Are you ready for winter?  I was watching the news this morning, and a town near Buffalo, New York has had 88″ of lake effect snow. Things get serious when you have that much snow.  There is a huge danger of life-threatening roof collapses and rescue teams can’t get to you.  It is not an auspicious start to winter, and was captured beautifully in this aerial shot by Derek Gee for the Buffalo News/AP.

Yesterday, I posted about the swan boat in Hamburg transporting the towns swans to a warm place for winter.  So for those of you who are waiting for the latest in cygnature swan news, it appears that a swan missed the boat got his or her cygnals crossed and missed the boat.  Looking to catch-up with the other swans this one got lost and shut down a runway at London’s heavily congested Heathrow Airport. It created quite a cygne.

Nothing speaks more to the change of seasons than the great bird migrations, and we love to tell this story in photographs.  I found this interesting/amusing photograph by Fabian Bimmer for Reuters that tells a twist on that story. Swans from Hamburg’s inner-city lake Alster are migrating to their winter home – only they are transported there by boat and really seem to be enjoying the ride.  The only thing that would be better is if they were being carried off by one of Boston’s famous “Swan Boats.”  But their removal is also a sure sign of impending winter.

I saw, this morning, a very touching a moving photograph by Nancy McKiernan / Baptist Health Nursing and Rehabilitation Center from Reuters.  It shows United States Army veteran Justus Belfield, 98, who dressed in his uniform for a final time and saluted from his nursing home bed in Scotia, N.Y. on Veterans Day.  Mr. Belfield was a World War II and Korean war veteran who served for sixteen years in the Army and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.t time. He died the next day.

Figure 1 – The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 26, 1989. Image by Sharon Emerson and from the Wikimedia Commons under creative commons attribution license.

We mark this second week of November the fall of the Berlin wall, thirty-five years ago.  The two words “Berlin Wall” conjure up many classic images – of its construction, of the cold war, of people trying to cross it, and of its fall.  Perhaps most deeply are the images of President Kennedy speaking at the wall: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”  It is an important symbol of the durability of human hope.

The image of Figure 1 is from November 1989 by Sharon Emerson and shows section of the wall covered with colorful graffiti.  There is a hole in the wall through which and East German guard speaks to a westerner.  It was a moment that slowly led to the reunification of Germany.

Yesterday I discussed the sensation of wondering just what it was like before North America was “civilized.”  I used to do this as a child growing up in Manhattan in New York City.  And it was a fantasy enhanced by a certain Twilight Zone episode “The Odyssey of Flight 33” in which a commercial airliner breaks the time barrier, while landing in New York City and is sent back first into the prehistoric age (Jurassic judging by the apatosaurs) and then to New York City of 1939. The tale is a modern telling of the Flying Dutchman myth.

Last holiday season I was given an amazing book entitled “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City” that tries to take us back. It is the decade-long work of landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson, who reconstructs in words and images the wild island that Henry Hudson first saw in 1609 and which nearly eight million people now call home. Sanderson re-creates the forests of Times Square, the meadows of Harlem, and the wetlands of downtown. Computer generated imagery truly takes us back to what it was like and I highly recommend this book to readers who share my childhood sense of wonder.

We’ve gotten pretty used to grizzly photographs, but nothing like this. Exploded just now on social media is a photograph by veteran wildlife photographer Jim Lawrence in British Columbia of a grizzly bear. The image was taken on October 30. Lawrence was photographing bears fishing for salmon in a river near Revelstoke, BC. He had set up his Nikon with 400 mm lens on a tripod and returned to his car for a different lens. When he turned around, a five-year old grizzly, whom he affectionately called Harry because of his long fur, had climbed out of the river and was, well, studying the image in the back of the camera. Grabbing another camera Lawrence was able to capture the grizzly photographer at work.

So while, I’m usually not one to assist in the spreading of Facebook viral images, I just couldn’t resist this one.

I was literally stunned this week by images of ceramic artist Paul Cummins’ installation at the Tower of London to mark the centenary of the start of World War I.  As many as four million people are expected to visit the site.

Poppies are the universal symbol of the World War I dead.  There are 888,246 poppies filling the moat.  Each one represents a British or colonial soldier who died in the war. Blood made of poppies seems to pour from the Tower in a sobering display*.

Another thought provoking image is that of Albert Willis (left), Paul Cunilffe (center), and Joe Robinson (right).+ They represent three generations of British military servicemen. You would have hoped that the senseless carnage of World War I (16 million dead and 20 million wounded was behind us).  But perhaps the most haunting legacy of World War I is that it was only the beginning of modern warfare, and that the terrible story continues to this day.

What comes relentlessly to my mind are the words of A.E. Housman written on the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in his poem 1887:

“‘God save the Queen’ we living sing,

From height to height ’tis heard;

And with the rest your voices ring,

Lads of the Fifty-third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not;

Be you the men you’ve been,

Get you the sons your fathers got,

And God will save the Queen.”

The ultimate statement that Cummins’ masterpiece may make is that the dead scream out to us in anonymity; but we are too involved in our own conflicts to truly listen.  Only the names of the nameless have changed.

*Nick Harvey for Rex Features

+Chris Jackson for Getty Images

I am always amazed at how many times I am moved by a photographic essay.  It is the essence of photography that it enhances and enriches a story and, when well-done, can intensify a personal story beyond the possibility of the written word alone. Today I found a photoessay by AP photographer Tsering Topgyal. When he was 8 years old and living in Tibet, his parents hired a smuggler to take him over the Himalayas. His weeks’ long trek brought him to India.  His story is the story of tens of thousands of Tibetans, who have left Tibet for India since the Dalai Lama fled Chinese rule in 1959. Topgyal has not seen his family for eighteen years and his search has been to understand just why he was sent.

His search has led him to explore with powerful images the stories of other Tibetan exiles, who had to leave their families behind.  One of the people that he interviewed is Tsering Choephel, 26, who left his home in Tibet for Dharamsala, India 23 years ago. His comment is so poignant, and I think represents the tragedy of all refugees from all conflicts. “The great tragedy of my life is not being separated from my family, but being separated from the sensibility of missing them, after living without them for decades.”

Topgyal photographs Pema Lhamo, now eight, demonstrating how she stuffed herself into a box in order to escape, when she was three years old. And he photographs Kalsang, who is now nineteen, posing in the library of her Tibetan college library near Dharamsala.  She escaped Tibet in 2004 and is studying Buddhism.  The volumes behind her offer counterpoint.  Can you really learn your culture from books?

I’ve noticed a trend.  When it comes to fun photographs we, maybe it’s really I, am drawn to all those events involving throwing colored pigments on everybody, wife carry races, and the highland games.  No one was hurt, not even the poor wives, in the production of these photographs! So I was struck this week by a wonderful picture of Raisin Day at Saint Andrews College in the UK.

Here, all the students have taken part in a great foam fight.  They are doused with foam and having a great time! It’s the usual story where the first year students are the “victims.” Academic parents are dressed up in embarrassing costumes but are rewarded with a gift that used to be a pound of raisins, Hence the name, but now more likely to be of the fermented variety of grape. Indeed, fermented grapes figure prominently in the weekend’s events. The origin of the tradition of Raisin Day is obscure in this University, Scotland’s oldest, founded in 1413.