountering this common snapping turtle – Chelydra serpentina laying eggs in sandy soil besides the path at the wildlife refuge. I gingerly walked past her, watching her carefully as she watched me carefully, and stood a while taking photographs. It never occurred to me that my camera has the ability to take video.

Here is a clear example of when a DSLR is preferable to an IPhone. With the IPhone I might have lost fingers getting close enough – or she might have eaten the IPhone – you never know.

As the name implies this is the most common species of snapping turtle in North America. The other species being the alligator snapping turtle – Macrochelys temminckii. There’s a lot in a name. My wife tells me that this one needs a name. So I will call her “Chely Serpentine.” The term “serpentina” or snakelike, derives from this snapper’s ability to bend its head back and, well, snap you. Hint – mind your social distance. I have read that they are not particularly aggressive, except when threatened. Book knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I tried very hard not to threaten Chely as I took her picture.

I include one full color image to give you a sense of the scene, but took the rest in black and white because the prehistoric demeanor would seem to demand it. I love the intricacies of  shell and armour and the dinosaur-like face with bugs clinging to it – the result of digging in the sandy soil.

Snapping turtles reach maturity at twelve to fifteen years of age, depending upon whether they are in a southern or more northern environment respectively. They typically lay twenty to forty golf-ball sized eggs, which hatch in the early fall. There is a very intriguing aspect to snapping turtle egg development. Snapping turtles have temperature-dependent sex determination. Eggs maintained at 68°F produce only females; eggs maintained at 70-72°F produce both male and female turtles; and those incubated at 73-75°F produce only males. Not surprisingly, there is a very high mortality rate among hatchlings. It is unclear how long these behemoths live, but capture, tag, recapture programs place this at about one hundred years.

Figure 1 – Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 190 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/1000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 2 – Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 310 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/1000th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 3 – Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 135 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/800th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 4 – Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 310 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/1000th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Eastern cottontail, Sudbury, MA, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I ran into the fellow in Figure 1, my next-door neighbor, in my back yard yesterday evening. He is an Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus), and it makes one wonder. The wild is really at our doorsteps. But more significantly, there has been a family of cottontails and a family of woodchucks living in my backyard as long as we have been here.

Whose backyard is it really? I read that back in the nineteenth century the site of my home was the location of a wheelwright’s shop and home – a Mr. Taylor, I believe. I suspect that the forebears of these fur-bearers were living here then. They would have been disturbed as human houses were torn down and new ones constructed. But they stayed on.

Every spring each year, my wife and I plant large pots which we locate at the end of the driveway. We carefully water them, and the next morning we find them all torn up with the little plantings strewn about the lawn. It only happens the one time each summer, as if it were a little protest meant to remind me of just who was here first.

So anyway, here is a portrait of my next-door neighbor. It seems sadly likely that at the time of King Philip’s War one of his distant ancestors was roasted for some Puritan’s dinner – we cannot say for sure.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 330 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/250th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – The pine barren #1, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

My wife and I used to, and I suppose still do, rejoice in the view of a pine barren. Pine barrens  occur throughout the northeastern United States. They are plant communities that evolve  on dry, acidic, infertile soils dominated by grasses, forbs, low shrubs, and small to medium-sized pines. The Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge is a pine barren, and an obvious feature, as you explore the landscape, is its glacial origins in the last ice age. Indeed, the watershed of the Concord and Assabet Rivers have developed from two huge glacial lakes which flooded the land 18,000 years ago: glacial Lake Sudbury (which encompasses what is now the Wildlife Refuge) and glacial Lake Concord.

With the coming of the warm weather there is a definite sense of summer in the air. For the first time this season, I put on bug spray – which seemed to attract the bugs to me. Bugs, bugs, bugs! As you walk along the paths now the song of the insects cries out louder than that of the birds – and more amusing is the bizarre bass croaks of the frogs, which you mistake at first as stomach gurglings.

Nature seems ever timeless. The cycles are there but the key is their immutability. But the longer cycles are there as well – the glaciations and the transitions of the climax forests. The woods are not as they always have been nor as they ever will be.  The Earth changes – now hastened by man-induced climate change – an biological evolution marches forward – with direction only defined after it has occurred.

I thought today that I would share some photographs of the pine barren. Figure 1 was taken with my big lens. This was not only overkill but also a sacrifice of sharpness. Figure 2, on the other-hand, was taken with my ever ready and trusty IPhone 6. For fun I include the camera settings for the IPhone as well, and I leave it to the reader to decide which is better and which is sharper.

Figure 2 – The pine barren #2, Iphone photograph, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 100 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/320th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.

Figure 2 IPhone 6 4.2 mm Lens, ISO 32, 1/186 sec at f/2.2 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Granites on the beach, Madison, CT. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

As I am writing this blog I look over my shoulder to my right and see the outdoor temperature on my patio, 86 deg. F. That crosses this New Englander’s comfort zone, which lies somewhere between 76 and 80 deg. F. For me this is hot!

Beyond personal disconfort, I have to say that it is certainly time, people, to take in your Christmas decorations. June is no time to have lit-up Santa’s on your roofs or holiday wreaths on your doors. It smacks perhaps of the slothful.

Now I have to say that I know of at least one reader and co-Masschusettsian who is rejoicing, probably by her pool. And that is the very point. When it gets this hot and humid our thoughts naturally gravitate towards the water. My thought are at the beach and by the ocean. It is a Herman Melville put it in his Moby Dick “There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.” To quel my yearning, I am going to post today this image that I took a while back of granites on a beach in Madison, CT.

I am always torn when photographing stone. Should I do it in color or in black and white? For these particular granites I was struck by the wonderful pink coloration. Granite is an intrusive igneous rock, which means that it cools slowly deep beneath the Earth. This slow cooling gives the mineral crystals time to grow – hence beautiful texture and mineralization.

Canon T2i with Lens    EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE MOde, 1/800th sec at f/13.0 with no exposure compensation

It is high time for a little housekeeping at Hati and Skoll Gallery. So a few things. First, and most importantly a bug thanks to all of the loyal blog readers and site-visitors. I really appreciate all of your support and comments. Second, I have updated the “Birds Gallery;” so that it is closer to being complete. Third, and finally, as regular readers will recognize over the last several months I have been hiking and photographing at the wonderful Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge in Sudbury, Maynard, Stow, and Hudson, Massachusetts.  So I thought that it would be fun to consolidate and put up a dedicated gallery of these images, even if just temporarily. Also I decided to do this as a photoessay rather than just a random gallery; so if you visit the “National Wildlife Refuge Gallery” you will see not only photographs but also notable quotes about wilderness and nature. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks again for all of your support.

David

Figure 1 – Moccasin flower, Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Sudbury, MA. May 20, 2016. IPhone macrophotograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I should probably have saved this posting until Fathers’ Day. But it is May and the orchids are in bloom in Massachusetts, demanding a timely posting. The thing is that my dad was a naturalist, and he would have delighted to walk with me in the woods. He would have been delighted by the great blue herons, by the Canada goslings, by the toad whose picture I posted yesterday, and by the adamant water snake that I crossed paths with last week. But I have been waiting and watching, waiting for the orchids to bloom, because I knew that this would have delighted him the most.

Figure 1 is a photograph of a so-called moccasin flower. It is a lady-slipper orchid, Cypripedium acaule. They are very special and they grow on the ground of the New England pine-barrens. Indeed, they defy culture because no one has yet to figure out the essential ingredients provided by the pine needles and oak leaves that nurture them. The photograph was again taken with my IPhone serving as macrocamera. Here I would have preferred a little more sharpness. But I was not carrying the macrolens for my Canon with me. And like yesterday’s toad image, I had to get down on the ground close to the flower. There is something pretty magical about orchids, which we think of as tropical flowers growing in the Northern woods.

I say that my father would have delighted in walking with me. But, in fact, he still does. He was an extraordinary and encyclopedic naturalist. And in his day biology was still about naming things, just as geology was about mysterious land bridges where dinosaurs paid a toll and crossed between continents. So whenever, I walk in the woods today I remember all the names of plants and animals and minerals that he taught me, and it is as if he were still with me.

And there is something else. I grew up in New York City, which you would think was about as far from nature that you could get. But that was not really the case. There were wonderful parks: Central Park, Fort Tryon Park, Prospect Park, and Van Cortland Park where nature was waiting for you still, and if you tried hard enough these places would transform in your imagination to an antebellum time before nature’s war with mankind.

Figure 1 – American toad. Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, May 20, 2016, Sudbury, MA. IPhone photograph. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

As the weather has warmed up, I have noticed more and more reptiles and amphibians on my daily walks. First, it was the turtles soaking up the rays of sunlight on an otherwise chilly day. Then came the frogs, and the other afternoon I came across a little Northern water snake on the path. Despite his diminutive size this snake held his ground.

Yesterday I was delighted to come upon the American toad – Anaxyrus americanus – of my youth. Unbeknownst to my youthful self, they were classified as Bufo americanus in those days. We loved to find them. We would hold them, and they would excrete a “urine” in response, and after a period of boyhood tormenting we would release them, because even then we had been taught that natural things have the right to their own life and domain.

I didn’t touch the toad I found yesterday, and he just froze in the path confident in his camouflage. You think immediately of princes under the spell of witches waiting to be kissed by a kind-hearted maiden. That is, of course, the Ovidian stuff of  metamorphic myth, where things judged ugly may be transformed. Who is the ugly one? Remember though, that there is change in nature. Egg clusters become tadpoles, and tadpoles become frogs. Fuzzy goslings soon become geese. And verdant leaves take on the hues of autumn. It is far from a static world and these changes are as dramatic as princes changed to toads.

I conceived of the image of Figure 1 and I took it with my IPhone, which does a wonderful job of macrophotography. Indeed, I should say an amazing job of it. I was troubled by the top views that I kept getting, which really didn’t show the eyes. So I got down on the ground with the toad and held my camera sidewards on the earth within inches of him. The result is Figure 1, and I am pretty pleased with the effect.