Category: On Nature

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Behold the Hunter!

I took Hobbes outside this morning to do his business (he’s still hobbled up, so we can’t just let him out to do his thing in the backyard, we have to actually leash him up and walk him over to where he can pee), and it was about 6:30am, which this time of year is about an hour before sunrise. I glanced about for cars on the street (there were none), and when I looked up at the southern sky, to the left, my jaw dropped.

Orion the Hunter was there, in all his glory, with Canis Major to his right (or my left, as I was looking at him).

Orion has always been my favorite constellation, for various reasons…the winter stars are always so much shinier, for one thing; for another, Orion isn’t a stretch like some constellations are. Orion really looks like a figure of a man, maybe lifting a sword, hanging in the sky. Orion is big, taking up what seems like a full quarter of the sky as I gaze upon him. Looking at Orion I get a sense of mythology and vastness. And I know that Orion’s form contains even more wonders, like the Orion Nebula which is in his belt…and I know that if you follow the path of that belt to the right of Orion, eventually you run into the Pleiades, which are another of the sky’s great wonders.

Orion’s return to the sky always symbolizes to me the deepening of autumn and the coming of winter, and for me, those things are not unwelcome. Welcome back, Hunter! It’s good to see you.

Camera: Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra; processed in Snapseed.

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“In spider’s web a truth discerning”

Enlargeable version here.

I took this photo last Sunday while walking around the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center in West Seneca, one of this region’s underknown gems. It was a stunning morning, because the fog had not yet lifted and therefore the light was soft and diffuse and almost dreamy in places. And I am starting to wonder if maybe I’m starting, just starting, to get the hang of this photography thing.

More photos from that day here.

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unfolds a plan of her devising,
A thin premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all that journey down through space,
In cool descent and loyal hearted,
She spins a ladder to the place
From where she started.

Thus I, gone forth as spiders do
In spider’s web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken thread to you
For my returning.

–E. B. White

 

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A vicarious adventure

The Wife and I honeymooned around New England: a couple of days on Cape Cod, a couple of days in Boston, and then we road-tripped through New Hampshire and Vermont on our way home. One thing I wish we’d had time for was a drive up to the top of Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.

Thanks to my favorite YouTuber, Post 10, I can at least see what the entirety of that drive is like. I wonder how many motorists every year don’t take sufficient care to cool their brakes on the way back down….

(Put that on fullscreen and watch it in the highest def your connection can manage. It gets more and more eye-popping as you go.)

 

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A metamorphosis, completed

You may remember me writing a few weeks ago about the Monarch butterfly caterpillar we found in the milkweed outside our front door, and its turning up again a few days later as a chrysalis clinging to the siding of our house.

Well, our friend kept hanging there for the better part of three weeks. The chrysalis gradually shifted from bright green and opaque to darker and somewhat translucent, until this past Saturday it looked like this:

If you examine the larger version of that photo, you can see the telltale markings of our butterfly friend’s wings inside the chrysalis.

This past Sunday I noted the chrysalis was still there as I departed for my morning’s photography walk…and when I returned less than three hours later, this is what I found on the side of the house.

(Embiggen)

Our friend stuck around a while–my understanding is that they have to let their wings dry before they can fly–and then I assume they departed for Mexico. I hope they enjoy safe travels; that’s a long trek.

What an exciting thing to see again…and for the first time!

 

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Scenes from Hunter’s Creek Park

Yesterday’s photography location was Hunter’s Creek Park. Officially named “Sergeant Mark A. Rademacher Memorial Park”, the location is more generally referred to by its original, and now informal, name, which comes from the creek that runs through it. Hunter’s Creek Park is one of the most rugged parks in the Erie County Park System, with its most dominant feature being the gorge through which Hunter’s Creek runs. This being the case, the park is a “conservation” park, which means that aside from the two small gravel parking lots at either end (the park roughly runs north-south), there are no facilities at all. No shelters, no rest-rooms, nothing. Just trails, some of which are very popular with mountain bikers. The larger Conservation Trail, which is a part of the even larger Finger Lakes Trail System, partially runs through Hunter’s Creek Park.

Here are a few of the photos I took yesterday. More in this Flickr album.

As soon as you enter the trail you’re enclosed by vegetation that feels like a tunnel. It’s an amazing feeling: there’s no transition at all. One step down the trailhead and BAM, you’re in the wilderness.

The gorge’s walls are loaded with temporary waterfalls like this. I imagine this only runs in spring, with snowmelt, or for a few hours after a heavy summer rain. There are also many gullies for feeder-streams, just all of which are as dry as this, which run into Hunter’s Creek. You have to be careful when hiking here. Steep drops abound.

A study in shadows. I like this shot a lot. I thought about flicking that dead leaf aside, but I chose not to. I’m generally averse to modifying the scene that nature provides for me.
This is new since I was last here, a few years ago! That’s a launch platform for mountain bikers. You can see the steep drop to the right, and at the bottom of that someone made a ramp to jump over a big log, and farther on a smaller ramp for another jump. I actually set up at the bottom, shifting my camera to Shutter Priority mode and dialing up the ISO so I could attempt a biker-in-midair shot if an opportunity presented itself, but no bikers came along in the few minutes I waited. Alas! Maybe next time.

I love how this turned out. Ditto the previous shot. It only took me a few months of owning this camera to learn that it has a Macro Focus setting for close-ups of small objects like this!

This is not a pose! I’m actually taking the preceding shot here. I just decided that, needing a self-portrait here, I should set up my phone to take my picture while I took the intended picture with the main camera. Two birds, one stone, you know the drill!

Even though it’s now September and everyone is mentally filing away Summer 2023 into the memory bank–and in a way they’re right, as “Meteorological Fall” has already begun–the summer isn’t showing signs of giving up just yet, as The 716 is in for a stiff dose of very hot weather this week, and yesterday was pretty warm for hiking purposes. If I wasn’t carrying along my good camera I might well have dipped myself in one of the creek’s deeper pools! I’m better at managing high heat than I used to be, but I’m unlikely to ever really love the heat, and I welcome the return of the cooler temps we enjoyed last week. Fall will come, after all, and I tend to file “Temps above 80 after Labor Day” along with “Snow after St. Patrick’s Day” in my head: even though they happen every year, I find them annoying.

But photography is about the light, after all, and the light is most definitely taking on a more autumnal feel now. It won’t be long before the trees do, as well.

 

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A metamorphosis, in progress

When we moved to WNY way back in 1981, my grandmother visited and noticed that our new backyard had a lot of milkweed in it. She told me that milkweed is a preferred plant for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, and we should go out and see if we could find any. And we did! Quite a few, even. She helped me modify a jar (by punching holes in the lid), and after picking a few milkweed leaves and stalks, we had ourselves a habitat for a caterpillar. In this way she showed me how to nurture a caterpillar all the way to the formation of its chrysalis, and then to monitor the chrysalis for the shifts in color at the end that indicate that a butterfly will soon be emerging. At that point we would open the jar and put it outside so the butterfly could escape when the time came. I never did get to actually witness the moment of emergence, but it was still an amazing bit of participation in the natural world. It was also, I imagine, the kind of participatory lesson that is passed on from generation to generation, not unlike catching fireflies in a jar for a bit or learning to fish. (I never learned to fish, by the way. Not every lesson gets learned by everyone. And no, that’s not a complaint. Fishing looks like a lovely pastime, but it’s not one where I feel like I’ve missed out.)

Why do I bring any of this up? Well, a few years back a milkweed plant managed to seed itself in the mulch bed right outside our front door. We’ve let the milkweed grow each year, and this year it finally happened. This past Saturday we met this individual:

And then our friend disappeared. We wondered where the beastie got to…and then, yesterday when I got home from work, I found the beastie’s new digs. Right on the siding. I wonder why (s)he built there and not in the safety of the milkweed…but I suppose it’s fine.

The wheel turns.

 

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At the Ridge….

Highmark Stadium and the city of Buffalo, looking north from Chestnut Ridge Park

For the first time since Cane died last September, I went hiking at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday.

Chestnut Ridge is an old park whose development by Erie County began back in the late 1920s, and a lot of the park’s original infrastructure, quite a bit of which still stands, was built by work crews of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Chestnut Ridge is a very large park–at more than 1100 acres, it is 300 acres larger than New York City’s Central Park–and it covers a lot of rugged terrain, ranging from forested hills to steep gorges through which streams run. The most famous feature in Chestnut Ridge Park is the Eternal Flame waterfall, which is just that: a waterfall behind which there is a small grotto into which natural gas seeps from underground. This gas is almost always aflame, and if it happens to be out, you can literally reach in behind the water and relight it, if you’ve brought a lighter with you.

Chestnut Ridge was a common destination for Cane and I in our weekly nature walks and hikes, and we covered a great deal of the park’s terrain and trail system over our years of trekking there. My last visit to the Ridge with Cane was last July, I think…which was therefore the last time I was there at all. Shortly after that visit he started limping slightly, and that was the beginning of his end.

Yesterday was my first trip there alone in many years.

Being up there yesterday was many things. It was beautiful, obviously, and being in nature was honestly what the doctor ordered after what’s been a trying few months recently. I kept thinking, though, of the presence I was missing; I’d walk a hundred feet and suddenly realized that I hadn’t had to stop three times for a greyhound to smell this tree, that bush, this patch of dirt, that rock. When you’re used to walking those trails with one hand always holding a leash, it’s a bit strange when that hand is unoccupied. And when I made my way down to the side of the stream at the bottom of one of those gorges, there was no watching as Cane found a deep spot to lay in–you know, to cool off–and to drink.

I won’t be staying away from Chestnut Ridge this long again…but it’s not going to feel the same there again, is it?

Photos:

Stream in Chestnut Ridge, from a bridge. It’s been very dry the last six weeks; usually there’s much more water than this, this time of year.

The trees that I call “the Fallen Sisters”. Again, note how dry the stream is. This time of year that whole streambed is flowing.

Inside an old pump house. The pump is long gone.

It was a good day, a good walk in the woods. There was even time for a touch of whimsy, like plucking a few wildflowers and wearing them in the bib of my overalls. One should always strive for a touch of whimsy. At least, that’s how I see it.

 

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