Uluru (Ayer's Rock) - Northern Territories, Australia

Once you have selected your location for your Big Trip, the fun really begins.  I know that I thoroughly enjoy the prep and planning of each and every trip.  Something about the process of planning elevates a simple idea to something of incredible potential.  The trip moves beyond a chance to take some photographs and captures a life of its own.

The Trip becomes opportunities to document a spectacular event, an intricate bit of natural history, a rare species, or a vanishing landscape.  It’s a chance to discover a new world and share it with family, friends, and potentially a much larger audience.  The Trip is a time to create a work of art whether through photography, writing, or a combination of the two.  It is a chance to do something that feels bigger than you.

That’s at least how I feel as I prepare for a trip.  It is an opportunity of a lifetime and something unavailable to someone on a short weekend trip.

So how do we get there and what is different than a weekend visit?  For me, there are three main advantages total immersion, local familiarity, and removal of distractions.

Learning to anticipate moves like this wingstretch by a Dusky Woodswallow (Artamus cyanopterus) can only happen through extended time in the field

Total Immersion

Photography isn’t like riding a bike.  If you put the camera down and pick it up months or years later, it doesn’t come back totally naturally.  Beyond the technical retraining, which can be quick or can take forever, there is the act of seeing.  As photographers, we are always refining how we view the world.  I don’t want to say that we see the world in small rectangular windows, but unconsciously, we are always looking to place elements of a scene into a framed composition.  It’s an unconscious effort, but this practice helps us to refine the way we see and create photographs.

When I am able to totally dedicate myself to photographing a specific subject for weeks on end, I am able to constantly rethink and reconsider how to approach making images.  If it’s an animal, I become familiar with the creature’s behavior and can better anticipate its actions.  If it’s a landscape, I learn to anticipate light and how it moves across the landscape.  I learn what a scene looks like in the morning, midday, evening, under clouds, under sun, and numerous other conditions.  Depending on the length and timing of the trip, I may even be able to experience a change of seasons.

Total immersion allows a photographer to go beyond cursory, superficial photographs, and allows us to witness and capture fleeting moments.  So much of photography is a matter of not only being at the right place at the right time, but being ready for the moment to happen.  The more time spent in the field increases our chances and allows us to anticipate where and when that incredible image can be made.

Thanks to a local tip, I found a great spot to photograph nearly tame Rainbow Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) - New South Wales, Australia

Local Familiarity

Total immersion begins to blend into my second point.   Extended trips are the closest way you are going to be able to get to being a local.  I’ve written about it on numerous occasions, being local and having local knowledge is incredibly advantageous in photography.  Extended trips are your only chance of developing that experience and knowledge yourself.

Local familiarity is a function of two major aspects.  First, the more time in the field, the more familiar you are with the region.  That is obvious, however, the value of my second point can be easy to miss.  The longer you are in an area, the easier it is to become a part of the community of other photographers, researchers, and naturalists that can share with you their knowledge.

I have seen it in almost every place I have ever visited.  Local guides take tourists to one spot and give them a set lecture.  If these clients express a particular interest or it can be established that they aren’t mere tourists then locals will provide additional information or take them to another location.  However, these typically aren’t the places where the guide and his neighbor might go on their own time.  Call me cynical if you wish, but I don’t feel like this is done in malice.  It’s just insulation between local culture and outsiders.

One way to get beyond this insulation is to become part of the community through and extended trip.  In Costa Rica, much of the work we did was on private land that was accessible only through our local contacts and the fact that one of my collaborators had committed to a five year PhD program, and this was going to be his primary field site.  His dedication of time and interest in being part of the community opened doors typically closed to most American tourists even in an open tourist community like Monteverde.

When you live in the back of a car, many modern distractions vanish quite easily - Australia

Removal of Distractions

I know it is cliché to say that we are inundated with way too much media today.  It’s true though.  I don’t have to tell you how easy it is to get distracted by a new website, Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc.  As a photographer, I am not only trying to create new photographs but create a following on this blog through social media and produce quality content for each and every post.  Add to that the need to handle article and magazine submissions, fulfill print orders, contact potential new clients, and much more, many nature photographers struggle to find the time to photograph!

Extended trips can offer a relief from all of that and a chance to truly work creatively.  When I am on a project, email gets checked every couple of days, the blog gets updated occasionally, and the rest of life gets put on hold.  After all, when you are sleeping in the top of a tree in the middle of a forest, it’s a bit difficult to check email or worry about twittering (especially when you don’t have an iPhone or other fancy smartphone).  If I’m backpacking, I’m not carrying a laptop and only editing photos when I return to my car and a hotel or coffee shop.

Extended trips really are a great excuse to get away from everything.  Put up an Out of the Office message on your email saying you won’t have Internet access, shut down your computer, load up your camera bag, and get into the field.   Turn off the cell phone, ignore Twitter, post one last message on Facebook, write some blog posts in advance scheduled to post automatically, and go!

One of the best things you can do to improve your photography and further stimulate your passion is to totally immerse yourself in a long term project.  Plan a Trip.  It might just give you the opportunity to create the photograph of a lifetime.

For the past few weeks I have been working and photographing on an archaeological excavation off the coast of Turkey, diving on a daily basis to 150’ to excavate a 2,000 year old shipwreck.  Due to the depths and the 20 minutes we spend on the bottom, we are forced to spend up to 20 minutes at a decompression stop, breathing pure Oxygen in order to rid our blood of excess nitrogen.  It is here; at this point of limbo we call deco, where I have watched the fish.

There is the normal school that grows and shrinks depending on the day that floats with us here.  Drawn out of curiosity at first, but the school quickly grew over the last few weeks as some divers brought down stale bread.  Now the school can number somewhere between 50 and 100.  Two obvious species make up the mix, but one, the more common, is what really got my attention.

This morning, I am hanging at deco with two other divers.  The resident fish are here, looking for handouts but none of us are feeding.  The fish though are remarkably bold, swimming within a few inches of my face, seemingly peering into my eyes as I stare back.  After a few mesmerizing moments, I look up at my partners, neither of which have any fish around them, they have all congregated around me.

Focusing back on the fish, they appear to be laterally striped with slightly different colors, light yellows and blues, so subtle that from a distance the colors form lines, but up close, the are really a mix of short broken lines that begin and end in a random pattern. It’s like looking at one of those pictures from a Magic Eye book where a mix of gaudy colors turns into a three dimensional image if you sort of defocus and cross your eyes.  If you stare intently on a stripe of color starting at the gills and try to follow it, there is no direct path but your eye gets there, jumping from line to line as one melds into another until all meet together at a single point, the tail.

The tail itself is magical.  When viewed in profile, it looks a bit darker than the rest of the fish, but if the light is right and the fish is swimming away, the tail is rimmed in a blue that rivals the sky.  What possible evolutionary benefit this halo of color can provide, I do not know.  I simply marvel at the beautiful color that suddenly appears as the fish casually swims away from my face.

The two days previously have provided few photo opportunities for myself so I have been assigned cleaning duties.  This particularly ship sank off a remote rocky section of coast in the century before Jesus walked the Earth, in the height of the Roman Empire.  Carrying a massive, marble column, close to two meters in diameter, the ship went down and has rested on the bottom for two millennia.  The marble column was loaded on the ship in drums, large cross sections.  Stack the eight sections on top of each other, add the capital to the top and presto, you have a column.

For the last two millennia, these eight sections have been sitting on the seabed in two rows of four each with the capital sitting on top of the pile.  When excavations began, the massive drums were moved in order to access what lay below, in particular any hull remains.  However, 20 centuries on the ocean floor means that all sorts of marine creatures have made these columns their home.  From worms to algae to hermit crabs and more, it has covered the surface of the drums, slowly breaking down and transforming the marble drums.

When the drums were moved off to the side of the wreck, they were flipped over, thus exposing the bottom surface that up until now had been in direct contact with the sand of the bottom and partially buried.  These semi-pristine surfaces offered the best glimpse into the original size and shape of the drums before marine life began little by little, breaking the marble down into very fine sand.  That was all two and three years ago.  Since then it’s been open season for anything looking for available real estate and these surfaces were rapidly colonized.  I was sent with two plastic scrub brushes in hand to dispatch as much algae and gunk as possible.  We wanted to once again showcase the gleaming white marble in all its glory.

On my first drum scrubbing dive, I approached carefully even though I was assured that I really couldn’t damage an eight ton chunk of marble with a little plastic brush.  After a first few swipes, that became quite obvious and I began scrubbing enthusiastically, a brush in each hand.  Placing my knees somewhere near the center, I began sort of rotating around scrubbing in circular patterns with each hand.  Algae, slime, and gunk were freed from their grip in the marble and liberated into the water column around my face.  As I rotated around the drum doing a sort of underwater break dance, I was totally enveloped by a cloud of green amorphous sludge.  Within seconds, visibility was cut to zero and unknowingly, I approached an edge and proceeded to fall completely off the drum to the seabed a few feet below.

After righting myself and regaining my bearings, I dove back in for another go.  As I continued to spin and scrub, spin and scrub I made massive progress and before long the surface began to transform from a fuzzy green brown to a hard shiny marble though a stain remained from the life that had grown there moments before.

As the current began to pull the cloud off gunk away from me, I noticed the fish.  At first, they were just at the edges of the cloud, but I quickly became aware they were surrounding me, only inches away from my swift brushes, nimbly diving in to grab up anything edible that I liberated into the water column.  Trapezoidal fish with black stripes, whiskered bottom feeders, whispy, thin minnows.  I was simply providing a buffet free of charge and free of effort.  As I worked from drum to drum, I had a diverse school following me like a group of children greeting a stranger in a small village.

Now, as I float horizontally at deco watching the striped fish watch me, I wonder if they recognize me as the scrubber, the large creature decked in black with giant yellow fins.  Is their memory that good?  Can they smell the remaining bits of algae embedded in my wetsuit?  Do these fish at 20 feet even know about the buffet that occurred 130 feet below them the previous day?  I ponder these questions as I float semi motionless staring into the eyes of a fish until my dive partner taps me on the shoulder, signaling our time is up and we must return to the surface, give up the weightlessness and return to our terrestrial existence forever tied to the force of gravity.

* * *

The fish are still there as I return after my afternoon dive.  I now have 20 minutes to ponder the life of a fish, their consciousness, and their relation to my life.  However, these thoughts are quickly pushed aside as concern for my dive partner takes precedence.  As we have ascended, he has struggled to clear his ears.  There are few experiences I have had that rival this pain.

Feeling that your ear will explode, as the air in your sinus cavities begins to expand.  As you slowly rise to the surface, the pain grows exponentially until all you want is for it to be relieved at any cost.  Usually equalization comes bringing a wave of relief.  Occasionally it doesn’t, resulting in excruciating pain and the danger of a rupture or other injury.

As I signal to my partner by pointing at him, my ear, and then giving an OK sign, he thinks for a moment and then responds with a wave of his hand side to side.  Things aren’t good, but they aren’t bad.  So, so.  Not much we can do at this point anyway.  Ascend slower.  Pray.  Keep Trying.  Pinch your nose, blow.  Repeat.  Drop down a few feet and try again.

But now we are at deco and can’t go anywhere, there is nothing to do but wait and hope they eventually clear.  After a few minutes, I return to my fish.  In the afternoon, the light is different.  I can see slightly different colors, different patterns.  The broken lateral lines aren’t broken on all the fish.  In fact, each one is different, like a snowflake or a fingerprint.

The patterns seem to follow a general pattern, but each individual is quite different.  The belly is white, clean.  Starting about a third of the way up the side, the colored lines begin.  Spread out at first, rather broken.  Running from gill to tail, they sporadically cover the side of the fish.  About two thirds of the way up, a thin black line, about even with the eye, runs from the gill to the tail, continuous, unbroken.  Above this, the lines of color become densely packed and by the time you reach the back of the fish, they have simply become a speckling of color, not lines at all.

The dorsal fin runs along the back from above the gills nearly to the tail.  At times it lays flat and others it raises up to revealing sharp pins with webbing in between.  The top is dark, nearly black, while the webbing is a more translucent film offering a slight hint of speckling.  So faint I can’t tell if it exists or my eyes are playing tricks on me.

A few days later I leave the bottom as the alarm sounds ending my dive.  At Deco, a few fish circle, awaiting our arrival. However, the numbers have decreased dramatically.  Only a few days ago, the school was three or four times the size.  The school has consistently grown, like teenagers who have discovered a party with beer and then calling everyone they know.  Yet, when everyone arrives there is only a single case of beer and the crowd disperses in a sullen mood.  It is like this today, a few fish show only to find that we have no bread for them and reluctantly return to the depths.

As the fish disperse, I realize that they don’t recognize me as the buffet provider from a few days earlier.  I am seen simply as a large creature that occasionally dispatches free food 20 feet below the surface.  The memory exists, divers provide food, but recognition of the individuals that provide the bread seems to be more than the fish brain can store.  A part of me wishes that I am special enough to be held in regard by the icthyeous brain but I also realize, all I need to do is stick a piece of stale bread in my pocket.

This essay was written last summer, 2009, during my time working on the Kizilburun ship excavation off the coast of Turkey.  I was inspired to record my own experiences after reading The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs.  I apologize for the length, but I wanted to post the essay in its entirety.  I’d love to continue to post essays like this describing my experiences in the field, but would love to hear your opinions.  Do you want more?

For more information about the excavation, please take a look at the underwater panoramas.

Orange-bellied Parrot - With only a few hundred of these parrots left in the wild, how does their presence or absence effect the conservation of biodiversity.

Biodiversity is a major buzzword these days, but my guess is that many people don’t grasp all that is rolled into that single word.  There are multiple measures of biodiversity and yet there is really only one commonly understood definition, the variety of life in any given area or ecosystem.

Yet for scientists, biodiversity can be understood on many levels.  For instance, let’s imagine three forests.  Each forest has 5000 individual birds flying around.  Forest #1 has 100 species of birds, each represented by 50 individuals; Forest #2 has 100 species of birds, 99 of which are represented by 2 individuals and the 100^th species represented by 4,802 individuals.  Finally Forest #3 has 1 species with 5000 individuals.

If we are talking strictly about the variety of life, as stated above, then wouldn’t Forests #1 and #2 have the same biodiversity?  If we are talking abundance, well they all have 5,000 individuals.  So what exactly is biodiversity and why is it so important to conservation?  How can we distinguish between these different forests in a more meaningful way?  Let’s dive in and get our hands dirty.

Let’s look at two major components of biodiversity, species richness and species evenness.  Species richness looks solely at the number of species in a given area.  Using our above examples, Forests #1 and #2 both have the same species richness; they each have 100 species.  However, when you look at the distribution of each species, or the species evenness, you get a very different picture.

Picture species evenness as the chance of seeing one species over another.  If you walked into Forest #1, your chances of seeing any given species are equal.  However, in Forest #2, nearly every bird you saw would be a single species and you might stumble upon a couple of the rarer species.   Of course, Forest #3 is a monotypic forest with only one species.  This means it has a very low species richness but it’s hard to talk about the evenness since there is only a single species.

The third factor that needs to be considered when talking about the conservation of biodiversity is endemism.  If a species is endemic to an area, it can only be found in that specific area and nowhere else.  However, endemism works on different scales.  For example, you can say that the Florida Scrub Jay is endemic to Florida, the Carolina Chickadee is endemic to the southeast United States, or the hummingbird family is endemic to the New World.  These unique species alter our impressions of biodiversity and have major conservation implications.

In conservation, biodiversity is a major buzzword but why do we care about it so much?  The traditional argument focuses on ecosystem services.  We must conserve biodiversity in order to prevent the loss of species which might offer the keys to scientific breakthroughs like the cure for cancer or other diseases, inspiration for new products (think what the rubber tree did to the car and other industries), and so much more.

This is a good economic argument but what about the more philosophical argument.  What about preservation for the sake of species?  Does any given species have an intrinsic value?  Are we better off simply because we know a species is living out there somewhere?  I know that I am not alone in saying yes, we as individuals and as a species, are better off.

It is a mental thing, a soul thing.  Even if I may never be able to visit the tiny Inaccessible Island in the South Atlantic to see the Inaccessible Island Flightless Rail, I feel good knowing simply that it is out there.  I like knowing that the world’s smallest flightless bird is going about its daily business on a tiny 5.5 square mile island far from anywhere. Is that bird going to give us the cure for cancer?  Highly unlikely.  Is it every going to offer some sort of opportunity to improve the world economy?  Nope.  Will it’s existence every impact anyone outside of a few crazy birders trying to see every bird in the world?  I doubt it.  Does its existence matter?  Why wouldn’t it?

So let’s look back at how endemism, combined with species richness and species evenness, impacts biodiversity and conservation.  If you ran a conservation organization and your budget allowed you to preserve just one of our three example forests, how would you pick?  You’d probably pick Forest #1 with its high species richness and great species evenness.  But what if in Forest #2, out of those 99 species with 2 individuals, several were endemic to that single patch.  How would that impact your decision?  Ok, 2 individuals isn’t going to be able to produce a viable genetic population even if you could ensure their survival and breeding, but what if all the populations increased by a couple orders of magnitude and you were looking at 5 rare endemic species each with a population around 200.  Then which forest do you choose?  Can you choose Forest #1, knowing you are condemning those few endemics in Forest #2 to probably extinction?

This illustrates a very simple example of the ongoing decisions that every conservation organization must address.  How can they make the largest impact with a limited amount of funding and resources?  How do you preserve the greatest biodiversity?  What matters more? Species richness? Species evenness? Endemism?  When there is potential for a species’s, or even an ecosystem’s, existence to hang in the balance, how do you make that decision?

I don’t envy the decisions that every organization must make, but we can help.  Make your voice heard.  Support whatever conservation efforts you believe are working on a critical issue.  Is it the conservation of Inaccessible Island, the Amazonian rainforest, or a green space in your neighborhood?  Vote with your support and help to support conservation wherever you feel passionate.

Plumed and Wandering Whistling Ducks - Parry's Lagoon, Western Australia, Australia

Yesterday I spent the day in the company of 4 other excellent birders as we worked our way around Lake Cayuga, into the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, and back down the far side of the lake.  Over the course of the day, we tallied up 24 species of the Anatidae family that includes Swans, Geese, and Ducks.  Other birders were also covering the same areas we were and at least 4 more species were seen that we missed.  Two of these species were represented by 3 individuals among a flock of over 8,000 Canada and Snow Geese.  These two species are essentially smaller versions of the Canada Goose (Cackling Goose) and the Snow Goose (Ross’s Goose).

So why did we not spend the time picking through these huge flocks for these few unusual individuals?  What does that mean about my group’s interest in the species concept compared the other groups?  Does any of this matter to the birds themselves?  Ultimately, why do we care about classifying these birds so specifically?

Why didn’t my group spend the time to find the few oddballs in the flock?  I’m not quite sure.  We did spend some time earlier searching through a smaller flock of Canadas looking for a Cackling.  We spent a good portion of the day picking out ducks at a huge distance, distinguishing the species in low abundance out of thousands of others.  I can’t tell you exactly why we didn’t find the Cackling and Ross’s Geese.  We thought about it.  In fact, I made a joke about looking for a Ross’s Goose.  It was a joke at the time and then I got home and saw that people actually had done exactly that.

For me, it has a lot to do with the experience of seeing a species.  Before I was a photographer, picking birds out of a flock with a scope at 500 yards or more would have been a rewarding challenge.  Today though I want to be closer.  Ideally, I want to be within 20 yards.  If it’s a songbird, I want to be much closer.  Years ago I was content with counting species.  Today I want to observe birds and behavior, preferably with both eyes, not just one through a high powered scope.  For me, both the Ross’s and Cackling Geese would have been new birds.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d be happy to have them on my life list, but I’d much rather add them when I can really see them up close and personal.  Then I could study the differences and behavior.  If I can get a photograph, great, if not at least I am more confident on the identification.

I can’t speak to the motivations of the other birders in my group or the other birders that did pick out those two odd geese species.   I can guess though that by taking the time and painstakingly identifying every individual in the flock, the other birders were more interested in documenting species numbers and distribution.  This motivation can come from a desire to contribute to academic research through citizen science project like eBird or even to further their personal records and understanding.  Maybe it comes from a desire to see two more species on that given day.  I don’t know, but I do know that birding and the experience of seeing and identifying a bird is very personal. It is different for every person and probably different every single day.

So does any of this mean anything for the birds themselves?  Overall, probably not.  The only way I see taxonomy affecting a specific bird is through one of two ways.  First, birds could be affected negatively if a specific subspecies was split into a full species and numerous birders flocked to a specific location to see the new species and ended up disturbing the population.  Seems theoretically possible but on the whole, not all that realistic for a major impact.

The second option can be much more significant and benefit a bird and that is conservation.  Splitting a single species into two species means that the overall population of that species gets cut significantly since some portion of the birds is now considered a separate species.  Since population size has a lot to do with conservation efforts, this could raise the profile of one or both of the new species, leading to increased conservation efforts.  The Gunnison Sage Grouse is a good real life example where this has occurred.  This could also go the opposite way with a separate species being reclassified as a subspecies, however when this happens the conservation efforts seem to continue despite the reclassification.  I’ve personally seen this with both the Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow and Attwater’s Prairie Chicken.

This all leads to a single ultimate question.  Why do we care if a specific population of birds (species or not) exists or doesn’t?  Why do we value biodiversity and why is it so important in our lives?  Does a species have some intrinsic value?  Tune in next week for a discussion of biodiversity and its importance in our lives.

Once considered a distinct species (Melithreptus laetior), the Golden-backed Honeyeater is now lumped with the Black-chinned Honeyeater (Melithreptus gularis)

Over the past few weeks I have been able to add several new species to my life list mostly because I have begun to pay extremely close attention to the identification of some difficult birds.  Since some of the species I have been looking for are so incredibly difficult to identify, I have begun to wonder about the definition of a species and why do we have this compulsion to classify animals.

Modern taxonomy started with Linnaeus in the 18^th century and today we continue to expand on his systematic classification of plants and animals.  Taxonomy is the process of classifying a species within the context of other related species.  Closely related species for example are placed in the same genera while closely related genera are placed in the same family.  On and on it goes up through orders, classes, phyla, and eventually kingdoms.

Could this desire to classify and place each animal in a defined category be motivated by our attempt to seek order out of chaos?   This classification does provide evolutionary context for a species, which can valuable for scientists trying to study any particular species.  First, let’s back up a few steps to the very beginning…

What is a species?

I think the most basic definition of a species is a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring.  Simple enough, right?  If they can interbreed and their offspring can breed successfully, then bingo, we’ve got a species.  It’s nice and simple at first glance, but let’s dig a little deeper.

The Endangered Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow is now classified as a subspecies of the Seaside Sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus mirabilis).

First, a group of organisms must be able to interbreed.  Seems simple enough.  Obviously some animals just aren’t compatible.  After all, a warbler and an eagle aren’t going to be breeding anytime soon.  Furthermore, throughout the animal and plant world, we find an almost infinite ways that individuals distinguish between individuals of a closely related species and their own.  One way to ensure that breeding only happens with individuals of your own species is to separate breeding by time, space, or behavior.  For example, if one species of plant blooms and releases its pollen in March, another closely related species that attracts the same pollinators would benefit from blooming in April.  In fact, both plants would benefit, as the pollinators wouldn’t go from a bloom on species A to a bloom on species B.  This separation in time ensures that these two species don’t interbreed, but does it mean that they can’t interbreed? These are two very different ideas.

What happens if a scientist comes to the forest in March and collects pollen from species A and stores it until species B blooms in April.  She then hand pollinates species B with species A pollen.  A few months later you have fruit on species B and if you germinate those seeds they grow to be full grown hybrids.  What does this mean?  When will this plant bloom? March? April? Somewhere in between?  How does this impact our definition of a species?  The species don’t breed in nature but they are capable of interbreeding under artificial conditions.  Does this mean they are still separate species or not?  How do we handle the idea of artificial interference?

Let’s look at the second half of our earlier definition; the offspring of a species must be viable.  This second condition means that some species will be capable of breeding but that their offspring will be sterile.  The most common example is a mule, a hybrid between a horse and a donkey that takes on characteristics of both but is sterile.  If you want more mules, you have to breed more horses and donkeys.  That is a clear cut example of how this works, but what if we have species that do hybridize and produce viable hybrids?

The Mottled Duck (Anas fulvigula) is rapidly declining in Florida and hybridization with the ubiquitous Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos)

The obvious example to a birder in eastern North America is the Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warblers.  These two closely related yet very distinctive wood warblers hybridize regularly where there ranges overlap.  Not only do these birds produce viable offspring, at one time these offspring were thought to be a distinct species, the Brewster’s Warbler.  Today, we know that both Brewster’s and Lawrence’s Warblers are in fact hybrids of the Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warblers.  But if our rule was that a species couldn’t produce viable offspring with another species then how do we consider these warblers?  Why don’t we simply classify them as a single species with two very different subspecies or color morphs with a zone of overlap?

The reasoning stems from the frequency of hybridization.  If these birds were indeed the same species, interbreeding should occur rather frequently but in fact this hybridization occurs far less than would be predicted by chance encounters and matings.   Further evidence comes from mitochondrial DNA comparisons.  And here, we enter a world that Linneaus could never have fathomed.

Using DNA or mitochondrial DNA comparisons means that we can classify animals based solely on their genetic code, even when morphological differences aren’t readily visible.  Recent work in birds has resulted in the splitting of numerous species and I believe this trend will continue.  I must admit that when I read papers describing the differences in base pairs and other factors involved in genetic comparisons, I am a bit lost.  My background is in ecology and natural history, not genetics so I have a lot of catch up to get current with this research.

The Kalkadoon Grasswren (Amytornis ballarae) was recently split from the more widespread Dusky Grasswren (Amytornis textilis).

However, these genetic comparisons bring to mind a very big question… Why?  Why do we care that two populations are two specific species even though they are indistinguishable in the field?  What impact could this have on us anyway?  Even more baffling, what impact could this have on these two populations if we call them a single or a separate species?  I will address these questions and a few more in next week’s Sunday Essay.  In the meantime, leave your thoughts on why we, as scientists, have a compulsion to classify species even if it requires extremely advanced techniques and machines to distinguish one from the other.

Debris field after Hurricane Ike - Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge, Anahuac, Texas

With the prospect of a late season hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast later this week, I wanted to post some images from a project I worked on this time last year.  In October 2008, Hurricane Ike slammed into the Texas coast, devastating coastal communities near Houston from Galveston to Sabine Pass and produced significant damage inland as well. The media was inundated with photographs and video of the damage to the coastal towns, but there was very little focus on the natural areas of the coast.  That is where I found my niche…

The Texas coast, just north and south of Houston, includes some of the top hotspots to witness spring songbird migration in the country.  What makes areas such as High Island, Sabine Pass, and Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge so spectacular is the fact that when songbirds are migrating north across the Gulf of Mexico these areas are the first line of trees that birds see when arriving on the coast.  After an extremely long flight, these trees provide both refuge and food sources for scores of warblers, tanagers, and thrushes.

All of these areas share the same topography, known as a salt dome.  This coastal region consists of large expanses of marshes.  These salt domes are small areas where the land is higher than the surrounding marsh, allowing trees to take root and small forest patches to grow.  From a bird’s perspective, these islands show up as islands of dark green in a landscape of light green and brown marsh and if the weather conditions are just right, you can see well over 20 species of warblers in a good spring day.

However, these areas are rather sensitive, particularly to high storm surge like that associated with Hurricane Ike.  Hurricane Ike delivered rising water well over 15 feet high in some areas completely inundating the marsh, flooding many of the salt domes, and spreading massive debris fields across the region.

I set out to create a series of panoramic images of the impact of the storm on these natural areas while most mainstream media focused on the cities and human tragedy.  In November 2008, when I was photographing these areas, the real damage was unknown.  Unfortunately, now that I have moved out of state, I am unable to return to document what it looks like a year later.

These panoramas clearly show the destruction and debris fields, but what they don’t show is the long term impact of saltwater inundation.  What happens when a freshwater marsh is inundated by over ten feet of saltwater?  What happens to soil when trees are blown down and everything is flooded by saltwater?  Can plants sprout in an environment with that much salt?  What happens to all the chemicals, gasoline, and pollution washed out of people homes and garages during the flooded?  All of these questions are hard to answer on the short term and it will take several growing seasons before these regions can really expect a full recovery.

The impact of Hurricane Ike on the families that live in the region is hard to fathom as so many families lost everything, including their homes.  However, the reality for natural areas is a bit different.  Yes, the habitat looks different than it did before the storm, but these forests are in an area frequently impacted by hurricanes.  A storm hits this region every few years and the habitat has adapted to this.  It will respond quickly and within several years, new trees will begin to replace those that fell.  The salt will eventually dissipate and the marsh will recover.  It won’t take days or weeks but in years, decades or even centuries, this region will recover, be hit by more storms, and recover once again.

Nature functions on a different timeline than us.  We think in days, hours, minutes, and seconds.  A year seems like an eternity for many of us.  However, change in nature can occur in minutes (fire/earthquake), hours (cyclones/hurricanes), years (pollution), or eons (geological shifts).  These different scales of time are one of the biggest challenges of research and conservation.  We struggle to implement policy for the long term but it is a necessity if we want to impact climate change, habitat loss, species extinction, and many other environmental issues.

“Former President Bush near death after exploring unknown Brazilian river”

No?  Sounds beyond absurd right?  Well, in 1914, it would have described Former President Theodore Roosevelt nearly perfectly.

For the past few weeks I’ve been listening to the audio version of the book, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard.  The book describes the journey of Roosevelt in 1913 down the totally unknown and unmapped River of Doubt, now the Rio Roosevelt, in South America The book is a fascinating portrayal of a former President who lived life large and advocated a life of hard work, particularly in the outdoors.

After losing the 1912 presidential election as a third party candidate, Roosevelt was shunned by his former friends and colleagues.  By running as a third party candidate, he divided the support of his own party, thereby guaranteeing victory for Woodrow Wilson.  Roosevelt, as during previous periods of difficulty in his life, sought a period of adventure and exploration and found it in an expedition to the Amazon on the heels of a South American speaking tour.  His original plans called for a sightseeing tour of several of the major tributaries of the Amazon River, a journey that, while not mundane by any means, didn’t provide the adventure that the former President sought.

Upon his arrival in Brazil, on an offhand suggestion by one of his hosts, Roosevelt chose to change his plans and explore the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt.  This Amazon tributary had been discovered during an expedition to lay telegraph cable throughout the Amazon basin, but that expedition did not have the time or resources to explore and map the region at that time.  Roosevelt, accompanied by the head of Brazil’s Telegraph Communications, Colonel Rondon, the man who first discovered the river, spent the following months traveling down the river.

I won’t ruin the book, as it is an excellent read, but I’ll just say that things didn’t go too well, many people died, and Roosevelt and his son Kermit both emerged from the River near death.  Millard spins a suspenseful, page-turner (or non-stop listener!) complete with vivid descriptions, insight into the personal relationships of the expedition, and tidbits of Amazonian natural history.

This book highlighted not only Roosevelt’s passion for “the strenuous life” but his fascination with natural history and his contribution to science both through this expedition as well as previous trips.  This expedition, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, was a journey of exploration but also of collecting.  Ornithologist George Cherrie joined the expedition and despite the hardships of travel, returned with about 3,000 skins of birds and other animals for the museums collections.  Roosevelt contributed numerous specimens from his home at Oyster Bay as well as his previous African safari.

Cherrie recorded in his journal that Roosevelt was always asking about the life histories and habits of the birds and animals they encountered during their journey.  Roosevelt wanted to know everything: what birds ate, where they nested, how they attracted mates, what were their predators, etc.  Roosevelt wanted to know the story of each and every animal that they saw.

It is this curiosity, paired with careful observation, that creates a naturalist.  As wildlife photographers, we have to dig deep into this curiosity and wonder to take our photographs beyond simply pretty postcard to dynamic images that tell a story.  It’s up to us to observe the natural world carefully and find that moment, or series of moments, that tell a story about our subjects.  Through a better understanding of natural history, an intense curiosity, and careful observation we can improve our photography and the images we create.

What are you thinking when you are in the field?  How do you approach your subjects?  Leave your comments below and check out the link to The River of Doubt.

The River of Doubt

Tricolor Heron Nest - Alley North Rookery, Everglades, Florida

As you may know, the Florida Everglades are near and dear to me as I spent nearly two years dedicated to my project, Everglades Imagery: Intimate Detail of a Vast Landscape.  I have not spent any significant time in the region for quite a few years so I have planned to spend some time there in January.  As I have been planning this trip, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the experiences I had when I lived in the National Park during the first half of 2005.  One of those experiences was so unique that I thought I’d share it with you today.

On the morning of March 30, 2005, I found myself on an airboat headed out several miles into the open sawgrass prairie of Water Conservation Area 3, an area north of Everglades National Park. I was in the company of two students and their research advisor and we were trailing another couple airboats also loaded with researchers.  Our destination?  The Alley North Rookery.

First off, you may ask, what exactly is a rookery?  It is at the very simplest, a breeding colony of birds, though not all bird colonies receive this terminology.  The term originated to describe a colony of Rooks, a crow that lives across Europe and Asia.  Over the years, the term has come to describe seabird nesting colonies and, as in this case, colonies of wading birds such as herons and egrets.

Alley North is the largest rookery in the Everglades system by a long shot. In 2002, this one rookery contained more nests than the entire Everglades system had twenty years earlier. Most of the wading birds species that nest in the Everglades can be found in Alley North. Among the thousands of nests you can find hundreds of Great and Snowy Egrets, Tricolored, Little Blue, and Great Blue Herons as well as Black-crowned Night Herons, Glossy Ibis, Anhingas, and a handful of Roseate Spoonbills. However, of all the birds found in this rookery, White Ibis dominate. In 2002, there were just over 19,000 nests total and an estimated 16,000 of those nests were built by White Ibis.

White Ibis - Alley North Rookery, Everglades, Florida

My first ever experience in a rookery was as a child when my dad and I were fishing off the west coast of Florida and discovered a tiny mangrove island with a dozen or so Green Heron nests.  We promptly dubbed the island “Green Heron Island” and returned numerous times over the years.  We’ve changed the name to “Pelican Island” to reflect the change in breeding birds, but that is one of those seminal experiences of my early years birding.  However, that was only a couple dozen nests, I simply could not fathom visiting a colony that numbered nearly 20,000 nests.

After about a half hour of traveling through a maze of airboat trails, we arrived at a large tree island, a high point in the marsh where willows and other trees can grow. As we pulled up, hundreds of adult White Ibis and herons took flight and circled overhead and then settled back down once the airboat propellers had been shut off.  The tree island was dominated by small willow trees barely reaching ten feet in height surrounded by a marsh made up of primarily cattails with a few patches of sawgrass. The cattails reached about seven feet above the water making it extremely easy to get lost since there was no way to find a point of reference beyond the cattails that were right in front of your face. A few inches of water flooded the marsh with deeper pockets up to a foot or more. Below the water was a deep layer of peat that formed from the years of dying grasses that were not able to decay and break down in the water. This rather spongy yet mucky bottom was fairly easy to walk on, as long as your foot didn’t go into someone else’s footprint and stick.

White Ibis Chick - Alley North Rookery, Everglades, Florida

I had joined a group of researchers from the University of Florida who had been studying the Alley North rookery for several years.  We split into groups to cover more ground and reduce the amount of time we spent inside the rookery disturbing the birds.  My group was surveying a transect through the rookery of nests that had been marked earlier in the season. Every week or so, the researchers return to check the status of each of the marked nests; this data served as a representative sample of the rest of the rookery and allows them to estimate the success of the entire rookery.

As we entered the water and headed into the rookery, I was told that this year had been a particularly bad year for the wading birds and that the researchers had been observing extremely high failure rates. Unusual dry season rains a few weeks before had raised the water level throughout much of the marsh, flooding some nests and dispersing the birds’ food sources making life difficult for birds that were attempting to feed chicks. As we entered the willows, we passed a number of nests that were only a few inches above the water at the base of cattails. All of these nests were empty or contained a few broken eggs. These eggs were not left behind by newly hatched chicks but rather from vultures, crows, and other predators that had found the unprotected or abandoned nests.  (Later data showed a failure rate of nearly 90% for that particular season).

Predated Nest, White Ibis - Alley North Rookery, Everglades, Florida

Farther into the island, we started to find nests that were still occupied, and we began to record data (the number of eggs or number and size of chicks).  As we made our way through the rookery, we found several White Ibis nests with one or two small black chicks that looked nothing like the adult birds. If it hadn’t been for the slightly curved bill, I never would have guessed that they were even ibis. Among the ibis nests we found one Great Egret nest with two fairly large chicks that threatened to jump out as we approached.  One small nest contained four light blue eggs. These eggs and the chicks in a nest a few meters away belonged to two pairs of Tricolored Herons, one of which was watching us keenly from a tree above.

The photography inside the rookery was unlike anything I had done up to that point.  Nearly all the photographs were taken at arm’s length without looking through the camera.  It was the only way I could get close enough to make the image while minimizing the stress to the birds.  I photographed nests with chicks, nests with eggs, nests with broken eggs, empty nests, and the researchers working. The photographs I walked away with will probably never hang on someone’s wall. They are not the beautiful images of portraits of birds with nice clean backgrounds that I often strive to take. Instead, they tell a complex story of chaos and survival.

We had limited ourselves to a single hour in the rookery to minimize the disturbance so we were in and out quickly.  Afterwards, we stopped at a second portion of the rookery to do another survey before heading back towards home.  During the half hour ride back to the boat ramp, my mind was at war with itself.  The experience had been amazing as we walked among the thousands of nests, yet the shocking site of so many empty nests was stunning.  While I wanted to tell the story of the rookery and the struggle for life, I had my own struggles. I struggled with the need to tell the story and the impact of our presence on the rookery.  We strive to protect these birds from the near extinction of the early twentieth century, yet our very presence can be detrimental to any individual bird or nest.

Dead White Ibis Chick - Alley North Rookery, Everglades, Florida

There are thousands of nests at this rookery. Of all of the thousands of eggs laid, only a small percentage of the chicks reach adulthood. Many fall victim to vultures and crows. Others become a meal for a snake or alligator or raccoon. Still more die of starvation as water levels rise and foraging becomes more difficult for the adult birds.  Here we are, in the name of science, trying to understand our mistakes of the past and correct them for the future. But as we make efforts to understand these birds, we are causing chicks to jump out of their nests and flee into the marsh.  Some will return to the nests, others won’t and will cement their fate by meeting an alligator or other predator.  Does the data gathered from this one small transect of a hundred nests enable us to protect the tens of thousands elsewhere?  Can we justify the death of some of those chicks that we disturbed to save the greater good?  As we rode back to the boat, these are the questions that were streaming through my head.

It’s now been more than four and a half years since that experience.  I have spent a lot of time working in the field alongside various researchers and struggling to answer some of those same questions.  The reality is this: science can’t be performed in a vacuum.  This simple paradox can’t be avoided; it is impossible to study something without impacting it.  The struggle is to observe and document while minimizing that impact at every possible moment.  That morning crystallized that fact in my mind and was one of the many extraordinary experiences I had during my time in the Everglades.

So what do you think?  How can science, photography, and the welfare of our subjects interact?  For me, the subject always comes first and if that means I don’t get the picture, well I don’t get the picture.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Let’s get a discussion going here in the comments section.