YOU'RE INVITED...

If you didn't get one of these cards in the mail, or pick one up around town, then I formally gift you with an invitation to my photography exhibit this Friday, in Kalamazoo Michigan.

This Friday is the infamous Art Hop for October in Kalamazoo, and this one proves to be insanely big and busy, with an emphasis on photography. There's a photographic conference going on at WMU this weekend, so photography is the buzz around town.

I'm personally thrilled to see my own work magically shape-shift from a digital image on screen to a real, tangible photograph, hanging on the wall. If you've been following my blog, and come to the show, you can also experience this transformation.

It's also a chance to purchase a framable print, at "just starting out" prices. So invest now, before inflation kicks in.

Nearly all the photographs were taken in and around Kalamazoo, except for two that were taken at Ottawa Marsh in the Allegan State Game Area. So these are our urbanm, animal neighbors, and there's a distinct possibility you my have seen one running, or flying, around town.

ROOKIE HUNTERS

Driving around late summer and early fall, I always see more redtail hawks than usual, with the light chest glaring from a distance on a telephone pole or wire. Now that I know redtail behavior so intimately, I know full well these are the juveniles from this years brood striking out on their own, trying to earn a living. They're learning the ropes when it come to hunting.

As rookies, or novitiates, they don't have hunting down yet. That's why they perch in some of the oddest and most conspicuous spots. The bird above and below stuck out like a sore thumb right off East Michigan Ave, surveying a patch of mowed grass just outside the junk yard and unusually close to traffic. The juvies cluelessness is a photographers blessing because it means extreme approachability. Any adult redtail, in their right mind, will instantly fly if it senses you approaching within 100 yards. They can be a real challenge. Juvies, however, are a real gift.

The trade off to this easy photographic victory is the absence of the trademark, rust colored tail of the mature red-tail, as well as the less mottled chest. There is a graphic clarity to the adult redtail that makes it a more prized visual, much like the adult bald eagle compared to a juvenile. The adult is simply more beautiful.

What amuses me about the juvy red-tail though is how they remind me of myself when I first took up whitetail deer hunting, particularly with bow and arrow. When I first started, being relatively clueless as to deer behavior, movement, eating habits, and just how damn elusive they can be, I would plunk myself down in the middle of the woods, next to what looked like any old game trail, thinking right at dusk a deer would come sauntering along. Or I would sit a tree stand in a small tree in the middle of an open field, sticking out like a window washer on the side of a building, thinking I was invisible. It's amazing how far I've come. The same will be true for any juvy hawk that survives the passage into adulthood.

The driving force though can be hunger, sharpening the hunting skills as hunger zeros in on prey. All the crazy, trial, hunting zones (the ones that initially felt like a jack-pot) just don't bear any fruit, and any hawk (or hunter) with sufficient processing power, figures this out quickly and moves on. The same was true for me. The only difference being the absence of hunger. I would go home and simply open up the fridge. My learning curve was a tad slower than the hawks.

From The Wild to the Walls of Water Street

I'm really excited to announce my exhibition of wildlife photos at Water Street Coffee Joint during the months of October and November.

Some of the photos seen in my blog, as well as many never seen before photos, will finally greet the public in my first exhibition of wildlife photographs. The show opens on the October Art Hop which happens to be Friday, October 1st, coincidentally the opening day of archery season for deer. Clearly my favorite time of year and I'm thrilled to finally share some of my photos with the public.

You'll be hearing more from me about the show as it approaches.

Gray Fox in Town

Good News Downstream

The good news downstream is that the oil hasn't reached our stretch of the River. The guy in white in the canoe was a City of Kalamazoo employee surveying the area Friday for evidence of the spill and fortunately the word out is  - no oil - . Me and a couple friends concluded the same thing from our eye witness observation from the bridge at Michigan Avenue and Kings Highway.

Not a particularly comforting piece of news for the stretch upriver that's been saturated in crude, but from a bigger perspective, to contain the disaster to only that 25 mile stretch is significant. The health of the entire river, and connecting bodies of water--especially Lake Michigan--depends on it. Preserving other parts of the river will most likely help in the eventual recovery of the contaminated stretch. Wildlife and fish have some immediate places to escape to, and, in the long run, can eventually re-colonize the recovered portion of the river.

I'm skeptical that they can stop every ounce of oil, whether sheen or the thicker stuff, from making it's way downstream, but stopping the major flow means a lot to the health of the river, and us. 

It makes me think of the expression, "everybody lives downstream". Indeed, we're just downstream, and thank God they know that upstream. 

Something Smells

I ventured east of Kalamazoo the other night to see the effects of the recent 1 million gallon spill of crude oil into Tallmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. 

My first encounter with significant signs of oil on the river was in Battle Creek, and the first thing you notice is the powerful odor. Your body, instincts and experience tell you it's not a good smell. Fifteen minutes into it I became nauseous. 

It reminded me of the foul stench you release when you kick up muck in a marsh. 

Now imagine (there's some truth to this) that smell, comprised of aging, decaying matter, then compressed, distilled, and intensified by a thousand times, and you have the smell of crude. And here we are, as humans, drilling up this stuff that was sequestered in the earth for millions of years, safely removed from living systems, then trying to move it around in mass quantities so we can use it for so many facets of our lives. At some point it's bound to spring a leak.

Things have run amok.

Go See For Your Self

I visited our contaminated river Thursday evening, and when I arrived at a point further upstream, closer to the source of the spill, the impact of this catastrophe was far more visible.

I was one of many on the 9th St. bridge, just Southeast of downtown Battle Creek, trying to absorb the situation.

And although I think we have the capacity to comprehend something from afar, through pictures and news, it wasn't until I saw firsthand the crude oil, spanning from bank to bank, flowing non-stop downstream, that I began to fully understand the severity of the situation. The first thing that came to mind was, "the river is f - - - ed! It really makes you want to do something.  

When you see the thick, black, tarry stuff clinging to vegetation on the banks and all throughout the floodplain, you realize this is not going to just go away, and cleaning it up in it's entirety is impossible, it dawns on you how damaged the river truly is.

And this follows in the wake of the Kalamazoo River's sordid history with the paper mills and PCB contamination.  After decades of negotiations, community input, legal wranglings, and various other human obstacles, we finally start making progress in the cleanup of PCBs, only to face another historic environmental catastrophe that once again puts us on the map for all the wrong reasons. 

It really hits home when you experience it firsthand. Go see for yourself.

As I was leaving for the night, right around the corner from the bridge was none other than a BP gas station, an uncanny reminder that not only are the spills becoming far to common for comfort, but that we, as consumers and drivers, are the demand in the supply chain of crude that flows through our land and water. 

 
How did I get to the bridge to observe the oil spill? I drove my car and burned some gas. How crude.

If The River Could Talk...

...she would scream.

I visited the Kalamazoo River this evening near Battle Creek. It's not good.

More to come...

Monster Bucks Among Us

Years of scouting, waiting and learning are finally starting to pay off.

All I'm going to say is, this buck is in the city limits. 

Ottawa Marsh

Spending most of my time and energy exploring the urban wild-scapes of Kalamazoo is of course a joy, but it's also a labor of love, a discipline. Restricting myself to the wild spaces of Kalamazoo has it's pros and cons; the pros being that it's conveniently right out my back door (so to speak) and it's also uncharted territory in the wildlife genre, representing the burgeoning phenomena of urban wildlife, endemic throughout America. The cons are that the wild spaces are always miniature compared to bigger preserves or wilderness and often degraded. In fact, sometimes depressing. 

My explorations into Schippers Crossing, particularly the degraded parts, are more like a photo essay, trying to capture the beauties and tragedies of a landscape that we've deemed disposable. These "truths" can make for interesting material, from a photo-journalistic standpoint, but as soon as I put down my camera, the beauty and intrigue can quickly fade away. From the perspective of the naked eye, it's often a depressed and depressing landscape. There's garbage, garbage and more garbage, there are the casualties of clear-cuts, excavations, dumpings, and did I mention garbage. It's not always pretty, at least in the way we seek aesthetic solace from the natural world.

Now don't get me wrong, there are some real gems in the city, with real fine vistas that serve up generous sensations of the wild and solitude. But when I want to un-restrict myself to the city limits, and explore some truly vast and wild landscapes in the area, there is one place in particular that ranks real high on my list of favorites. It might even be the top of the list for Southwest Michigan. I'm talking about Ottawa Marsh, a marsh system branching off the Kalamazoo River in the Allegan State Game Area. 

I recently ventured out into the Marsh on my birthday, as a present to myself. A brand new birthday kayak, allowed me to get some real nice shots both at dawn and dusk.  What's intriguing and beautiful about the Marsh is that it's a bayou. In fact, one map (might have been Google Satellite) even listed it as a bayou. Although it technically fit's the definition, I--like so many others--always envision bayous in the South and the Gulf region.  Low and behold, we have our own.