Recently in Nature Photography Category

I've been sweating through a semester-long class and now that it's over, I feel like I've been let out of the fields and allowed a glass of lemonade.  The blog has taken a backseat to the work, unfortunately. But here I am, ready for summer.

Been buried in a memoir project for two weeks...generating lots of material, but also neglecting the blog. So here's a muskrat near my house last year to keep you company while I work my way out from under my pile of stuff to do.

Last spring I stopped by the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota. Ely is a remote outfitter town on the edge of the even more remote Boundary Waters Wilderness  Area, and the Wolf Center is a sparkling newish facility where they have a number of wolves.  Wolves still live throughout much of Northern Minnesota and Canada, and the center is part of various studies and activities around protecting wolf populations in the wild. Here's a wolf from the Center to keep an eye on my blog while I'm away for a few days.

Now that I've mapped the heck out of my novel-in-progress, I'm settling back to the writing itself. And I'm considering my darkest character, and how to flesh her out.

Winter roars on in the colder climes of the world, and so a reminder of summer is in order. The holidays have been unbelievably hectic here in the Northern Word House, so consider this our belated holiday card, with seasonally inappropriate imagery.  From the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, summer 2008.

I was playing with my photographs today and ran across this one. It's amazing how rich and warm dying leaves feel right before nature slams your head against a block of ice. Minnesota has such extremes that at any given time, you can barely remember the season that came before - it's like another lifetime.

In early October I found my way to Decorah, Iowa, an idyllic little town right on the Mississippi River. The town has a secret tourist spot that isn't well marked, but can be seen from a distance when approaching over the river from Wisconsin - a viewpoint perched on one of the upper Mississippi's many high hills.  Once I crossed into Iowa via an impressive steel bridge I set about finding the spot. Taking a left from the bridge and then an immediate right, I found a sign to a city park. I followed the sign up a steep hill behind the town and sure enough, we emerged on the viewpoint along with a number of other gawkers.

The Mississippi spreads out in marshes, island, and a thousand channels, surely a mystery to navigate but a beauty to behold from high above.

Decorah is extremely small but has a quaint main street and impressive scenery. Might be a nice spot for a writer.

To bide the time while I figure out how to customize this terribly ugly blog software - and that looks to be quite a challenge, with little in the way of useful "for dummies" resources on the net - here's some views of Crex Meadows, a bird sanctuary in Northwestern Wisconsin, near Grantsburg. This is the sanctuary where several Whooping Cranes are being rehabilitated with ultralight planes to guide them on their migration. We didn't see the Whooping Cranes, but we did see thousands of Sandhill Cranes getting ready to migrate south.  

The trees turn gold in this place, a small patch of land never logged near the city. Old sugar maples and hickory and ash. A small lake surrounded by red and orange and yellow and gold. The forest floor, barren, hard, and clean. Look up, and everything is as it should be: nature's greatest palette in every shade of red and gold. Look down, and the forest is dead, nutrients depleted, leaves digested, plant life stripped bare. To a casual observer, the woods look surprisingly neat and clean. But nature is not supposed to be neat and clean, and it is an unwanted janitorial crew that has changed this and millions of acres of forest throughout the United States.

A walk through the woods with a professor and a few other curious souls gave me the full story. Wood-Rill Scientific and Natural Area is a reserve near Orono, Minnesota, deeded to the state by the celebrated Dayton (department stores) family, who used to enjoy it as their backyard. The trees here have always been here, since they were seedlings, and before them were other trees that sprouted, lived, and died without an axe.

The professor told us about the damage the earthworms have done. Earthworms? The gentle, squishy creatures we learned about in school that make the soil fertile and moist? Not so. Earthworms are not native to North America, and in the eastern woods they wreak havoc, stripping the soil of nutrients. Their burrows are everywhere. Little mounds, sometimes clusters of mounds, worms underneath. Spread by fishermen and others who transport nightcrawlers for bait and other uses, this plague threatens even mature forests.

An hour or so into the walk, a crack of thunder split the sky. But light continued to stream in through the gold and orange leaves, and raindrops held until we departed for our cars. Fall colors, even in Minnesota, can be elusive - you'll see patches along the roadsides, but to catch an entire forest in a cathedral of color, you have to get a bit lucky. You need sunlight to see the full effect. Last year we found it at Lake Maria State Park; this year it was Wood-Rill. I wonder where I'll be next year when the color surrounds me.