Tag: Animals

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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.

Categories
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
City Life

Dead Animals in Winter

Dead Raccoon - foot of the Chorley Switchback on the Beltline Trail, Toronto

Winter can be challenging for local fauna, and, for some, it isn’t survivable. As a matter of evolutionary biology, most animals have met the challenge of winter by developing migratory patterns. However, wherever humans have settled, they have disrupted those patterns, either by deliberately feeding animals or by generating enough garbage to sustain scavengers. Now, Covid-19 has disrupted the disruption. Where widespread lockdowns have been imposed, animals dependent upon humans may have to adjust to a sudden scarcity of expected food.

Or maybe nothing. Changes in human behaviour are temporary and short-term. Although difficult to measure, it is unlikely that Covid-related changes in human behaviour will have any lasting effect upon animal behaviour.

As for the photograph above, who’s to say why this raccoon died? Maybe it couldn’t find its usual heap of human generated garbage, or maybe it was diseased, or it was old, or it committed raccoon seppuku.

I think it’s worth noting that, in terms of the information they convey, virtually all photographs are anecdotal. This is a feature intrinsic to the medium. At the same time, perhaps for the first time in human history, we have been forced to engage in what might be described as an epistemological reckoning. While conflicts emerging in the context of Covid-19 present as political or ideological conflicts, if we step back from the fray, we find that they are really conflicts about how we know what we claim to know. We’ve never had to do this before, not as a global collective.

If you peel away the labels, the anti-vaxxers aren’t anti-science; they’re pro-science, but theirs is a science of the Newtonian variety. Cause and effect. Discrete interactions. All behaviours, whether on a cosmological or a subatomic scale, function like billiard balls in the rec’ room. Meanwhile, the WHO, epidemiologists, and public health advocates subscribe to a post-Newtonian science of probability where interactions are evaluated in the aggregate and discrete events are meaningless.

Photography is always a discrete interaction and, at least when deployed as a means to communicate information, has nothing to say about matters in the aggregate. A photograph of a dead raccoon doesn’t tell us anything about raccoons, or winter, or death, or disease.

In point of fact, I didn’t make a photograph of a dead raccoon to convey information in any of the ways we customarily think about information. I made the photograph for its affective force. How does it make you feel? Affect is another way we know what we claim to know, but it tends to get ignored in most of our public conversations.

Dead cat in snow, Lower Don Trail, Toronto