the eyes have it

June 6, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

To see, or to be seen? That is the question.

The birds and plants in the woods and waters of Port Darlington show us some of the ways in which the invention of the eye has shaped life history.

Many birds (for example the Yellow Warbler, above, and the Scarlet Tanager, below) are famously flashy. It seems unlikely that the beautiful appearances of these birds would have evolved if they never saw each other, but only sensed their world through hearing, smell, taste and touch.

Scarlet Tanager (click images for larger view)

Yet the urge to be hidden is just as influential as the urge to be seen – leading to a fabulous array of camouflage schemes. Sometimes one bird manages both tricks.

The Cedar Waxwing has a striking crest, and seen from one side its red wing tips and yellow tail tip really jump out. Yet with its predominantly subdued earth tones it can blend into shadowy forests very well.

Cedar Waxwing

Many creatures can’t see but still leverage the power of vision for their own benefit. Look at some of our woodland flowers, whose stunningly vibrant colours call out to pollinators.

Wild Violet

Trout Lilies

In this regard one of our most common woodland flowers is a marvellous mystery. The Mayapple spreads mostly by runners. Its pollination strategies have a poor rate of success, partly because its flower produces no nectar. And its striking white flower grows underneath large leaves, facing downward.

Mayapple in June

The chilly spring has delayed the bloom of Mayapples into early June this year. To savour this beauty, stand in a patch of Mayapples, bend down until your nose touches your toes, then rotate your head 180° so you can look upward into the beautiful flower just about 30 centimeters above the ground. And while relaxing into this pose, remember to breathe, so you can drink in the rich aroma of this flower.

But back to the creatures of the sky and water – one of the recent visitors to our shoreline was a Ruddy Turnstone, named for its colour and its habit of turning pebbles over to spot the insects on which it feeds.

Ruddy Turnstone

The Turnstone nests in the high arctic and didn’t stick around here long. But a summer resident bird uses similar colours in an entirely different pattern. And like the Turnstone, Woodpeckers use their eyes both for long-distance navigation and for close-up work in dining on tiny bugs.

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

This Red-Bellied Woodpecker appears to have found a good home high above a flooded woodland along Bowmanville Creek.

Room with a View

Waterfowl have been foraging in the same woods, including this Blue-Winged Teal spotted just before sunset.

Twilight in Flooded Forest

A resident Beaver also swims back and forth through these woods, perhaps enjoying the fact that large branches can now be floated home rather than dragged through the bush.

Sunset Shift

Beavers are said to have poor eyesight, and if you’re quiet you can get very close before they spot you and dash back to the water or do their slap and dive. But they do their best work at night and underwater, and their eyes cope with these challenges very well.

To see, or to be seen? The Grackle is famous for its flashy iridescence but its appearance is striking in another way too. As it patrols the rich ground under a bird feeder, its eyes not only see but are seen. With those intimidatingly stark black-and-white eyes shouting “I see you!” the Grackle warns all rivals.

Eye On You

Just another in the myriad ways that vision has shaped life.

And without eyes, we would neither raise our eyebrows nor sit in wide-eyed wonder.

I Wonder …

Photo at top: Yellow Warbler in Thicket (click here for larger view)

plastic swamp

Link May 28, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

The billions of pieces of plastic floating in ocean gyres begin their watery journeys in ditches and creeks in almost every location inhabited by people. Many are tossed into tributaries in the centre of continents, far upstream from any ocean, including the small watershed where I live.

Also published at Resilience.org

The neighbouring coastal marshes where I spend many hours have much in common but there’s an important difference: they belong to separate “garbagesheds”.

There should be no need for such an ugly word, but as water moves through watersheds in our disposable civilization, that water gathers a lot of garbage and deposits it, at least temporarily, in catch points such as marshes.

Westside Marsh is part of the tiny (5.4 km²) Westside Creek watershed, which includes only a small amount of residential or commercial development – and thus this garbageshed¹ collects relatively little garbage.

Bowmanville Marsh, by contrast, belongs to a watershed with thirty times as much area, including nearly all of the “developed” areas of the town of Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada. Throughout this marsh, wherever water can sometimes flow and vegetation can filter that flow, there is garbage.

The plastic garbage may or may not be the worst of it, but since it tends to stay on the surface it is the most visible.

In the Bowmanville/Soper Creek garbageshed which drains through this marsh, the ditches and brooks carry plastic bottles toward Lake Ontario, and log jams on the creeks often catch hundreds of pieces. Flimsy and ubiquitous mass-market water bottles make up by far the biggest share.

Hydration (click image for larger view)

It only takes one good downpour to jostle some of the bottles out of this trap. Some pieces move quickly downstream and into Lake Ontario, while other pieces float a short distance into flooded woods or into the reeds where they stay for weeks, months or years.

Hydration with Straw

As a nature lover I usually go into the marsh to marvel at all the life and beauty that remains here, and that beauty is the usual focus of my photography. At the same time, it’s hard not to be aware, and often to be sickened and appalled, by the presence of plastic waste in every nook and cranny of the marsh.

Hydration with 150 Calories

There once was a time when people didn’t need to have a drink in their hand, their pack or their purse at all times, every day, everywhere they go. Obsessive fear of dehydration generally guided only those making long journeys across inhospitable drylands.

There once was a day when people could routinely spare the time to sit down and drink hot beverages from open cups which afforded them the aroma of fresh coffee.

But advertising factories relentlessly manufactured new needs, and materials wizards cooked up mountains of packaging that was cheap enough to throw away after one use.

Hydration with Sugar and Milk

Hydration with Less

Hydration with Intoxicant

Were it not for this seemingly never-ending stream of garbage, there would be no need for “adopt-a-roadway” clean-up campaigns by civically-minded citizens – and in the long run, we’d be much better off taxing single-use plastics out of existence rather than trying to pick them out of grasslands, forests, marshes, creeks, lakes and oceans.

But in the meantime, it is far easier to pick up trash bottles from easily accessible roadside ditches than it is to wade into creeks, pick through logjams, or push canoes through stands of reeds trying to grab plastic detritus piece by piece.

Every bit of trash picked up from a ditch is one less piece making its way downstream.

Hydration with Additives

But when high water lifts long-trapped bottles out of the marsh and into Lake Ontario, our plastic avatars move into a far wider garbageshed – perhaps, one day, joining a great garbage gyre in the ocean.²

Hydration at Sea

Photo at top of page: Hydration with Shine (larger view here)

¹When this word popped into mind I suspected that others must have thought of it too. But my internet search turned up just one similar usage of “garbageshed”, by theologian and ethicist Malinda Elizabeth Berry.

²According to Wikipedia, the North Atlantic garbage patch “is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer.” Researchers from The Ocean Cleanup project claimed that the Great Pacific garbage patch “covers 1.6 million square kilometers. … An estimated 80,000 metric tons of plastic inhabit the patch, totaling 1.8 trillion pieces.”

flight paths

May 14, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

Amateur photographers who try, as I do, to capture birds in flight soon learn that the smaller birds tend to be more difficult to catch than the big birds.

You need to get that much closer to a small bird, and with some exceptions they tend to be skittish. Their takeoffs are amazingly quick and their wings beat very fast, which means you need a very fast shutter speed, which in turn means only very strong light will do.

So it’s a great idea to start with the Great Blue Heron.

Launch Pad (click images for larger views)

These beautiful birds hang around from April until November, giving you lots of time to learn their habits. When they fly, they often settle down again not far away, giving you another chance for a photo if you missed the first try, if the lighting is wrong or the background is too cluttered.

Scout

Our medium-size feathered residents are more challenging. Many duck species, for example, have famously fast take-offs. Though you may see them often, it’s easy to get a collection of pictures showing colourful blurs, or just some tail feathers exiting the photo frame.

Gulls, on the other hand, can glide along in the face of a fierce wind with only the occasional wing movement. When a Ring-Billed Gull swoops along close to shore, just above the waves, it’s possible to get some easy photos. For the photos below, the Gull’s fishing habits helped. Over and over it made a slow pass against the wind, then swooped high and caught a ride downwind a hundred meters, then came past me slowly again.

Reading Right to Left

With birds that are just migrating through, serendipity plays a larger role. Six Short-Billed Dowitchers visited Bowmanville Marsh a few nights ago, likely on their way to nesting grounds near James Bay or in sub-arctic Quebec. We’re on their flight path, but opportunities to photograph them may be rare as they only drop by briefly, unannounced.

Stopover

Serendipity also played a starring role in the following photo. While I was training my camera on a window-mounted feeder intent on getting some snaps of hummingbirds, a Baltimore Oriole set down for just a few seconds on a wicker chair just below the feeder. A quick framing and re-focus gave me a chance for just one shot – but it worked, with a clay planter and indoor greenery on the other side of the window adding complementary colours.

Oriole with Wicker Chair

Fortunately three hummingbirds soon arrived as well, and it was clear this feeder was disputed territory.

Hummingbirds, Face to Face

The determined hummingbirds thrust and pounced as fiercely as some of their distant dinosaur ancestors, and none of them got much to eat for the next hour.

Archilocus Rex

At last a single hummingbird settled in for a long drink at another feeder. “Watch this”, he seemed to say, “Flying isn’t my only trick!” – and with slight movements of his neck a patch of beautifully-patterned feathers flashed from black to ruby-red and back again.

Light Tricks

Photo at top: Time Flies Like an Arrow (Osprey, Great Blue Heron, Red-Winged Blackbird) – click here for larger view

walk on the wet side

April 24, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

Through the past week’s intermittent rains returning migrants have joined our full-time residents around the bird feeders and in the marsh, while green shoots have begun to decorate muddy creek banks.

Cardinal Number Two (click images for larger view)

This Black-Capped Chickadee looks for food in a freshly-pruned Forsythia.

Black-Cap Times Two

Our many sparrows include a Tree Sparrow (which likes to feed on the grass beneath a bird feeder) and a Song Sparrow (seen below on a fallen tree beside Bowmanville Creek).

Tree Sparrow on Wet Canvas

Still Life with Song Sparrow

Tree branches would barely show against the sticky mud flats along Soper Creek – except for the vivid mosses growing on the wood and the lichens growing on the moss.

Branch of Green

One such lichen, Cladonia asahinae, grows particularly on Chorisodontium aciphyllum, Polytrichum strictum, and Andreaea species of moss. You may prefer an alternate description: these are the cups used by forest pixies to collect and drink the morning dew.

Pixie Cup Lichen

But the tall stems on this moss also do a good job of hanging on to a morning fog.

Forest on the Forest Floor

Just a few steps away some of the first big leaves are emerging from the same saturated mud.

Green Red and Blue

The abundant moisture helps bring out the rich colour in fractured tree stumps.

Robin on Wet Stump

Even on a dull morning in the marsh, Canada Geese have ways of adding their own colour.

Interpretations May Vary

But by late afternoon on a calm, clear day, it can be warm enough to climb up onto a log and dry off in the warm sun.

Sunset Turtle

Top photo: Cardinal Number One (click here for larger view)

13 seconds in march

March 29, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

In these parts we can usually hear spring coming long before we can see it.

On the second day of March when this coyote was making midday rounds, the marsh was frozen solid and it didn’t even feel like spring – except that the snowflakes landed almost like soft rain.

Midday Rounds (click images for larger view)

But non-wintering birds had already started to appear, and the quiet of winter was punctuated by sounds we hadn’t heard here for months.

Smooth Operator

A few Long-Tailed Ducks started to show up in late February. This one was taking shelter in the harbour on a blustery early-March afternoon.

A more surprising visitor on the same day was a Common Loon, which had been stranded after landing on a rooftop in Oshawa. Unable to launch into flight except from water, this one was rescued and set free in Bowmanville harbour.

Portrait of a Loon

A quick look around

One way to gauge the spring was by watching the ice dwindle on the harbour breakwaters. Though the ice at the very ends of the breakwaters is still hanging on, ice on the lower rocks was gradually washed away by waves or melted by the strengthening sun.

Breakwater, March 13

Breakwater, March 27

It was a warm sunny afternoon when we had a delightful surprise visit from a pair of Trumpeter Swans.

Nice to meet you

The largest native bird in North America, Trumpeter Swans were nearly extinct in the mid-20th century, and had been extirpated from Ontario some 200 years ago. But dedicated work by volunteers over the past 30 years has resulted in a population of hundreds of these birds in Ontario, along with as many as 50,000 on the continent as a whole.

These feet are made for swimming

In spite of a few warm afternoons, most nights and mornings have stayed below freezing, and it’s hard to think how some of the really small birds stay warm.

Fluffed

The Black-Capped Chickadee seems to stay comfortable right through the winter – but at least it has the ability to fluff up its luxurious plumage for maximum warmth.

Announcement

The Red-Winged Blackbirds return from their migrations long before there is a hint of new growth in the marsh, and perhaps they stay warm through aerobic vocal workouts.

Slippery Slope

The song of a Killdeer in March is more surprising. A pair stopped by the harbour on March 27 and found the sand at water’s edge was still an icy slide.

But each spring sunrise lets us know the chill is only temporary.

Due East plus 13

Top photo: Due East (click here for larger view). The top photo and the bottom photo were taken 13 seconds apart.

the light of a nearby star

March 3, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

A tree at the base of the Port Darlington breakwater stands watch over wind and waves and grows a new coat during winter storms.

Last week’s blasts from the west whipped up the waves and funnelled splashes high into the tree.

Crescent (click images for larger views)

By the heat of the noon-day sun the glow was a glorious spectacle.

Splash, slowed

But the sun’s rise through this tree called me to the beach at dawn, day after day.

A moment of sunrise

Cold fire with twigs

Sunrise moment II

Convergence

Photo at top: Arcs (click here for larger view)

rumours of spring

February 28, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

When small talk first turns to the coming of spring, that’s generally a good sign that we’re entering another phase of winter – and I mean that in the nicest way.

The light is the most obvious, of course, with the sun rising much earlier and climbing higher. But we also start to see some of the earliest migrating birds.

The Long-Tailed Duck is primarily a sea bird and summers along the arctic coast. Though they are said to sometimes winter in the Great Lakes I haven’t yet spotted them here in mid-winter. In the past week several have been hanging around Port Darlington, sometimes mingling with the swans and buffleheads.

Twilight Buffet (click images for larger views)

It’s worth noting that only the male Long-Tailed Duck (top photo) sports the namesake appendage. The female (below) apparently functions quite well without those extra feathers.

Who needs that silly tail?

In February the stronger sun has worked with rain, snow, fierce winds and wildly fluctuating temperatures to sculpt new scenes along the waterfront each day.

Beach scene, sand

Beach scene, feather

Beach scene, ice

A recent storm distributed rounded chunks of ice across the beach, then coated the whole lot with a slick new surface of ice. This made for treacherous travel for a wobbly biped with a high center-of-gravity – even before a thick blanket of fluffy new snow hid all the hazards. In such conditions, obviously, it’s safer to make your pre-dawn rounds on all fours.

It’s this way

The break-up of ice takes a different form on our creeks, as recent rains pushed huge slabs through valleys and low-lying woods.

Water under the bridge

On the lake, massive walls of ice provided a shield for the shoreline until these formations were cut away by pounding waves.

Bergs

Whitewater

I’m happy to mark the last day of February in calm conditions with a celebration of the vivid colours at dawn and twilight.

Bright ripple

Cliff face

Blue whale

Top photo: Long-Tailed Dive (click here for larger view)

edge effects

February 15, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

Storm surges, snow squalls, frozen rain, creeks on the rise, ice jams, gale force winds, soft waves of slush – February’s weather has been, shall we say, entertaining. Here’s a small selection of pictures from the past week.

Quicksilver (click images for larger view)

What colour is ice, you might ask? After a fierce storm on Lake Ontario much of the ice is deep dark brown, as breaking waves have scoured up sand and pebbles, piling the mix into new peninsulas along the shoreline. The next day’s winds then carve out new fjords, bridges and islands.

Cathedral Ceiling

After frozen rain coats a log on the marsh, the sun carves equally complex patterns in the shimmer.

Waterlog

Where the geese have been, we can always find our feather-of-the-day.

Acrostic

Cold temperatures, bright sun, gentle waves spilling over beach pebbles – a recipe for beautiful edge effects.

Topography I

Topography II

Let’s have one more shot of cold water on the rocks:

On the rocks

Top photo: The light gets in (click here for larger view)

vortex

February 2, 2019 Bart Hawkins Kreps

PHOTO POST

The Polar Vortex which just gave us an old-fashioned hint of arctic weather may not have been everyone’s cup of tea. But for anyone out sightseeing on the shore of Lake Ontario this weather has been hard to beat.

Way Out – February 1 (click images for larger view)

Sunset Wave – January 30

Dual Frequency – January 31

Steam Cloud – February 1

Two Goose Bridge – February 1

Fire Lake – January 31

Solar Light – January 28

Set The Table – January 31

Top photo: Vortex – January 30 (click here for larger view)

Postscript: a word about safety

Lake Ontario shore ice can be deceptive and very dangerous. Even when a mass of ice appears solid, water can be forced underneath by the waves at high pressure. As a result there can be thin spots in unpredictable places. Before stepping out on such ice, you should know whether the water underneath is deeper than you can or want to stand in. Carry a very stout stick which you can use to test the solidity of the ice in front of you every single step. Do not be tempted to crawl to the edge of the overhang at water’s edge, since this ice may give way suddenly and topple you into the water. You should think carefully about what it would feel like to look up at a big wall of ice while you (briefly) bob up and down in frigid water. And what it would feel like to crash through a weak spot in the ice and then try to pull yourself back up through that hole, if you can find it. Those thoughts should put you in a properly cautious state of mine before venturing out on the ice. Key photo tip: let a zoom lens take you close to scene while you stay safely out of harm’s way.