tedschnell - Tumblr blog

[tedschnell]

"Antifa are cowards. I have no respect for them or their fascist "anti-fascist" ideology. They knock down elderly people on the streets and claim they are right to do so. Never mind that those old folks getting knocked down had no idea why they were being bullied in the first place." Impressive, except for the part about you not respecting them, there's not a single factual part in your statement. Good you're no longer a journalist, you were undoubted awful at it.

You apparently wouldn’t recognize a fact if it bit you in the ass. 

[tedschnell]

Life Lessons and Woodland Trails

 They are well-worn by the many feet that have passed as walkers, runners, and even the hop-skip-and-jumpers have trod these woodland trails and prairie paths.

Even the occasional imprints of a cyclist’s tire or a horse’s hooves can be read in the muddier sections of these pastoral pathways that meander through Burnidge Forest Preserve, which comprises 600 acres of land west of Elgin, Illinois.

It is a popular place for hikers, riders, nature lovers.

Old oak trees, whose sprawling branches reach toward the sky like the arms of faithful worshippers, have shed their leaves. Those oak leaves, along with the assorted fall castoffs from shagbark hickory, black walnut, apple, and dogwood trees, among others, carpet these trails, crunching underfoot as a photographer strolls along, pausing from time to time to look at this branch or that tree or whatever other wonder draws his attention.

The air is cool and crisp on this day, and a little damp from a brief sprinkling of rain in the past hour or so. The skies are overcast but not necessarily gloomy.

Throughout the woodland, the trails wander, sometimes broad, sometimes narrow, often shaded by oaks or hickories, or by thick brush and smaller trees like staghorn sumac. The trails beckon on, and here and there are diversions aplenty that catch the artist’s eye. Some call out from a distance – “Come this way! Make a new trail that you might clearly see me completely.

The photographer pauses.

One image he had recorded earlier had reminded him of a Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Dwelling on that for a moment, he considers many of the trails, some plain, some hidden, that stretch throughout this preserve. Many he knows well – this was his playground as a child, and he has explored many of its secrets, although some, such as a favorite tree here or there, have fallen or otherwise vanished with time.

This forest preserve is like life – with its four seasons, and with paths that offer many opportunities to explore, to wander. But not all paths can be explored at once, and some are more enjoyable, or even more difficult to traverse, often depending on the season. Each has a start, each leads to a final destination. What happens from start to end depends on which turns we take along the way.

My life’s path has taken many twists and turns. I pause to consider that, and wonder whether the season I am in is fall or winter, and how close I am to my final destination.

Either I am in the fall of my life, or I am entering winter, I conclude. I cannot be certain. And while I am indisputably closer than ever to my final destination, my arrival time is something I cannot know.

Shrugging, I step forward once again and leave life’s imponderables behind me as I step off the trail to see what there is out there. Whether fall or winter, I have not arrived yet. There is life to live, pathways to walk, and trails to blaze.

[tedschnell]

Regal in the Shadows

Beneath overcast skies and enduring occasional sprinkles of rain, a great blue heron, Ardea herodias, stands among the large, blackened boulders that line the western shoreline, beneath the shadows of overhanging brush and trees.

The Fox River, swollen by recent rains, is running high as it pours over the Kimball Street Dam in Elgin, Illinois. Water shooting downstream along the western edge of the dam offers a perfect vantage for the herons and egrets hunting fish.

Below the overhanding trees and brush, wading birds gather. The foliage and shadows offer some protection from potential threats such as predators. At this moment, a great blue heron stands regally in the shadows, watching for fish and later moving to a perch atop a boulder to stand guard over its hunting site.

Further downstream, stone riprap lines the shoreline, which also is piled with driftwood and other debris that has washed up there.

Fishing is good right now. That will be important to any of the herons and egrets that will need fat reserves should they migrate south for the winter. Some will stay – winter heron sightings are not unheard of in the Fox Valley.

For now, however, it is fall, and that means it is time to eat as much as possible in preparation for the coming winter. This is may be the birds’ last opportunity to feed well for a while.

Winter is coming, and spring is many months away.

[tedschnell]

Renewed Clarity, Appreciation for Sight

 There are so many things we human beings take for granted, perhaps more so in the United States, which has so much of the world’s wealth and talent.

Those of us of modest means eat like kings compared to many on this planet. Running water and flushing toilets are, for most of us, a matter of daily life. We take driving and things like mass transit as mere conveniences here, where in some parts of the world they are veritable lifelines.

We read (OK, I know it seems to be a dying art form, but we still do), while many do not.

But there are things God gave to us as a matter of our birth that are quite remarkable and unique that we also take as accepted facts in our own little worlds.

Until we lose them.

About 13 years ago, I awoke one morning and began getting ready for work, but for some reason, my eyes were not quite right. While I had been asleep, a blood vessel inside my left eye has burst, filling the vitreous humour, a jellylike fluid that fills the eye, with blood. Blood is opaque, meaning light cannot pass through it. So, in that eye, I found myself blind.

There was a major surgery to cauterize the burst vessel and some other “abnormal” ones with it. The burst vessel and surgery caused some damage to my retina, which is comparable with the digital sensor in a camera.

The recovery from eye surgery is slow, measured in months, years even, not in days or weeks. Still, I was able to continue to work as a newspaper editor and, later, as a website editor, although I adopted a pair of “cheaters,” or reading glasses to bolster my weakened left eye.

My vision improved slowly for several years before a complication developed. A cataract, which normally I might not have noticed until well into my 60s or 70s, began to grow at an accelerated rate that my surgeon said was somehow triggered by the surgery.

My vision began to fade again.

I had a second surgery to remove the cataract, and the results were good. Then, about that time, I developed an autoimmune disorder in which my body began, for some unknown reason, to attack the tissue behind the retina in my right eye, causing swelling that came and went. But it also meant the focal length in my right now underwent periodic changes, rendering my glasses only marginally useful.

I embarked on years of steroid and other drug treatments to bring the disorder under control, but periodically, my vision dwindled to little more than what appeared to be like looking through frosted panes of glass. Those periods did not last long – steroids brought my vision back swiftly. Still, I could not drive when in those circumstances.

As the doctors used medication to stabilize my right eye, however, the vision in my left eye began to blur again. I was laid off before this happened, and in the following years, I stopped going to see the specialists who had been treating me. This was the second layoff I had experienced in three years’ time, and cash was tight.

But before that job ended, even with the vision problems I was having, I was required to shoot photos and video. I have been a shutterbug since I was about 14 or so, but video was new. Still, I tackled both with enthusiasm, despite my failing eyesight and even though it had been quite some time since I’d used a camera regularly.

But I had not lost my knack for taking decent photos, which also served me well as I began shooting video.

Soon, however, my sight problemed prompted me to stop driving at night, and I wondered frequently how long it would be before I might face giving up the minimum wage job I now held delivering car parts. The vision in my right eye also seemed to begin changing again.

In my spare time, however, I found joy in continuing to shoot photos, largely of God’s creation – birds, wildflowers, leaves, landscapes. I also varied my subjects to include architecture – bridges over the Fox River in the area around Elgin, Illinois, my hometown.

I sometimes struggled, because of my vision, to find subjects to photograph. But the camera, after each shoot, served as a new eye for me, and my laptop became the place where I truly could enjoy what I had photographed earlier in the day.

In a sense, the camera served as my eye, and my laptop as my ability to see precisely what I had been photographing. I could see well enough to frame my subject matter – I often could not, however, tell exactly what the details were in that subject matter.

I knew the effects I could capture, for example, by photographing a spring leaf backlit by the sun. I could not always see clearly, however, the shadows other leaves might cast upon the one upon which I had focused.

All of this changed, however, on May 1, with a laser procedure to clear the cataract that had grown back inside my left eye. And, as I was being screened in advance for that procedure, the doctor discovered that the issue that had plagued my right eye had disappeared, and that any fuzziness I had been experiencing in that eye in recent months could be remedied with a new pair of glasses.

The laser procedure on May 1 was noninvasive, was not uncomfortable, and lasted only a few minutes. Even with my eyes dilated, however, I clearly could see more clearly afterword than I had been able to see in more than 13 years.

The past couple of weeks have been an emotional roller coaster of sorts, as I have noticed the vibrancy of colors and the clarity of details I had not been able to see clearly in more than a decade.

I can see stars at night again in Elgin. Traffic lights have far brighter reds, yellows and greens than I remember. And street names I have been largely unable to read while driving now stand out sharply.

To be clear, my vision is not perfect. The retinal damage in my left eye means most vertical lines I see bow out slightly to the left. There are other minor issues as well.

But I have higher hopes for my photography. Until now, I’ve targeted mostly large birds like herons, waterfowl, and egrets, which I can see better even at a distance. Smaller birds, such as many songbirds,  largely have been out of sight for me.

Flowers also represent a new array of possibilities!

Last Sunday, May 7, 2017 while walking through Rutland Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, I grabbed a frame of the flower of a shagbark hickory tree, Carya ovata, a tree whose bloom I had photographed a year earlier – only because I had stumbled upon the bloom as it emerged from a small 2-foot-tall sapling. The one I spotted Sunday was growing approximately 8 feet over my head.

A week earlier, I would not have been able to make out enough details to determine the bloom was a flower, let alone something I might want to photograph.

So my adventure continues, often amid songs praising and thanking God for his mercies and kindness.

My eye troubles may not be over. I am increased risk of several types of complications, but they also may never return again. And the clarity I experience now may give me the confidence I need to drive at night again.

Time will tell.

So I share with you just a few photos. The flower I mentioned is one. There also is a tiny oak leaf, no larger than a fingertip, which I happened to glimpse from perhaps 4 or 5 yards away, as well as one set of tree leaves that seem to glisten, and another set backlit by the sun with shadows I actually intended to capture.

Sight is a precious thing, and God has put a lot of beauty into this wide world.

One more thing I see more clearly than I have in years is faces. The smiling, kind ones are those I like best, although all kinds of faces are so interesting, and so very varied.

So, cherish what you see, while you can see it.

* Over the years, I have received excellent services from Drs. Jon Geiser and Byron Tabbut and healthcare professionals at Wheaton Eye Clinic, and, more recently, from Dr. Brian Heffelfinger of Fox Valley Ophthalmology and the healthcare staff there. God is good and kind, and He uses these people who are very skilled and compassionate.

[tedschnell]

On Top of the World

A great blue heron, Ardea herodias, lands above its nest high above the peat bog that is at the heart of Rutland Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois on Sunday, April 2, 2017.

[tedschnell]

Great Blues: Landing Rite

 On a dreary, slightly windy and overcast day, about 20 great blue herons, Ardea herodias, standing atop most of the 18 or so nests sitting high above a peat bog roughly at the center of Rutland Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

There very well may have been more than the score of herons I could see plainly. As I photographed them, I noticed that in some nests which at first blush had appeared empty, the silhouette of a small, dark dome extended above the upper edge of the twigs and branches that the birds had woven into their nesting platform. The small shadows moved from time to time, a sure sign of a heron sitting low in the nest, perhaps keeping its profile low in the winds to conserve body heat, even as it used it to warm the eggs.

On another nest, a yellow, daggerlike bill clearly extended over the sides. At the broad end of the huge beak, an eye blinked, overshadowed by the heron’s trademark black brow.

Visually, the male and female birds are virtually identical, so it is impossible for me to tell which one is sitting on the nest at any given time. While, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, females generally sit on the nest at night, both genders take turns keeping the eggs warm. That means the adults can take turns leaving the nest to find food.

It’s also worth noting that the great blue herons’ sharp vision also makes them very capable night-time hunters. I imagine this becomes essential once, in the next month or so, the eggs begin to hatch. Like other baby birds, the young herons will be noisy, greedy eaters, squawking loudly and continually in expectation of the pending arrival of a meal whenever their parents leave the nest.

But the young have not hatched yet, so the arrivals of the adult birds returning to their nests often are announced with a deep, throaty, croaking sound as the heron approaches. Landings sometimes are awkward – the birds may miss the nest itself or an adjacent branch, which means they might have to circle around to try again.

Navigating the landing makes the birds appear ungainly. While they sometimes alight directly in the nest, often, they must use the feet on their long, stiltlike legs to grab hold of what often appear to be impossibly thin branches. The adult birds weigh in at only 5 or 6 pounds, which seems much lighter than their stature would indicate. That also explains why these regal birds can land on such delicate-appearing branches high overhead of the woodlands floor.

When my vantagepoint is right, I’ll get a glimpse of what I call “the ritual” – in which one or both birds bob their heads up and down and crane their necks upward as they welcome each other back to the nest.

I was reminded as I read up on the Cornell Lab’s material on the birds that great blue herons are monogamous for the season. But, unlike such birds as the Canada goose or the bald eagle, great blue herons do not mate for life. The herons’ ritual is, in fact, one part of the breeding rite they repeat each spring as they select new mates.

I photographed these birds Sunday, April 2, 2017 at Rutland Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

SOURCE: Cornell Lab of Ornithology

[tedschnell]

Gender Differences Complicate Herons’ Nesting Time

 It sometimes seems to me, as I observe wildlife, that we human beings have not advanced as far as we often like to believe.

That thought crossed my mind on Sunday, March 12, 2017, as I photographed great blue herons, Ardea herodias, which once again are nesting in their rookery at Rutland Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

These largest of North America’s herons are quite remarkable in many ways. With wingspans of 5½ to more than 6½ feet, these wetlands wading birds grow to as much as 4½ feet tall. Their gangly legs and long, snakelike neck make them seem awkward and out of place in the platform-like nests they build high in the treetops over Rutland Forest Preserve.

They are said to mate for life, yet each year, they re-enact a courtship ritual whose complete rites I have yet to witness. But by spring, when the hens are heavy with eggs and ready to nest, the final act in the ritual occurs as the birds return to their rookeries.

As the females prepare their nests for the coming weeks and months, the males bring them offerings of twigs and small branches. For young breeding pairs, these may be used to build a new nest, although established couples may return to the same nest, or one nearby, each year, which they expand. Newer nests in the uppermost branches of trees tend to be smaller platforms. Established nests grow larger over time.

It was the branch-offering ritual I have observed during some of my early spring visits to the rookery over the past three years, but on March 12, the glimpse I got reminded me of a married couple who is feeling the stress of impending parenthood.

As I gazed up with my binoculars, looking for a gap in the trees through which I might photograph the birds, I heard the croaking squawk of a male announcing its return to the nest. In its long, sharp beak, it bore a rather long, cumbersome branch, which it promptly presented to its mate. Apparently, however, the branch did not meet the hen’s criteria.

First, she uttered a dissatisfied squawk, and then I heard what sounded liked the female snapping shut her beak several times. The male moved backward, toward the edge of the nest, and hurriedly took wing. As he took off, his offering flew out of the nest behind him, bouncing off branches as it plummeting an estimated 60 feet or more to the woodland floor.

The vilified male would not return to the nest for at least 20 minutes, and when he did, he bore a smaller branch or twig that the female apparently found more acceptable.

Ah, yes, apparently, it seems, the differences in communication between genders is not the unique province of men and women.

Great blue herons, which bear some feathers that grow continuously in long, stringy decorative plumes on their chests and wings, appear quite majestic in flight and while perched upon their nests or on nearby branches. But their arrivals to and departures from the treetops make them appear quire ungainly. Their long legs particularly give them an awkward appearance so high above the woodlands floor, particularly on windy days when gusts sway the branches – and the nests on which they are built – crazily back and forth.

Decades ago, when herons first caught my interest, I assumed they nested among the reeds and cattails in the wetlands where they hunt for prey that ranges from fish to frogs to smaller turtles and snakes to even small birds and rodents. And, while they are solitary hunters that are equally comfortable and adept at stalking their prey in daylight or at night, they are more social when it comes to nesting. Rookeries, I have learned, can by much larger than the roughly 18 nests in the treetops over Rutland Forest Preserve.

When I returned there a week later – on Sunday, March 19, 2017, I counted eight active nests. During the prior two nesting seasons, however, breeding pairs have not taken occupancy of the nests until as late as April or May, as the earlier broods are beginning to hatch and the raucous, continuous squawking of the young fills the treetops.

Late spring and early summer are when photographing the nests becomes far more difficult, because as the foliage grows, it fills the gaps between branches where one can photograph the birds early in the season. Still, it is possible to photograph the birds, and their young, at that time. It just becomes more difficult and demands greater patience.

That also makes it more rewarding for the photographer, while watching and listening to the young grow from hatchlings into rapidly into spindle-legged replicas of their parents perhaps even imbues the observer with a familial sense of pride.

For me, that also brings back memories of my own early years as a parent, and still causes me to marvel at how quickly those years pass.

Despite my own anthropomorphic descriptions of these birds, which after all are mere animals, I can’t help but wonder if the time passes even more quickly for the herons, which raise their young in a matter of months rather than years.

SOURCE: Cornell Lab of Ornithology

[tedschnell]

Walking on Water

 As it lands among others of its kind, a Canada goose, Branta canadensis, appears to walk on the waters of the Fox River at Walton Islands in Elgin, Illinois on a sunny midwinter Sunday, Jan. 15, 2017.

[tedschnell]

First Snow, 2016-17

Shortly before 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016 as the snow was still falling in the yard of my home in Elgin, Illinois.

[tedschnell]

Seeing God in a Fall Fog

 The fall colors this year were occasionally spectacular but generally muted, the product, I guess, of a dry summer and unusually warm autumn that left expanses of drying mud in place of some ponds, like the large one that greets visitors entering the Coombs Road entrance to Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

The colors were there – I’ll share some in a later post – but you often had to look for them. They just were not as vivid and expansive as they have been in recent years.

The fog on Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016 seemed to accentuate the season’s diminished colors, which largely have faded away already.

Fog is a moody sort of weather pattern that some photographers dislike, but which I find refreshing. Even as it obscures vision, it adds a mystical, magical quality to the landscape, a characteristic that, for me, anyway, is reminiscent of the works of J.RR. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, two of my favorite authors.

I spent most of my time at Burnidge walking around the two ponds that lie off the Big Timber Road entrance to the preserve’s Paul Wolff Campground. I had hoped to see perhaps a solitary heron fishing among the cattails and reeds, since the mud flats that were once a pond at the other entrance appear to draw little interest from wildlife – at least during the day.

But there was no heron, and even other common pond-side birds seemed absent, or called plaintively from hidden roosts in the thick willows or nearby woodlands. There was a smattering of mallards on the pond, but they seemed to avoid me, staying always at a distance on the opposite side as I walked.

So, I focused on the landscape, the often-skeletal remains of plant life that was so verdant scant weeks ago, and I enjoyed my hike as I took it all in, framing and creating my images as I went.

Even in fall, a season of decline, I see God’s fingerprints in his creation. A leaf, even dry and faded, is one of a kind. The skeletal husks of Queen Anne’s lace, wild carrot, Daucus carota, which from a distance all seem so similar, are markedly different if you step close enough to examine individual plants.

The fog hovers heavily over the land, a shroud of sorts for a dying landscape. Soon, winter snows will seal the tombs, creating its own stark beauty in the process.

The pond and the woodlands will enter a largely monochrome phase, where color virtually ceases to exist – except on blue-sky wintry days when the sun does shine. Life will be largely muted until spring, a metaphor for the hope I find in God’s promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Some may scoff at that. That It’s not the first time someone will disagree with me. But over the past 57 years, I have found ample evidence, historically and otherwise, that affirms my faith. One of those evidences is in the nature I photograph. From a tiny clover bloom in the spring to a stand of sawtooth sunflowers in late summer, to the beaver I saw swimming in the pond on this foggy day, they all scream that God is there, the master artist and creator.

And I, with eyes that have faded with age but with a love for that which can be seen, am privileged to document just a small part of his handiwork. I trust that the joy it brings me likewise blesses you.

[tedschnell]

Cold Swim on a Foggy Day

A young beaver swims across the pond near Paul Wolff Campground on a foggy afternoon in Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois on Sunday, Nov. 27, 2016.

[tedschnell]

Night Wings

It's after midnight, Overhead, Canada geese Call out plaintively.

[tedschnell]

Bridges: From Architecture to Abstract Art

 Bridges are fascinating structures, and from time to time, I like to break from the nature photography that I so immensely enjoy to photograph bridges, and then digitally manipulating the images to create abstract art.

The first time I tried this two years ago, I was walking along the Fox River in downtown Elgin, Illinois, while I was photographing the ducks and other waterfowl. It was September 2014. And as I strolled along the riverwalk as it passes under the Chicago Street and Highland Avenue bridges over the Fox River, my eyes were drawn to the concrete arches supporting the bridge, as well as the patterns the arches created.

Over the next week or so, I began playing with those images, cropping them down to what I found to be the most interesting parts, and then copying the cropped photos and using the copy to create mirror images of the original, which I digitally spliced together. I continued to do this until I had a series of images that pleased me, and I posted them in this blog about Sept. 20, 2014 (see Abstracts in Concrete) and again on Oct. 10. 2014 (see From Reality to Abstract).

On Sunday, Oct. 30, 2016, I visited Red Gate Bridge over the Fox River, north of St. Charles, Illinois, with the same kind of idea in mind, as well as with hopes (disappointed) that I might see some herons or egrets hunting along the river there.

The Red Gate Bridge is an interesting structure at the least, with an awesome pedestrian bridge directly under the roadway. That offers some interesting angles for the photographer, whether he/she is searching for nature photos on the river, or trying to capture images of the bridge structure.

But the bridge’s approaches also curve, which adds another dynamic for photographers.

Those dynamics also create interesting features which can be manipulated in the image program I use (a freeware program called GIMP). The images displayed here include the two original bridge photos and the abstracts I constructed using each one.

It’s not nature photography, but it is photographic art, which means it will not appeal to everyone. Still, for me, it is an interesting and entertaining change of pace in my practice of the art of photography.

[tedschnell]

Grace and Age, Willow and Oak

 There’s a reason we use the term willowy to describe a ballerina, for example, whose thin, slight figure moves gracefully with the melody and rhythm of the orchestra.

Willow trees, especially, it seems to me, weeping willows exhibit that same sense of grace and rhythm as the lithe dancer. As their branches sway in the breeze, they also reflect the streams of water flowing downward in a fountain.

This weeping willow stands along the shores of a marsh in a woodland clearing at Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois. I visit this clearing perhaps once a month, admiring the willow almost with a sense of romance.

On Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016, her leaves had not begun to don their fall colors. In a woodland whose rich green hues are rapidly fading to yellows and oranges and browns – and whose leaves already are piling up thickly on the ground – she stands like a lonely sentinel. The swampy area she overlooks is filled with waters covered with a green pond scum that is broken only by fallen tree limbs that jut upward like large, dragon-like creatures which have chosen to bathe in the afternoon sun.

There are other willows along the edge of this marsh, but none are particularly close, and give this tree a sense of isolation from its own kind – a feeling one would not expect in a rich woodland.

I lift my camera to my eye to take its portrait, move to another position and lift my camera to my eye again. Trees are ancient things that have borne witness to much more of life and history than I can ever hope to see. Some, like the ancient oaks that dominate much of the preserve’s woodlands, seem to reflect the weight of the history they have lived through. Their branches and trunks are thick and gnarled and twisted, as if they have endured great hardship over time.

But the graceful willow, like a fountain, simply weeps over what has passed.

I pause for a moment before framing my next image. Trees fascinate me because of the sense of history they represent. The rings in their trunk, for example, bear witness to growth cycles that clearly show the lean years of drought, and the moist years of plenty through which a tree has lived.

Some trees seem to demand that, as a photographer, I not simply photograph them, but that I pause to plan and take their portraits.

This weeping willow is like that. So is this gnarly old oak tree I photographed in the same preserve on Oct. 16, just a week earlier.

I love the oaks, but on this day, the willow strikes a chord in my heart, and I am not entirely clear about why it does so. Perhaps a part of it is the sense of loneliness that comes after a broken relationship. But I think it also reflects mourning, both for that which I have lost, and the tragedies and sorrows I have witnessed over the course of my life.

I suppose that, in a way, the romantic in me relishes the memories, both good and bad. At first blush, that may sound contradictory, but over my lifetime, God has taught me I can trust him completely, including when he says, “that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

What we often forget, however, is that, just as the trees bear witness to far more years than we do, God is eternal. So, we must wait for that “good” knowing that it may not come to pass in our lifetimes.

It’s about perspective. This is what the trees remind me of – that regardless of how I feel at any given moment, the story has not unfolded in its entirety.

Therein, even on my worst days, I find comfort, and joy.

[tedschnell]

Big Birds: Cranes and a Heron

 They are two remarkable and graceful birds that share some similarities even though they differ dramatically, and both make their homes in the Fox River Valley.

I am talking about the sandhill crane, Antigone canadensis, and the great blue heron, Ardea herodias, whose elegance and subtle beauty reminds me always that God is as much an artist as a he is our creator.

Both are roughly the same size, largely prefer wetland areas, and both of which I encountered at the start and the end of the last week within roughly a mile or so of each other.

At first blush, great blues might appear to be the larger of the two birds, with a height of as much as 4½ feet to the sandhill’s 4-foot maximum. Both birds have long beaks, long necks and stilt-like legs, and each has a wingspan of as much as 6½ feet.

But the cranes, which can be a light gray and sometimes a rust color, are stockier, weighing up to 10.8 pounds. Great blues, whose color usually is a slate gray that has a bluish cast under the right light, typically weigh no more than about 5½ pounds.

Nesting habits, diet and even sounds better illustrate the two species’ differences.

I have photographed herons nesting in a rookery at Rutland Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois. Heron rookeries can be quite large, although the Rutland rookery this spring seemed to hold fewer than 30 adult nesting birds. What surprised me when I began photographing that rookery in 2014 was that these wetland predators build their nests as platforms high up in the trees.

Their nests, in fact, resemble smaller, more compact versions of the nests that bald eagles build and, like the herons, reuse from year to year.

Sandhill cranes, on the other hand, prefer to nest on the ground in or near wetlands. They build mounds from nearby plants. I have yet to photograph nesting cranes.

Another difference is in their diet. Herons largely are predators that are well-known for eating fish, crustaceans, frogs and other amphibians, as well as snakes and other small reptiles. But herons have been known to step away from their wetland haunts to hunt for ground squirrels and gophers, for example. There also have been reports of herons eating smaller birds from time to time.

Cranes are omnivores but are best known, perhaps, for eating farmers’ grains and other seeds, plus berries and other plant material, as well as small animals – The Cornell Lab of Ornithology said both vertebrate and invertebrates can be targeted. This can include many of the things herons eat, but the cranes mostly focus on seeds and crane, apparently.

Except for the nesting season, herons tend to be solitary. Cranes apparently travel about in small family groups, but join together in huge flocks to migrate in the spring and fall.

One final difference I will mention is the call each bird makes.

The great blue heron’s call is a throaty croaking or squawking that sometimes includes a honking reminiscent of geese but without the rhythmic cadence.

Sandhill cranes sound more like brass horns sounding off in stuttering, staccato bursts. In the spring and fall, migrating flocks often can be heard en masse, albeit at a distance, as they soar past high overhead.

I photographed the great blue heron in the images above while visiting Jon J. Duerr Forest Preserve, along the western shore of the Fox River, south of South Elgin, Illinois on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016.

The sandhill cranes I came across on Saturday, Oct. 15, 2016 while driving on Courier Avenue toward the Valley View area between South Elgin and St. Charles, Illinois. The group appeared to be picking up and swallowing small stones and gravel, most likely for the gizzards. Lacking teeth, birds have muscular gizzards which they fill with small stones and grit to crush up their food before it gets digested in their stomachs.

SOURCE: Cornell Lab of Ornithology

[tedschnell]

undefined

Faerie Falls

Water flows down the limestone face of a rock formation that is an unnamed waterfall along the Great Western Trail along the Fox River on Sunday, Oct. 9, 2916. This small waterfall is located south of South Elgin, Illinois.

[tedschnell]

Season Changes

  I am not the first writer, nor will I be the last, to notice how the seasons and the transitions between them reflect the segments in the life of a man or woman.

Spring, of course, is youth. The season abounds with new life – from the emergence of the tiny beginnings of wildflowers, grasses, and cattails, to the births of young mammals or the hatching of chicks in nests nestled closely among the brush and shrubs or hung high overhead in the overarching branches of oaks and other trees.

Later in the season, we move into adolescence, then blossom into pre-adults awash in a churning sea of hormones as our bodies grow and mature, leading us into desperately unfamiliar but often exciting new territory.

Come summer, and we have matured into the prime of our lives – a time to step out into the world on our own and to face its challenges, as well as the dangers that threaten to ensnare us.

But at some point in the summer, we begin another change. By late summer, the emergence of new varieties of woodland blooms diminishes dramatically, and the luster of the season’s earlier blooms begins to fade. Leave, on bush or tree, begin to show the ravages of pests, just as we find crow’s feet at the corners of our eyes, or new creases at the edges of our mouths or etched upon our foreheads.

Come fall, those lines and crow’s feet clearly are establishing themselves as wrinkles, although the vain might be inclined to call them the marks of character or wisdom.

And just as snow begins to frost the mountains’ highest elevations, gray begins to make its presence visible on our own peaks.

It is fall, a season when life slows as the tally of years takes its toll upon the living. Now is the time when living things go full-bore into the preparation for the final season, when life in many cases virtually comes to a standstill, or fades altogether.

But fall is not entirely tragic. In fact, for many, those twilight years have a golden glow that, only briefly, perhaps, outshines some of the other seasons.

Look at trees and other vegetation, for example. The green in which they adorn themselves during most of the warm=weather months is not their true color. That green is chlorophyll, which allows plants and some other life to convert the sun’s rays into energy in a process scientists refer to as photosynthesis.

The green of the chlorophyll permeates the plants’ leaves and often the stems, masking the plants’ true colors. But, as summer passes, days grow shorter, nights grow cooler. This signals a change to the plants, and the chlorophyll fades away, revealing each plant’s true colors.

In the Midwest, the sumacs are among the first to turn. I point out sumacs, such as the leaves of those pictured here, because their hues are among the most vibrant, although these images show only the beginnings of their switch to fall. I photographed these on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016, at Burnidge Forest Preserve, west of Elgin, Illinois.

The leaves will briefly reveal their true color – largely red for sumac. Other plants may turn from green to a flat yellow – or to a vibrant gold, like some maples. Still others may become aflame with orange and red hues. Still others simply fade to brown.

In the end, all but the evergreens will shed their leaves as fall yields to the colder weather heralding winter, a time when virtually all is still, as if dead.

Some leaves fall early and quickly. But for a while, many leaves will cling to their branches, reluctant to accept the inevitable separation from that which has sustained them for so long.

I wonder, as my hair grays and my knuckles slowly swell and my joints occasionally ache a little more each passing year, what kind of leaf I will prove to be.

Will I glow with warmth as some leaves do, or will I simply shrivel up and fade to a dull tan or brown? Personally, I am hoping I go the warm glow route.

But leaves also differ from tree to tree and shrub to shrub in another way that can be quite remarkable.

The same conditions that cause leaves to change color in the fall also trigger another action by trees and other plants, which close the spot at which a leaf’s stem attaches to the branch. It is as if the tree turns off the faucet from which flows into the leaf the water and nutrients gathered by the roots.

So as the leaf changes color, it dies. Some leaves fall early – it’s not unusual to see them on woodland floors as early as mid- to late August. Others, as maples seem to do, shed their leaves en masse, throwing down a thick carpet of gold and red onto woodland floors and residential lawns.

But some hold on, unwilling, it seems, to release their grip until winter snows begin to melt away. Some varieties of oak are like that, which can be a nuisance to homeowners with several varieties of oak on their properties, as we had when we were kids. We had an abundance of leaves (and acorns) to rake up and burn in the fall, but come spring, we often had more oak leaves to gather and burn.

Will my fall come early, as I suspect, or will I linger on well past the usual time?

That is a question only God can answer, and I am OK with that. ]šXZe