Category: Wildlife

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Wildlife

Dreaming Black & White

A black and white photograph of a black bird perched on a branch with its beak open as if singing.

When colour film became commercially feasible, it didn’t exactly sweep the photography world off its feet. Part of the reason may have been the cost. Colour film might be commercially feasible, but black and white film was still cheaper. However, when digital photography put an end to the price differential, black and white still retained its appeal.

While there are probably many reasons why people continue to shoot in black and white or to convert their colour images, one possible explanation is that some people dream in black and white. A monochrome palette feels natural to them.

A cursory search with Google suggests there is no definitive answer as to why some people dream in black and white and others dream in colour. For example, this Penn State course blog cites two principal reasons for black and white dreaming: 1) some people just don’t dream that vividly and so recall their dreams as black and white, or 2) people lose the ability to dream in colour as they age. However, a post on Psychreg suggests that most black and white dreamers were exposed to black and white media (and therefore tend to be older because they grew up in the days of black and white TV).

Personally, I recall my dreams in colour, although I do confess that the colours tend to be muted if visual concerns are incidental to the dream. For example, if the dream concerns a conversation or an argument, colour doesn’t really matter and so I don’t remember it. To that end, I share my two most recent dreams, both of which involved conversations.

Dream 1: Maya Ang;1ou

I dreamt of Maya Angelou. Instead of being dead, she was running for governor. I had volunteered to help her out. She needed technical advice on how to keep the haters from inundating her email account and flooding her social media with hate-bots. My big contribution, apart from telling her to use proton mail, was to suggest she use a special spelling of her name and distribute it only to her closest most trusted friends. So we came up with Maya Ang;1ou. I can think of no reason on earth why, at this particular moment, it should occur to me to dream about Maya Ang;1ou.

Dream 2: Bloomsday

Honest to god, on June 16th I dreamt it was Bloomsday. I was riding my bicycle through the streets of Dublin when I came upon a dingy row house with an old tin plaque beside the front door. The plaque commemorated the deeds of the fictional Leopold Bloom: “On this day in 1904, a fictional character in a James Joyce novel did take a shit on this site.” Or words to that effect. I had arrived with a paring knife in hand and meant to pry the plaque from the wall so I could take it home as a souvenir. However, before I could start, a woman opened the door and gave me proper hell in tones only the Irish know how to produce. I looked at her, sheepish, and when she saw that I was harmless, only drunk on Bulmer’s Cider, she softened her tone and, looking from side to side, said she didn’t think it would do any harm for me to steal the sign, and what did she care since it wasn’t her as put it there in the first place.

A black and white photograph of a graffiti-covered double door in Dublin.
A Door In Dublin
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Wildlife

Outside Time

A buck appears on the rise of a hill with a thicket in the background.
A Buck Appears in the Don Valley Brick Works Park, Toronto

Whether I mean it or not, much of what I shoot ends up being a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life. This becomes especially apparent when I revisit images years after the fact. The building has been demolished. The flower has wilted. The subject has grown old or has died. These photographs remind me of the way things were and, depending on my relationship to their subjects, they fill me with feelings of regret or wistfulness or happiness.

But not always.

Every once in a while, I have an encounter that sets me outside time. I share today’s photo not because it’s a wonderful photo (it’s not) but because it reminds me of such an encounter outside time. I was out for an early morning walk along the abandoned rail line above Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works Park when I heard a rustling along a path that tracks alongside the rail line. Looking up the slope to the path, I saw a buck staring down at me. It was an unexpected sight in the middle of a major metropolitan city. I raised my camera and took a few shots as it continued to stare down at me. When I lowered my camera, it held still. We simply stood and stared at one another.

What I take from this encounter is the memory of a feeling, the sensation that this moment had been bracketed. It was almost a mystical feeling. Something had pulled the moment out of the morning, out of the day, out of my existence. I hesitate to call it “my existence” as if I can legitimately apply a possessive pronoun to something as numinous as my presence in the universe.

Perhaps other pronouns are more fitting for this encounter. I’m mindful of Martin Buber’s I/Thou dyad. In that moment, I ceased to see the buck as an “It” and saw it, instead, as “Thou”. Or maybe I have things backward. Maybe I saw the buck as “Thou” and for that reason entered into a state that placed the two of us outside time. I lowered my camera and ceased to concern myself with capturing the buck as an “It” on a memory card.

I’m mindful, too, of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

The wild deer, wandring here & there 
Keeps the Human Soul from Care

The same poem calls us to hold “Eternity in an hour.” Writing more than two centuries ago, Blake recognized how Britain’s nascent industrialization was regimenting time. No less than the coal-fired mills and the newly invented engines, our strictures on the passage of time were doing violence to the natural world. Given our current trajectory, an encounter with a buck in the middle of a large city strikes me as nothing short of a miracle.

Categories
Wildlife

Toronto Zoo Elephants

Close up photograph of an African elephant.
Elephant, Toronto Zoo

When I was a kid, people used to ask me if Bob was my uncle. In high school, in the middle of intense conversations, friends would turn to me and ask what I thought were the truth or consequences of the situation. My friends thought it was funny that I shared my last name with a game show host. Commiserating with my cousin, who grew up in a different town, I learned that his friends told the same stupid jokes. Low hanging fruit, I guess.

Through most of my life, Bob Barker stuck to California, and I stuck to Toronto, and the two of us were happy. As his TV career faded away, the “Bob’s your uncle” jokes faded away, too. But then, in 2011, he showed up in Toronto as the lynch pin of a campaign to move three elephants from the Toronto Zoo to a wildlife refuge in California. All of a sudden, acquaintances started asking me again if Bob was my uncle. Only now, they included their opinions of the retired game show host turned animal rights activist: why can’t you tell him to mind his own business?

I have ambivalent feelings about the decision to haul the elephants by truck across the continent. Yes, the facilities in Toronto were inadequate. It puzzled me that although the Toronto Zoo is on a huge property, they allocated only two acres to an elephant paddock. On the other hand, a wildlife refuge in California isn’t much of a step up. While it protects three elephants from poaching and gives them a little more room to move, it still keeps them in captivity. There really is no good solution to the problem of managing an endangered species except for humans to stop doing the things that endanger it. It seems disingenuous to offer anything as a solution to a problem we caused in the first place.

The elephants departed in October, 2013. Three months earlier I visited the Toronto Zoo to photograph them in Toronto for the last time. As I view it, the greater concern is that, one day, photographs (and skeletons) may be the only evidence we have that we once shared our planet with elephants. A recent census indicates that there are less than 500,000 elephants left on the planet. While we have had some success against poaching, the chief threat against elephants is habitat loss caused by the encroachment of growing human populations. Moving a handful of elephants by truck isn’t going to do much about that.

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Wildlife

Barred Owl on Bob Lake

Barred Owl, Bob Lake, Haliburton, ON

There is no universe in which I make a credible wildlife photographer. I don’t have the gear. I don’t have the requisite knowledge. And maybe most importantly, I don’t have the patience. Even so, every now and again the photography gods favour me, as they did when I visited friends at their cottage on Bob Lake in Ontario’s Haliburton Highlands. This, my friends, is a barred owl (Strix varia).

Looking through my archives, I see I have dozens of photos of this owl, all with blurred twigs transecting the body or obscuring an eye. The owl would perch on a branch for a while, then swoop to a branch on another tree. I followed it all the way down the long lane to the property where we were staying until, at last, it landed on a branch with an unobstructed view from my position. As you can probably tell, the owl knew I was following it. However, it was high enough and far enough from me that it could safely discount my presence as a threat. It sits at the top of its local food chain and, with the exception of photographers, humans leave it pretty much alone.

I shot both these photos using a Canon 70-200 mm lens. With the image above, I used a 2x extender, giving it an effective focal length of 400 mm. Unfortunately, a 2x extender cuts the speed in half which makes it harder to capture anything in motion. That (and my lack of patience) explains why I don’t have any photos of the bird in flight.

Barred Owl, Bob Lake, Haliburton, ON
Categories
Wildlife

Jellyfish on Croy Shore

Jellyfish on a beach south of Dunure, Scotland

Featured above is an image of a jellyfish, one of thousands washed onto a beach in Ayrshire in the southwest of Scotland. Walking along a beach on the western shores of Scotland makes me mindful of how important the Gulf Stream is to life in this part of the world.

Glasgow sits at 55.9 degrees latitude. It is a northern city. By way of comparison, Toronto sits at 43.7 degrees and, despite what people say about Canada, it isn’t a particularly cold place. In fact, it’s further south than a third of the continental US. And it’s further south than almost all of France. Summers are hot and humid; winters are moderated by its position in relation to the Great Lakes.

A few years ago, I sat up all night with friends around an open fire on the outskirts of Glasgow. At three in the morning, I gazed up into the sky and noted that it wasn’t really dark. This was the end of May, three weeks from the summer solstice and I was closer to the Arctic Circle than I was to Toronto’s latitude. For a comparable view in my home province, I’d have to travel up to Fort Severn, the northernmost settlement in Ontario.

Periodically, scientists express concern that maybe the Gulf Stream, aka the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), might shut down as climate change progresses. See this Guardian article for an example. If this happened, it’s impossible to predict what impact that might have on Scotland’s climate. Currently, it’s moderate there: summers are never terribly warm, but winters are never terribly cold either. This is, after all, the land of the kilt. But if all that warm water stopped flowing through the North Atlantic, Scotsmen might have to start wearing something underneath.

Jellyfish on a beach south of Dunure, Scotland