What better subjects to point your camera at on an island but water (flowing and frozen) and rock (hard and soft.) No narrative this week, just some abstract form and color that you can fill in with what might be in your mind.
Cove in Isle of Harris, Scotland
Flow on the River Orchy
Ice on Loch Ba
Ice in Glen Etive
Ripples on Luskentyre Beach
Stars, moon and sun have aligned so that Passover, Holy Week and Ramada are all commemorated this week. The religions share a creation story that was oral tradition before being written down likely in the 5th or 6th century BCE. I seem to discover more beauty and wisdom in that text each time I read or proclaim it. I’ve just realized God divides sky, sea, air and land in days 1-3 and then in days 4-6 populates sky, sea, air and land.
For several years (2019, 2020 and 2021) I’ve found images that help me imagine the world the writer of Genesis created. It’s certainly tricky to translate ancient Hebrew into current English, so I’m using a different version this year to offer different insights. Hope you find it good.
North Atlantic
In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, with a divine wind sweeping over the waters.
Luskentyre, Isle of Harris
God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.
God saw that light was good, and God divided light from darkness.
God called light 'day', and darkness he called 'night'. Evening came and morning came: the first day.
God said, 'Let there be a vault through the middle of the waters to divide the waters in two.' And so it was.
God made the vault, and it divided the waters under the vault from the waters above the vault. God called the vault 'heaven'. Evening came and morning came: the second day.
God said, 'Let the waters under heaven come together into a single mass, and let dry land appear.' And so it was.
God called the dry land 'earth' and the mass of waters 'seas', and God saw that it was good.
Taransay Island, Outer Hebrides
God said, 'Let the earth produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants, and fruit trees on earth, bearing fruit with their seed inside, each corresponding to its own species.' And so it was.
The earth produced vegetation: the various kinds of seed-bearing plants and the fruit trees with seed inside, each corresponding to its own species. God saw that it was good.
Evening came and morning came: the third day.
Marram grass, Luskentyre Dunes, Isle of Harris
God said, 'Let there be lights in the vault of heaven to divide day from night, and let them indicate festivals, days and years.
Let them be lights in the vault of heaven to shine on the earth.' And so it was.
God made the two great lights: the greater light to govern the day, the smaller light to govern the night, and the stars.
God set them in the vault of heaven to shine on the earth,
to govern the day and the night and to divide light from darkness. God saw that it was good.
Evening came and morning came: the fourth day.
Jökulsárlón, Iceland
God said, 'Let the waters be alive with a swarm of living creatures, and let birds wing their way above the earth across the vault of heaven.' And so it was.
Icelandic seal
God created great sea-monsters and all the creatures that glide and teem in the waters in their own species, and winged birds in their own species. God saw that it was good.
God blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds multiply on land.'
Evening came and morning came: the fifth day.
Fulmars, Isle of Harris
God said, 'Let the earth produce every kind of living creature in its own species: cattle, creeping things and wild animals of all kinds.' And so it was.
God made wild animals in their own species, and cattle in theirs, and every creature that crawls along the earth in its own species. God saw that it was good.
Highland Cow, Loch Awe, Scotland
God said, 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals and all the creatures that creep along the ground.'
God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
God blessed them, saying to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that move on earth.'
Luskentyre Beach, Isle of Harris
God also said, 'Look, to you I give all the seed-bearing plants everywhere on the surface of the earth, and all the trees with seed-bearing fruit; this will be your food.
And to all the wild animals, all the birds of heaven and all the living creatures that creep along the ground, I give all the foliage of the plants as their food.' And so it was.
Scottish Blackface Ram
God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good. Evening came and morning came: the sixth day.
Thus heaven and earth were completed with all their array.
On the seventh day God had completed the work he had been doing. He rested on the seventh day after all the work he had been doing.
God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on that day he rested after all his work of creating.
Such was the story of heaven and earth as they were created.
Salt Marsh, Isle of Harris
River Etive starts with several small tributaries flowing off the tall mountains in the western Highlands. It eventually becomes a white water kayaking river before flowing into a sea loch, but near the beginning there are many small cascades.
Waterfalls on River Etive
Several movies have been filmed in Glen Etive. Lots of men in kilts ran through the Glen in Braveheart, and Ron, Harry and Hermione camp near the loch. Maybe you could see Hermione tie her scarf around one of the few trees in the Glen.
Glen Etive beech
Just up the road Daniel Craig pulled over to chat with Judy Dench as they headed to Skyfall just up the Glen. While this mountain may have looked down on them, there was no frozen water to reflect back.
Glen Etive reflection
A little wave in the shadowed blue light on one of the waterfalls caught some of the golden light reflected off the mountain and waved back.
I couldn’t choose just one image of this little fall. Hi, Glen Etive.
The focus of the photography in Scotland was seascapes and landscapes, but of course for me, the birds are irresistible. The coasts of Lewis and Harris, naturally, are filled with birds. Let’s start with the northernmost part of the island with the wonderful name — the Butt of Lewis. The wind might’ve been fierce, but the Fulmars handle it with ease. They were pairing up on the cliffs.
Gneiss Fulmars
Other pairs apparently felt more comfortable on the moss beds on top of the rocks.
Fulmar butts on the Butt of Lewis
Off the cliff and down on the beaches are the noisy Eurasian Oystercatchers. They are just as charismatic and colorful as their American cousins.
Eurasian Oystercathers
An earlier visit to Garry Beach on the east coast included a walk on the sandy beach at low tide. We returned at high tide, and I walked along the cliff side. Feral pigeons are common residents of cities all over the world. They are likely descendants of Rock Doves, and a few years ago ornithologists determined that small colonies of pure bred Rock Doves remained on the Outer Hebrides. Earlier this week, I shared images of the standing stones on Lewis and Harris. It is likely that the people who built those stones had also domesticated Rock Doves, and so might also be responsible for the pigeons that flock on top of monuments all over the world.
Rock Doves on Garry Beach, Isle of Lewis
Instead of walking down to the beach, I decided to circle around on the nearby road. There, I met a local fellow who walks along the beach two or three times every day, and we chatted about the area. I told him I thought I spotted a buzzard flying, and later realized we were talking two different versions of English. Americans refer to vultures as buzzards, while Brits refer to what we call hawks. He told me there were buzzards (hawks) often along the northern hills and golden eagles sometimes flew over the southern hills I was walking along. As I continued my walk with my long lens in hand, I kept searching the skies and hills for raptors. Soon, I was rewarded with a golden eagle surveying the territory. While I waited for it to fly, it just perched majestically over the scene.
Golden Eagle above Garry Beach
When it was time to leave the island, we took a ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool. The 50 mile wide North Atlantic strait between Lewis and Harris and mainland Scotland is called the Minch. As we were leaving the island, gulls gave us a farewell wave.
Glaucous-winged Gull above the Minch
About ten minutes from where we stayed on Iceland’s south coast is one of the country’s wonders. A tongue of the massive Vatnajökull glacier flows into Jökulsárlón Glacier Bay where icebergs break off and flow on Iceland’s shortest river into the Atlantic. Then waves break the bergs even more, and incoming tides push the broken ice unto the black sand, giving the place its name—Diamond Beach. Unfortunately, for our visit, no ice flowed back to the beach. Nonetheless, the mountains, glacier, bay, and beach were still wondrously beautiful.
Jökulsárlón Bay, Iceland
As we sat at the edge of the water, a school of fish fluttered and jumped in front of us, and soon seals were feeding. Far across the Atlantic, past Greenland, on Cape Cod, Mary Oliver watched seals and wrote a poem of memory.
Winter at Herring Cove
Years ago,
on the bottle-green light
of the cold January sea,
Breaker on Bagh Steinigidh
two seals
suddenly appeared together
in a single uplifting wave—
Seal on Jökulsárlón
each in exactly the same relaxed position—
each, like a large, black comma,
upright and staring;
it was like a painting
done twice
and, twice, tenderly.
Sunset seal
The wave hung, then it broke apart;
its lip was lightning;
its floor was the blow of sand
over which the seals rose and twirled and were gone.
Of all the reasons for gladness,
what could be foremost of this one,
Dawn Jökulsárlón beach
that the mind can seize both the instant and the memory!
Now the seals are no more than the salt of the sea.
If they live, they’re more distant than Greenland.
Over Greenland
But here’s the kingdom we call remembrance
with its thousand iron doors
through which I pass so easily,
Loch Ba golden ice
switching on the old lights as I go—
while the dead wind rises and the old rapture rewinds,
the stiff waters once more begin to kick and flow.
Herring Cove, Mary Oliver from What Do We Know? 2002
Dawn on Diamond Beach, Jökulsárlón, Iceland
The shutter is a fundamental tool of photography. The shutter opens to let the light in. How fast or slow will the shutter close to tell the story? On a busy, active oceanfront, the choices and decisions are many. How can you convey in a single frame the surges of waves at high tide, together with fierce winds, crashing against the high cliffs and weathered boulders?
Uig Bay, Isle of Lewis, Scotland
Scotland, like much of the north Atlantic, was a Viking settlement through most of the 8th through 15th centuries. Two weeks ago, I posted an image of the Reynisdrangar in Iceland which are next to the village of Vik. Vik is the Norse word for bay, and is translated in Gaelic as Uig. In the early 19th century, on a sandy shore near these Uig cliffs, someone found a buried Viking treasure which are today called the Lewis Chessmen. The ivory-carved chess pieces offer incredibly detailed insights into the Viking society. The sea seems to remember the Viking ships that sailed this shore, which in the span of the ages of these rocks, was an instant ago. You might even spot the fulmar flying through the waves.
Uig Bay, Isle of Lewis
The shore of the Outer Hebrides expose some of the oldest rocks on the planet. Lewisian Gneiss is 3 billion years old! The waves that crash against them last a few seconds.
Garry Beach, Isle of Lewis
We believe what our eyes perceive is “the truth.” But we see only a fraction of the light spectrum that other creatures can. What does a peregrine falcon perceive as it dives toward prey at 240 miles an hour, or a sloth as it climbs in the jungle forest? Lichens may live for thousands of years. How might they sense the high tide waves that spray them twice a day?
Isle of Harris
And if a lichen that lives multiples of times longer than we do can perceive waves in some way, how might the rock for which the life of a lichen on it might be for a small fraction of its existence?
When the high tide recedes, it leaves behind patterns in the sand that, at the longest, will exist only until the high tide returns.
Bosta Beach, Isle of Lewis
The sea covered this boulder. An hour or so before, the tide receded and left behind fractals or ferns or tree branches to embrace the rock for a few hours before disappearing. And my camera opened for a fraction of second to capture the light they reflected.
Tolsta Beach, Isle of Lewis
My trip to Scotland is wrapping up. Most of the time was spent on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, a rugged, windswept land far north in the Atlantic. The landscape is dominated by moors, mountains, rugged coasts and bogs. Few trees grow there. Leaving the island, we spent a few days inland in the forested, mountainous area in and around Glencoe.
Mountain sun and shade
Trees were a welcome sight following the stay on the island. Like in the image above, some scenes were filled with sharp, clear light. However, one morning began with a lingering fog.
Beech silhoutte
A small island floated on the loch with cool pastels surrounding the trees.
Later, the sun got above the nearby hills and warm light now enveloped the trees. As a Scottish King says, “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.” Macbeth, Act III, scene 4.
In the afternoon, the sky cleared and the sun slid down through the mountains surrounding a lochan. A line of trees beckoned the line of sunlight to follow them as it disappeared.
The only native pine in Scotland, and the national tree, is the Scots Pine. After the last ice age, the pine covered much of Scotland. But like the prairie in Illinois, humans eliminated most of the Scots Pine until only one percent of the vast forest remained. Legend says a pine would be buried on top of the grave of a Scottish hero. So who knows what may lie beneath this pine.
A Scots Pine
In March 2020 after visiting my daughter who was studying at the University of Edinburgh, I headed out on a photo tour with a Scots photographer I’d known online for about 20 years. After a few days on the Isle of Skye we were to catch a ferry to the Outer Hebrides. But Covid restrictions were quickly getting very restrictive around the world, and we chose to end the trip, saying “See you next year at this time!”
Three years later, I’ve finally made it to the Isle of Lewis and Harris with Alister. We parked by a farm near Shawbost on the eastern coast of Lewis, and headed out on a boggy hike with plenty of sheep nearby. Soon the waves were exploding on the rocks.
Then we perched on the cliffs above Stac a Phris Arch to wait for sunset.
It’s only the Atlantic Ocean between Lewis and Newfoundland, Canada, and we watched the waves through the archway.
The sun got below the clouds and sent golden light.
More storm clouds came across the sun, and it was time to head back on a boggy walk at dusk.
Stac a Phris Arch, Isle of Lewis, Scotland
That’s the name for the trolls off Reynisfjara beach on the southeast coast of Iceland. Visiting there now, so today’s post is one image from yesterday. Enjoy. I’m out to see a glacier.
I wasn’t sure what to post today. Then Margaret Renkl’s column in this morning’s paper took me back to many events, and I wanted to share those with you.
Snow Geese, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico
Renkl is an author and regular columnist at the New York Times writing about experiences in the natural world. Today’s piece was inspired by her visit to Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama to visit Sandhill Cranes that winter there. I’ve now got another place on my list to visit! I have however been to a winter gathering spot for the Sandhills in New Mexico. Closer to home, the cranes rest at Jasper-Pulaski National Wildlife Refuge in Indiana while on migration.
Sandhill Cranes, Jasper-Pulaski National Wildlife Refuge, Indiana
Renkle writes: “Cranes look like prehistoric creatures, and indeed, the majestic sandhills—standing nearly four feet tall and mostly gray, with a startling crimson crown—are among earth’s oldest bird species.”
Sandhills, Jasper-Pulaski NWR
Renkle: “My husband kept laughing at their ungainly landings, but all I could see was the magnificent way they moved in concert— . . . rising and banking, their elegant necks outstretched, their wide wings turned at exactly the same angle, glinting in the sun.”
Some Sandhills winter in Florida and a subspecies stays all year. Some of these are very tame, and I’ve got some close-up images with wide angle lens there many times. A small group was grub hunting in my mother’s lawn many years ago, and I set out a chair to watch them. One wanted to check out my shoes.
Renkl wrote: “The starlings above the highway were a lovely warm-up act for the sandhill cranes. . . But think of those extravagant murmurations of starlings, the way they draw swirling pictures in the air: It’s impossible not to marvel at their beauty.”
Murmuration near LaSalle, Illinois
The image above was used in the first edition of National Geographic’s Backyard Birds of North America. Definitely a highlight to get a phone call from NatGeo to ask if they can use my images! This one didn’t make the second edition, but another of a cardinal did—and the rights check came in the mail. This November we walked by the White House when a small murmuration danced and moved over the south lawn for quite a while.
Renkl notes that at home she’ll be listening for the cranes call as they head north next month, and so will I. She concludes:
Birds don’t exist to teach us anything—they have their own purposes and their own complicated lives—but we are fools if we can’t learn something important for our purposes, too, for our own complicated lives, in their dazzling, life-sustaining cooperation. How sensible it is for a fragile species, having no fangs and no claws, to share resources. How wise to turn to one another for help.
A final image back at Bosque del Apache. Snow geese winter there along with the cranes. Sometime near sunrise huge groups decide to take flight together.
New Mexico dawn
We’ve not had much snow this winter. Wednesday morning, with the first snow of 2023, Chance and I headed out to one of our favorite trails. With no one else on the path, Chance was off leash running and fully exercising his Alaskan Eskimo dog genes. We both stopped when a large group of Canada Geese gaggled through the quiet of the snow.
Salt Creek, Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve
I was listening to a podcast of a meditation on mystic Thomas Merton. An early biography of him is titled The Man in the Sycamore Tree, which itself is a reference to the story of Zacchaeus, a short man, who climbed a Sycamore tree to see Jesus who was walking through Jericho. On this path was a Sycamore tree towering over all the others, which I always forget is there until I come upon it. I’ve photographed it in many seasons, and say hello before heading further down the trail.
* * *
Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.
From It Was Early, Mary Oliver 2009
American Sycamore, Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, DuPage County, Illinois
Quite possibly most people outside of south Florida did not know Marjory Stoneman Douglas before the brutal shooting at the high school named in her honor. Her remarkable life began in 1890 and lasted almost to the 21st century.
Great Egret, Everglades National Park
Her father was the first editor of the small town paper, The Miami Herald. In a long line of authoritarian Florida governors, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward sought to drain the Everglades, while Frank Stoneman opposed him. When Stoneman got elected as a judge, Broward refused to give him the office. Marjory became a society columnist for the paper, but soon was joining and writing campaigns for women’s suffrage and fighting poverty. In 1947 she published The Everglades: River of Grass which immediately sold out and spurred effort to protect the largest subtropical wilderness in the country which prior to the book was simply considered a wasteland.
“There are no other Everglades in the World,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas
The fight to protect the vast ecosystem continues in fits and starts. One of the greatest harms was the construction of the Tamiami Trail from 1913 to 1926 which bisected the Glades from east to west and halted the natural southern flow of water. Just in the last few years, and still unfinished, is a remarkable engineering task to raise the road a few feet on massive bridges that allows the water to flow underneath.
About halfway across the Tamiami Trail you will find a small sign to a pull off for the Clyde Butcher Gallery. It’s in what he calls the Loose Screw Swamp because a friend told him he must’ve had a screw loose to buy land for his home there. Butcher mostly uses a large format camera and black and white film to capture images of the Everglades. In 1990, an image of his was used for the cover of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s 100th birthday party invitation.
Big Cypress National Preserve
“My first baptism in swamp water was in the Big Cypress Swamp, where I experienced a primeval presence I had never felt before. It was as though I was entering a time warp where the beginning and end of time combined in the waters of the swamp. It dawned on me, at that moment, that we humans are part of a greater whole.”
Introduction to “The Everglades” by Clyde Butcher
When Butcher was first starting as a photographer, Florida Institute of Technology purchased 61 of his larger prints. The school is in the town where I was raised, and a few years ago they exhibited the full collection. To stand in front of the massive prints is to share in his primeval presence.
Loop Road, Big Cypress Preserve
Big Cypress National Preserve protects much of the land to the north and west of Everglades National Park. Before visiting Butcher’s gallery I drove the Loop Road through the preserve which goes through open grasslands with dwarf cypress and wetlands with giant bald cypress. When his book The Everglades was published a couple years ago, he had an image called Loop Road 2 of dwarf cypress in the grassland he’d taken in 1998. I had to buy a signed black and white print from the photographer often called today’s Ansel Adams.
Barred Owl, Everglades National Park
That evening I ventured back into Everglades National Park with the promise of clear skies giving an opportunity for star images. After getting my tripod set, a blur flew overhead and then landed nearby. The Barred Owl posed briefly before continuing the hunt. I had no idea a shooting star joined the scene until I got back to look at the image. Many thanks to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and Clyde Butcher for their work to preserve such a place.
Poems can take you into other worlds. At other times, they can take you deep into your own world. Gordon Henry, Jr., a professor at Michigan State University, is an Anishinaabe of the White Earth Nation in Northwest Minnesota. A little further east, my mother grew up. She told me of other Ojibwe who would come to their door, and my grandmother would give them food.
His first published poem Sleeping in the Rain, includes a woman “somewhere past ninety now; . . . She lives in a room. A taken care of world.” And I thought of my mom, when she was past ninety, in her taken care of room. Then in Part V of that poem, I was taken to her mother, another woman who lived past ninety. She cooked on a woodstove. In the next room, as I remember it, was gas stove to heat the home, though I suspect, it too was a woodburning stove when my mom and her brothers and sisters grew up there.
Great Gray Owl, Sax-Zim Bog, Minnesota
. . .
The old woman dreams she is up north, on the reservation. It is autumn. Pine smoke hanging over the tops of houses, leaves sleepwalking in gray wind, skeletal trees scratching ghost gray sky.
Bear Head Lake State Park, Minnesota
She is in the old black shack. At home. Stirring stew in the kitchen. The woodstove snaps in the next room.
A tiny room between the kitchen and the front stairs held the wood box where the chopped wood was stored. A window in the kitchen looked toward the garden, out buildings, and in the distance, the mine my grandfather worked in. I suspect from that window you could hear and watch my grandfather and uncles chopping the wood that heated the house and fed the stove that fed them.
Soudan, Minnesota
Out the window, he lifts the axe. He is young. She watches as it splits a log on the tree stump. He turns away and starts toward the house.
My uncle had a painting made of my grandmother from a photo he had taken. It hangs on the wall above the stairs. Last week, I held my granddaughter and showed her the picture of my grandmother.
Me, Grandma, Mom, Grandpa - below the kitchen window
He is old. He takes out his pipe and presses down tobacco. She goes to the door to meet him. She opens the door. She tries to touch him. He passes through her, like a cold shiver, and walks into a photograph on the wall.
From, Sleeping in the Rain, Gordon Henry, Jr.
You can hear him read the entire poem here: MSU Libraries’ Michigan Writers Series
Yellow Medicine River, Minnesota
Revisiting some images of past travels, and enjoying the light in the mountains. Let’s start with a little visited park in southwest Wyoming. Fossil Butte National Monument was established to protect the abundant fossils that formed in and around this once inland freshwater lake about 50 million years ago. The visitor center displays an extraordinary collection of these fossils. Outside, the high, sagebrush desert is surrounded by distant mountains. Then a beam of light broke through the clouds.
Fossil Butte National Monument, Wyoming
About 400 miles south near the Arizona border is Utah’s Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. Unfortunately, ATVs have free run over the dunes, but careful angles can obscure most of their tracks.
Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Utah
Much further east atop Clingman’s Dome in Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee you can view the Appalachians receding into the distance at dusk.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina and Tennessee
Back west for a view of a meteor slicing through the Milky Way above a moonlit Zion National Park in Utah. Hope 2023 brings you peace and beauty.
Zion National Park, Utah
Some more images of winter in Yellowstone National Park with the ending of Mary Oliver’s White-Eyes. You can enjoy the whole poem here.
We approach the longest night of the year. In my church, we call these weeks before Christmas the season of Advent. The book of Genesis begins in darkness, but soon there is light and God declares creation very good. Jews and Christians and people of many faiths find God revealed in that creation.
West Thumb Geyser Basin and Lake Yellowstone
A millennium later, Paul wrote to the Christian community in Rome that understanding God begins by experiencing that creation.
Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park
Twelve hundred years later Eckhart von Hochheim was born in what is now Germany. He became a professor of theology and philosophy in Paris and Cologne, but his mystic practices and contemplation informed his teachings. Like David and Paul, he found God in that which surrounded him.
Young Bighorn sheep, National Elk Refuge, Jackson, Wyoming
Panther Den is a small wilderness area in Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. The River-to-River trail which extends between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers passes through the wilderness.
River-to-River Trail, Shawnee National Forest, Illinois
The highlight of a visit here is the Panther Den rock formation where you can wander among a maze of sandstone cliffs.
Panther Den Wilderness, Shawnee National Forest
Last week, I posted about Cache River State Natural Area. A ranger there suggested a few trails in nearby Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge which follows along the Cache River as it flows into the Mississippi. We tried Limekiln Springs trail one morning just as it was getting light.
Limekiln Springs Trail, Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge
Chance and I were enjoying the trail when he uncharacteristically began barking fiercely. I followed his eyes up to the camouflaged man hanging in the tree who I otherwise never would’ve seen. I understood his need to bark at such a strange sight, but apologized to the hunter whose pre-dawn climb to stalk deer was spoiled.
We continued along the Limekiln Slough which normally would be under water, but the dry conditions let us explore more among the cypress.
Limekiln Slough, Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge
Some beautiful shelf or bracket fungus decorated a branch that had fallen on the trail.
Bracket fungus
The trail went away from the slough up into the hardwood forest that still had some autumn color. The rising sun shown through leaves as we searched for a different route back to the car that would not disturb the hunter.
Autumn on Limekiln Springs Trail
The southernmost tip of Illinois is like a trip to the bayous of Louisiana.
Section 8 woods
I posted an image in Tuesday’s blog of the Mississippi River, which is not far away, showing the record low level of the water. This area, as you can somewhat see by the dark lines on the tree trunks, is usually below water. But the extremely low water levels allowed me to walk through the area.
There were remnants of water that you needed to avoid getting too close to so you don’t sink into the muck.
Section 8 Woods, Cache River Natural Area
The rich bottomlands contain many of the state champion trees—that is, the largest of the species in the state. Not far from here is the champion bald cypress. These huge trees with their swollen bases are hundreds of years old.
Big Cypress Access trail
A ranger suggested a trail named Marshall Ridge Access that led through some nice color or tall oak trees.
Marshall Ridge Access
The ranger said the trail end circles a wetland and that there might still be some late sunflowers in bloom even in November. She was right.
Marshall Ridge Access, Cache River Natural Area
The area was created by a glacial area overflow of the Ohio River. When that river settled into its current track, this wetland was left behind. Much of the area along the Cache River is protected by the state Cache River State Natural Area and the Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge. Probably the best way to explore is by canoe or boat, but fortunately a few trails provide views into the river area. Some fall color on the cypress and tupelo provide a nice end to this trail.
Lower Cache River Access
Shortly after passing a cemetery in the forest on Halloween, Chance and I pulled into Red Bud campground in the Bell Smith Springs Recreation Area in Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. We hoped daylight would show some autumn colors on the trails.
Bay Creek, Bell Smith Springs
When dawn came, we found most leaves were on the ground, but spots of yellow remained on some trees. We headed down a trail that was the first one Chance and I explored together shortly after we adopted him in 2020. He had great fun exploring the smells under all the leaves. And it seemed X marked the spot.
White trail, Bell Smith Springs
A surprising delight came from under the leaves. Looking where there was some rustling in the leaves was a sight I hadn’t seen growing up in Florida. My friend Ken and I would head out into the woods to go “snake hunting.” Sometimes we’d actually find a snake, but it’d be just as exciting if we’d find a blue-tailed skink
Blue-tailed Skink
A highlight of this trail is a feature called the Devil’s Backbone. Some large hunks of sandstone have fallen off the cliffs into the water.
Autumn color in Shawnee National Forest
Though the water was low, it still provided nice reflections and a nice end for an autumn hike.
Devil’s Backbone, Bell Smith Springs
About an hour north of Milwaukee is one of the country’s largest fresh water marshes. The northern two-thirds is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the southern portion by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
The marsh, of course, is filled with waterbirds and shorebirds such as this Greater Yellow Legs.
And one of the most handsome ducks—the Northern Pintail.
Then there’s the amusing American Coot. These fellows often battle for territory. These two took a break in the fight for possession of the tiny floating log to pose for a picture and show off their marvelous feet.
This fellow is a mystery to me. Green-winged Teals are common larger ducks and Cinnamon Teals are rare smaller ducks. Of course, this time of year, they are not in breeding plumage which would make the ID easy. This tiny guy could be a young Green-Winged Teal, but it’s very late in the year to be this small. Is it a rare Cinnamon?
My favorite birds, Sandhill Cranes were throughout the marsh and some took flight practicing for their trip south very soon.
The star of the visit was seeing one of the rarest birds in the world. Once nearly extinct, the Whooping Crane is up to nearly 80. Most have been captive bred and released but are starting to breed in the wild. I’d seen one years ago a couple hundred yards away among a flock of Sandhills. It was easy to pick out the bright white, much larger bird among the gray-brown Sandhills.
There’s a floating boardwalk on the north end of the marsh, and a short walk out brought a view of this pair less than a hundred feet away. I donate to the International Crane Foundation which is a bit west of here near Baraboo, Wisconsin where the major breeding and releasing effort occurs. It was a marvelous surprise to find this pair in the marsh.
