Northern Cardinal trumpeting his spring mating call, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA. © DE Wolf 2016.

We had a late spring snowstorm last night and, as expected, it didn’t amount to much – only about five inches and it is melting fast. So I can return to the view that since it is day one of spring it, actually is spring. And nothing is more representative of spring in New England than the mating call of the Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis). It is distinctive, and once you hear it your eyes automatically search for the crimson bird at the highest point in the highest tree.

I remember this so vividly from when I was a graduate student in Ithaca, N.Y. I used to devilishly record the male cardinals and then play them back, which invariably led to a war of song. Perhaps we should have called it a birdsong selfie.

With all of this in mind, I took the photograph of Figure 1 of a particularly plump and scarlet male high in a tree and singing his heart out at the Assabet River Wildlife Reserve last weekend. Calling all lady birds and you guys stay out of my territory. The cardinals are such a treat! All I had was my 70 to 200 mm zoom, yet still managed a pretty acceptable image.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 200 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000^th sec at f/7.1. with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Muskrat at the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

If you visit the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge’s webpage, they inform you that if you want to see wildlife, go there near dawn or dusk. Well, the other morning I made it out early, but not that early, even though dawn is now driven forward by the hour of daylight savings time. It was obvious that the pond and the forest were coming alive.  Everywhere Blanding Turtles had crawled out on logs and tufts of Earth, usually in large groups, to soak in the precious sunlight. As I was walking the trail, I saw a fuzzy mass sitting on a stump that emerged from the pond and started taking photographs as I approached. I thought at first that it was a little beaver, and he was terrified or at least very nervous about my presence, I came withing five meters of him and took the picture of Figure 1. Yes, it is a face that only a mother could love.

I was troubled by the twigs in front of him but could not get around them. So after I knew that I had the image that I wanted I took a few steps forward. This immediately drove him into the water and his long round tail revealed that he was not a beaver, after all, but rather a muskrat – Ondatra zibethicus. I managed then to capture a decent image of him as he swam off, and you can see from the interesting wake that he is headed left, like a rower with one paddle in the water. Success in animal and bird photography is almost always in the sharpness of the eye.  At that point the muskrat dove only to reemerge among some reeds a distance off. Wildlife can be difficult to photograph because of its elusiveness. This only adds to its appeal. But it is not the elusiveness that intrigues us. Rather it is the reminder of a place that we ourselves came from, indeed that we have never truly escaped.

Figure 1 – Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 180 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/2000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 2 – Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 200 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/4000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Muskrat swimming at the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Figure 1 – Early spring along the marsh, Saint Patrick’s Day 2016, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I went walking again yesterday at the Assabet River Wildlife Refuge. I got there early, and it was a weekday; so for a change I actually saw more wildlife than the occasional goose. But what was most striking to me was the impending sense of spring. Spring is tenuous in New England. March is famous for spring snow storms, and we are all warily watching the weather predictions for next Monday. But the good thing is that if it comes it will melt quickly – and of course it represents a photo-op in its own right.

Anyway, I took the photograph of Figure 1 along what is known as the Otter Trail. I was struck by the brightly illuminated verdant tufts of grass and the clear water. Soon it will all be overgrown.I was able to get exactly what I was looking for in the image. You may argue that the color is a bit over saturated and intense. But it is, in fact, the way my eye saw it – which is the whole point of photography.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 154 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/4000th sec at f/7.1 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1- Abandoned World War II Ammunition Bunker, Assabet River Wildlife Refuge, Maynard, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

March 12, 2016 and I am off into the woods at the Assabet River Wildlife Refugee. This is a spectacular wetland with a very strange history. In 1942 the Federal Government seized the of land, which spans the towns of Maynard, Sudbury, Hudson and Stow, Massachusetts, by eminent domain. Residents were given about ten days to pack up and leave, and claimed that they were given only ten cents on the dollar for their homes. This explains why as you walk the paths you come upon remnants of habitat, a fire hydrant or an old gas line. The purpose of all of this was to create a military for ammunition storage that was convenient to railroad lines that enabled shipping to the Boston Navy Yard.

The ammunition was stored in bunkers called “igloos”that had inside dimensions of 81x26x12 feet with a curved roofs. The sides and roofs were mounded with dirt to provide further protection and to disquiet the igloos from aerial view. The location was chosen so as to be out of the range of bombardment by enemy battle ships in Boston harbor.

Now the forest has grown back out of these bunkers and they offer a very dark and Gothic aspect that shatters the tranquil beauty of the woods.I have captured the great iron door to one of these bunkers in Figure 1. I find the place foreboding and mysterious. You almost expect to see the words “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” The words that Dante tells us adorn the gates of hell, “Abandon all hope ye that enter here.”

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 73 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode 1/50th sec at f/7.6 with no exposure compensation.

Figure 1 – Floor-tile study #2, Natick, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I just wanted to share Figure 1 today, which is my second floor-tile study. It was even more difficult than the one that I posted yesterday, in terms of the narrow contrast of the original; so again a challenging tone-on-tone. I processed it in a very similar fashion and again ended with a fairly deep sepia tone. Here the original was tan and tanner. I do not see anything specific in this tile only the intricate and magic of polished stone and in the image’s interpretive adherence to the “golden rule of thirds.”

Figure 1 – Floor-tile study #1 – the elephant and the unicorn, Natick, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

Following on the theme of abstraction, I took the photograph of Figure 1 of the pattern in a floor tile this past Sunday. It is a kind of photographic Rorschach blot, and the pattern that I see is that of a sitting elephant and a rather whimsical unicorn. This may confirm your suspicions about me.

The image was taken with my IPhone 6 and what attracted me was, as ever, the tone on tone nature of the tile. It was brown and browner with very little dynamic range. I took it to black and white, worked it up with all the usual tricks, and then sepia toned it deeply.

A tribute to M.C. Escher, Natick, Massachusetts. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

I think that most people both know of M. (Maurits) C. ( Cornelis) Escher and delight in his work. His drawings feature mathematical objects and operations and delightfully many of these can be termed “impossible objects,” like staircase that go up only to come back down. It is very much like a Twilight Zone of Mathematics and Escher is highly regarded among scientists and mathematicians . He featured prominently in Douglas Hofstadter‘s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Escher did not consider himself to be a mathematician yet he interacted with many of the contemporary mathematicians of his day, notably including:  George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Harold Coxeter.

A point in all of this is that infinity, symmetry, chaos, and fractals are everywhere. They surround us and will grace the receptive eye. Such is what immediately came to mind Sunday, when I was confronted by this store window decalled with this “infinite” mathematical pattern. It is the kind of pattern that wonderfully seems to blink between being flat and two dimensional alternative with appearing three dimensional.

Photographically, I spent a lot of time trying to hold the IPhone just right so as not to distort the image and to frame it just so. There was also a bit of a problem with window glare. But this I managed to eliminate: first by switching to black and white and second by burning or cloning out all of the glare. In the end I decided that the slightly tilted perspective greatly enhanced the sense of the infinite. Parallel lines are said to meet in infinity.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Figure 1 – Goose tracks in the spring mud. Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.

In 1802 a twelve-year old farm boy, named Pliny Moody, was plowing a field in what was known as Moody Corner in South Hadley, Massachusetts, when he discovered a slab of rock which contained the first recorded dinosaur tracks ever discovered. These tracks were subsequently acquired by Dr. Elihu Dwight. They were dubbed “the tracks of Noah’s raven” after the biblical raven that Noah released to find dry land.  Dr. Dwight retained possession of the tracks until around 1839, when they were acquired by  Professor Edward Hitchcock for Amherst College. They can still be found there as number 16/2 in the Amherst College natural history collection.

Now, two centuries later, there are many fine examples of dinosaur tracks or footprints from all over the world. In some regards we may think of them as being akin to photographs – capturing an instant in time and holding that instant for millions of years. Indeed, in a sense, photographs pale by comparison. Dinosaur footprints or tracks are unique among fossils in that they capture a moment of life rather than a moment of death and decay. Always in these tracks is the tell-tale reptilian triple toe. And you probably are familiar with the evolutionary origin of modern birds as dinosaur if not from textbooks then from movies.

All of this came to my mind this afternoon, when I went for a first outdoor spring walk. Boy is it good to be out. Spring in New England has the alias as “Mud Season.” Indeed, all self-respecting New England houses have what is referred to as a “mud-room,” where you take off and put on your mud-caked boots. I was walking along the side of a farm field in Concord, mindful of the mud. It was the same field where I had gotten in trouble trying to photograph wild turkeys last fall- sinking ever so deeply in the grime and slush. In any event, I came upon the scene of Figure 1. These are the tracks of Canadian Geese, Branta canadensis. And you may note the delicate curvature of the between toe webbing. “Welcome to Jurassic Park.”