An American Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum, in Wrangell - St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click the image above to view a larger version of this photo.

Hey Folks,

It’s always a treat to photograph a species I’ve never photographed before (or at least made any “keepers” of). Our recent trip up near the Nizina Glacier, in Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve seemed to be porcupine central. I think I saw 3 in the first 6 hours of the trip. That’s pretty cool, considering I often go the entire summer season without seeing any porcupines at all.

This one wasn’t too concerned about my camera clicking away, and I managed to snag a few images where he wasn’t buried in the thicker brush (Soapberry – Sherpherdia canadensis) and forest they typically might be found.

I’m guessing the young cottonwood saplings were his dinner. I saw a number porcupines out in the gravel bars of the riverbed, where the main vegetation was pretty much what you see here; the cottonwood saplings, Yellow Dryas (Dryas Drummondii) and the Wild Sweet Pea (Hedysarum Mackenzii).

I’ve been hoping to get some decent porcupine photos a while now, in part because I wanted one for my upcoming Wrangell – St. Elias National Park photo book, and I’m pretty glad to have had this guy help me out with that. Hopefully this summer I’ll get some more images of critters I don’t yet have for the project. We’ll see how that goes. If things go as planned, I should have the images I want by late 2012 (I hope). If not, I’ll just have to do without them; either way, I think this cute fella will appear in the book.

Cheers

Carl

Beaver, (Castor canadensis), hauling willow back to his lodge for the winter, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

You undoubtedly heard the news; today’s bling is Social Networking. You need to be on Facebook and you need to Tweet (loud and often). You need people to Digg your Flickrworld, you need to be Linked In, Hooked Up and Decked Out. You need to do this because you can’t afford not to, because everyone else is doing it, and because if you want to get ahead in life, to succeed, you need to do what everyone else is doing. Right?

It’s true, so I jumped right in. In the last few months I’ve opened the pages of Facebook and Tweeted my first Tweet, and just this week started a Flickr photo account. Additionally, my guiding business, Alaskan Alpine Treks, is now Linked In. Social networking, I’ve been instructed, is the key to my future success and now, after wrapping up a summer of hiking and backpacking in the mountains, I’m giving it a shot.

It’s an interesting and somewhat challenging process. You don’t need me to write about the ways in which successful folks engage this ‘social networking’, as this has been covered elsewhere far more effectively than I might manage. The topic here is the pervasive, engulfing nature of such sites as Twitter and Facebook, etc. According to their stats page Facebook has more than 300 million active users (irony of the term ‘users’ duly noted). Twitter is admittedly far behind in overall numbers but experiencing similarly rapid cancerous growth – some estimates put their account numbers now at over 15 million. Flickr has over 36 million members as of 6 months ago, though the site is still less than 5 years old. The numbers, staggering as they are, mushroom daily.

Perusing the pages of Facebook, I connected with a number of other photographers and photography fans, many of whom I’ve previously “known” over the years through mutual participation in various online nature photography forums. It seems to me that more and more people are now shifting their time from these smaller forums to larger sites like Facebook, etc, with the obvious aim of reaching a greater audience, and hence finding a wider market.

Facebook is also convenient, I suppose, not just for connections with the photographers I “follow” but also other pages and groups and discussions that I might be interested in. It’s kinda like one-stop shopping.

Does this not sound more and more like the Wal-Mart of the web to anyone else? Check it out for yourself:

Isn’t this kind of massive monopolization just another form of the corporate version of invasive species we see in the economic marketplace? They move in, take over everything in sight, bring the populace to rely completely on their service/s, and often drive smaller local industry into the ground (Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, for example). Perhaps the internet equivalent yields plummeting traffic numbers for smaller community-type forums and sites, while these larger omnipresent sites incessantly expand membership numbers, only further boosting their own marketability (and hence many other comparative advantages).

I suspect in the coming years, even maybe months, we’ll see it become harder and harder for the smaller online communities, particularly in the various arts fields, such as photography, writing, music, video, etc, to maintain their support and viability. These types of disciplines definitely lend themselves to the online world (more so than, say, dentistry) so I assume they will be the folks most impacted.

I’m reasonably sure the arguments in support of social networking sound a lot like the arguments expressed by proponents of large transnational corporations, whom are unceasingly eroding communities. And I’m more than sure they’re equally bogus.

It would seem to me that the size and scale of something like facebook will gradually embed a form of dependency into itself – as artists build a fanbase and larger support list on their facebook page, they potentially become more and more dependent on that service, making it ever more difficult and more costly to remove themselves from it (as noted above, Facebook does call their members “users”, right?).

A number of photographers/writers have well over 50 000 followers on Twitter, for example, and many artists on Facebook have maxed-out their friend-card at the facebook limit of 5000.  For any business, this is an important base of readers and target audience. For an artist, it could be critical.

Note: - What kind of organization would limit the number of ‘friends’ you’re allowed while simultaneously aiming to infinitely expand their own membership, that is, ‘friend’, list? What kind of organization would place a limit on the number of friends you can have, period?

In the natural marketplace, as opposed to the economic one, diversity is strength; biodiversity seems to be more stable and enduring than monoculture. It’s also a more productive bed of creativity, more rewarding to experience, and inestimably cooler. The individual becomes important, not the conglomerate.

That said, I think it’s probably a good idea to not put too many eggs in this potentially devilish basket – so I will continue to invest some time in the people, places and sites that have been so helpful to me over the years. I’ll continue to visit my friends’ blogs and websites (see under ‘Cool Folks’ in the sidebar), and I’ll continue to go for coffee at the local Kaladi Brothers, buy books from Title Wave and shop for outdoor gear at AMH. Walmart seems to do just fine without me.

Cheers

Carl

PS – so what’s up with the photo of a beaver at the top of the page? Well, I’ve been busy.

PPS – By the way, you may want to become a Skolai Images Fan on Facebook or Follow me on Twitter. And  My Flickr page is here. ReTweet this post below if you’re so inclined.

Hey Folks,

Here’s one for you while I’m gone – gone off on a secret “end of season” retreat. I am super excited about this trip, but can’t tell you much about it until I return. It should be awesome. Sooooo …

In the meantime, this photo is of a weasel (or ermine), from Skolai Pass. Member of the mustelid family, the Least Weasel is the coolest little critter . imagine a small, sleek ferret on crack. I’ve never tried to photograph an animal where I go so many images of his behind, as he raced off, or even with the animal completely gone .. this guy was SO fast, I barely managed to catch him at all .. the few moments he’d stop, look around, pose, and be gone, in a dash for cover. This photo is about 60% of the full frame version.

This photo was maybe a few hundred yards into our walk, so it was exciting. To be shooting a cool little guy like this within minutes of starting our trip was simply awesome. On the first day of our trip I managed to take my only images of a weasel from the park, my now favorite caribou image I’ve taken in the park, and my favorite image of Mt. Bona. And earlier in the morning we’d had some alpenglow on Mt Blackburn, as well. What a day.

So that’s it for the weasel. He’s running around Skolai Pass chasing voles, shrews and ptarmigan, and maybe the odd ground squirrel. I hope has a great winter, and is around to see again next year. What a treat it was for our group.

I’ll be back early October.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks,

So this last week I spent on the north side of the park, exploring clouds and rain and drizzle. The glory of fall in Alaska. I found this small beaver  pond, replete with beaver, so I spent a few hours photographing them in their little demesne. The pond was host to a couple of adults, male and female, and their offspring, 3 young kits. It was fascinating to watch them go about their business (mainly eating) for hours on end. The ole saying ‘busy as a beaver’ could equally hold as ‘hungry as a beaver’; all these critters do is eat, it seems. I watched this male swim to the pond’s shore, clamber out of the water, saunter down the trail, then reappear maybe 10 minutes later with a large willow sapling clenched between his teeth, dragging the branch behind him, as he re-entered the pond, and swam back towards his lodge. I was super fortunate that he stopped to eat right in front of me, and during the course of his dinner, all of the other beavers came by, at some point, to scrounge a branch or 2 off his sapling. Apparently willow leaves are good eating for a beaver. The ruckus that followed was almost comical, the various assortment of noises being surprisingly diverse.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks

Last week I spent the week up at Skolai Pass, Wrangell – St. Elias National Park, Alaska. After years of hoping to photograph a marmot in the park, and having seen many of them but never actually managing to photograph one, I found this guy, right by where we camped. I made a number of nice images of him, but this one I like the most. The pink flowers in the foreground are called Pink Plumes.

I’ll be out in the backcountry again this week, hiking from Iceberg Lake to Bremner Mines. I’ll post again when I return.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks,

Here’s a look at a Snowshoe hare (lepus americanus) just as it starts to pelage and change to its summer coat, and below, a look at another hare further along in the process. I like to try to photograph animals in the various stages of their phenology, and also to try some different kinds of compositions – the one below showing a little more of the forest this snowshoe hare lives in, and what they might do this time of year; sit in the morning sun and catch some rays after a long, cold winter. Speaking from experience, I can assure you the sun feels mighty good as the days started to finally get longer.

One thing you’ll notice here, if you look closely, is the black tips of the ears. Even in the middle of winter, the snowshoe hare ears keep those little black tips, though I’ve never understood why; in some places further south, like Oregon and Washington, Snowshoe hares can stay the dark summer brown all year long. You also get a little more of a look at the size of those big back feet here.

Snowshoe hares have a pretty tough winter, and browse mostly on willow and birch. but also aspen and poplar bark, some spruce, and whatever other greenery they can find. Dwarf birch seems to be their favorite. It’s can be pretty impressive to see the forest after a winter of heavy browsing by an intensive snowshoe hare population, lots of small trees and shrubs stripped bare; you can see some of the browsed vegetation in the photo below, and the culprit at hand.

Cheers

Carl (with a new audio-signature)
[display_podcast]
from “Kodachrome”, Paul Simon, Live in the Park album.

Hey Folks,

OK, OK, OK .. no more silliness. I mean, this is a professional website, right? I’ll keep it together, I promise.

Here’s a REAL snowshoe hare photo, taken on my recent sojourn to the northern side of Wrangell – St. Elias National Park. I was very surprised at how little sign of snowshoe hares there was in this area – negligible. Everywhere else, it seems, the woods are crawling with them. This is at, or close to, the peak of the cycle for snowshoe hares; a 10 year population fluctuation that seems to be pretty consistent. Sometimes the cycle might be 9 years, or 11, but it’s not usually far off. The population rises steadily, then faster, peaks, and falls drastically,  almost completely, in a single year. Ecologists aren’t sure as to what causes the drop in numbers, though theories abound, as always. One theory is simply over-population causes starvation, though there is evidence from a few studies that even with ample food sources, the hare populations still drop. Another is that the increase in hare numbers yields an equal increase in predator numbers, and the resulting high population of predators causes the hare numbers to drop. Foxes, wolves, coyotes, owls, hawks, eagles, marten, weasels, etc all prey on snowshoe hares; even arctic ground squirrel and red squirrels kill and eat baby snowshoe hares (called Leverets, unless you’re a red squirrel, in which case they’re called ‘dinner’). However, perhaps the best known of snowshoe hare predators is the Canadian Lynx. The relationship between snowshoe hares and lynx populations is well known, and graphed in almost any ecology text. The lynx population tends to follow, with a year or 2 lag, behind that of the hare. Right now, lynx numbers are pretty high, meaning it’s a good time to try photograph them. (I got one last winter, and my friend Ron got one this last fall – his photo is better than mine, but I got mine first! ) Speaking of which, I did see a lynx this last trip, but the day was over, it was almost dark, and I wasn’t able to photograph him. Ironically, the lynx was traveling along a trail that had been laid in by a trapper, and only a week earlier the area was loaded with  traps. 

Anyway, no one’s quite sure what causes the snowshoe hare numbers to crash so dramatically. One theory is that willows, their main food source, build up a toxin that the hares avoid, and after a number of years, the willows in the area get too toxic, and the hares won’t browse the willow, and so starve over the winter. This seems to be apparent in some places, but not in others. What’s really cool, is that the willow toxins tend to be lower down on the plant, in the first foot or 2 above the snowline, and the higher parts of the willow, out of the snowshoe hare’s reach, aren’t toxic – they remain palatable to that other great willow browser, the moose. Pretty cool. But again, there is evidence that this isn’t the reason, or certainly not the only reason, that the hare populations crash. 

Another theory involving the predators is that they stress the hares enough to affect their ability to reproduce – the woods are really alive with with raptors, lynx, foxes, coyotes, etc, and they all chase the hares. But, nobody really seems to understand completely what goes on, which is perhaps as it should be. One thing that makes it difficult to study is the length of the cycle; 10 years is a long time to study a single species, and in order to verify some recorded data, one has to wait 10 more years, which means few researchers know much about it, firsthand. One fellow in Canada, I believe, has studied them for 40 years, so he probably know more about them than anyone. I forget his name though. The cycle seems to be pretty consistent all across the northern boreal forest, from eastern Canada to western Alaska.

After the hare population crashes, the lynx population tends to follow, within a year or 2. Then it takes about 3 years or so for the hare numbers to start increasing again. This could be because of toxic willows, or it could be due the physiological changes from stress; i.e., it takes a few generations to breed this stress factor back out of the population.

Such is the way of the snowshoe hare and the lynx.

Cheers

Carl

hey Folks,

I promised my buddy Ron I’d post this. Hey Ron!

This is a wild lynx, from Wrangell St. Elias, photographed this last winter. I was pretty lucky to get this. I couldn’t believe my luck when I spotted this gorgeous cat, and hoped and prayed I’d get a photo. The lynx obliged me. I wish, of course, the image wasn’t quite so cluttered, particularly his little white beard created by the snow-covered branch in the foreground, but it’s the first photo I ever got of a lynx, so I’m happy enough, I reckon. He let me fire a few a frames, and then bounded off into the brush.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks,

Here’s one I shot yesterday. As winter comes to an end, the hares are hungrier than ever, which means I get to see them a little more. This one is just starting to change his coat back to the brown summer coat. You can see the black tips on the ears, which don’t go white, even in the mid of winter. As winter goes along, the hares get hungrier and hungrier – there is not a lot of fodder for them once the snow covers everything. You can see the willow branch this one was nibbling on when I found him. The hares eat the bark right off the saplings .. some of the saplings around the area have been completely stripped, while others haven’t veen touched. I have no idea what makes one willow sapling more delectable than another, but the snowshoe hares seem to know.

I’ll keep poking around and see if I can find some more hares to photograph in the next few days. There’s a lot of them around, but they’re pretty skittish, and don’t hang around too much when I stumble along.

Cheers

Carl

Hey Folks,

Here’s a follow up to my recent post on proposals to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska. Whilst that post concentrated on facts and figures and data and so forth, I think greater arguments ought be made. As you can see from a cursory read of that post, it’s too easy for folks to cut up a pie in any way they choose in order that it might yield the slices that best fit their appetite. I suppose part of the reason for this is that the pie itself is, ultimately, generated by our cultural institutions, our way of living, our way of seeing the world. The potential number of barrels of oil the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may yield is somewhat of an abstraction – what constitutes a “barrel”, for example? How large is the footprint of a drilling rig? How many caribou will that impact? Any measurements we choose to use are simply yardsticks of our own worldview (I guarantee you, for example, that the Porcupine Caribou Herd would, if asked, probably give a very different answer to even our cleverest scientists). What if we don’t look upon the world with that viewpoint, however? How else might we be able to see the world, and in what ways might we possibly benefit from a different angle?

To be completely honest, I don’t think our wisest path is to ask how will this affect the caribou or the polar bears. I think our wisest path will be, as it always is, to ask how will/does this affect us. A better question, and the one I want to consider here, is what could be the impact on our humanness if we choose to not drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Firstly, it might be helpful to examine what’s at stake. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the few places left in North America where we have access to the wild. So what is ‘the wild’? That’s an enormous question, and lies at the root of my essay here. We’ve become so used to defining the wild, wildness, wilderness, wildlife, and all that goes with it by what it is not that we probably no longer understand, in a sense, what any of those things actually are. Wild means uncivilized, right? Wilderness means a place untouched by our meddling hands, right? Wildness means unkept, uncontrolled, right? Wildlife means life that is not domesticated, right? One of the reasons we do this, I presume, is because if we actually define “wild”, we’ve probably just lost it. In effect, to define “wild” is to subordinate it, to reduce it to something within our grasp – it’s possibly like trying to define God or whatever deity you choose to wrap your parameters around. Something greater than ourselves is not, in real terms, definable by us.

Perhaps another reason we describe the wild in this way is because we are so pinned in our way of seeing all things as revolving around humanity, that we’re unable to find a way to describe some other without relating to ourselves (or, at least, to how we see ourselves). Each of those ‘definitions’ I suggested above relate, very directly, to ourselves, and, in this case, our control of things; I didn’t describe ‘the wild’, I described some thing that we’re not (or, as I said above, at least not how we perceive ourselves to be).

On the other hand, we are definitely definable by that which is greater than ourselves. We may well even be defined BY that which is greater than ourselves, that which we exist within. We exist within, just as we evolved within, the wild, within wilderness, and definitely within wildness. Wild is intrinsically as much a part of who we are as our ability to solve the quadratic equation might be. While, perhaps, our cognitive mathematical skills might be one of the things that provide humanity with our own uniqueness, setting us apart from the rest of creation in the same way a wolf’s howl sets it apart, our wildness is part of that which unifies us with creation, which connects us and joins us with all that we’re a part of. Our wildness is a reminder, a thread, that joins us to the landscape in which we live. Our constant struggle over the last few thousand years to stand aside from ourselves is probably as clear a sign as any that we’re not well.

I’d propose we can gain a lot by choosing not to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas extraction. We might begin to take some steps in a direction that lead towards a reconnection with the vital earth, a reconnection with the landbase, a reconnection with each other, with ourselves, with the wild. This is, in fact, a step towards humility and grace, away from arrogance and ego, because it’s a choice we can make, it’s our choice, and we really can do as we please. We can continue on, and say “this is our world, this is our planet, this is our country, this is our landbase, and we’re gunna do a, b and c to it”, or we can say “we live on this world, we share this planet with a host of other creatures and features, we exist ONLY within the landscape, and we have no greater right to use it than we do to use one another”. There’s absolutely nothing that stops us from choosing either of those alternatives. I honestly believe that at some point, our culture (because it is indeed, a cultural function) will deal with this issue – just as it did, for example, with slavery, and is doing so now with other “human issues” such as discrimination. Whether or not we make that choice today or tomorrow remains to be seen, but we will take that step.

What can we gain by undertaking such a monumental change in the way we perceive the world, the landscape, our fellow creatures, ourselves? Well, we’ll come to know who we are. We’re not a part of the world, we ARE the world – just as dogs and hogs and frogs and bogs are also the world. But to see ourselves in isolation, as we do, and the rest of the world as an other is to not know, not completely know, who we are. Isn’t that the spiritual process of virtually every religion to exist, to know who we are, to realize our humanity, to experience the world completely as humanity? To know who we are is surely the reason we exist. In order to more fully know who we are, we have to accept the wild within our selves, the wild, the free, the organic root of humanity. We turned away from this part of ourselves years ago, and reiterating over and over to ourselves that we’re not wild, we’re civilized, we’re orderly. I think this is another function of defining the wild through negatives so clearly – “UNcivilized, UNcontrolled, etc .. there’s a negative energy that permeates our vision of the wild, which reinforces our rejection of it. A kind of historic cultural collective brain-washing has taken place, effective to such a degree that we no longer know ourselves; we’ve focused so intently on a few aspects of ourselves, such as our cognition, or our economics, or our religion, that we’ve forgotten the others.

Here’s a simple experiment to try – and do try it, it can be very effective. Hold out one hand, straight out in front of you, palm up. Stare at the palm of your hand , right in the center, that point where the middle and third fingers join the palm. Focus on it, closely, completely, concentrate all your energy on that point, all your thoughts, your sight, every sense you have right there on the palm of your hand. Don’t move a muscle, just give all your attention to that point on your palm. Do it right now, and give it a good 30 seconds of your attention:

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Did you do it? Don’t lie.

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Are you aware of the toes on your left foot? No, I thought not. The way our mind works is that it doesn’t give its attention to multiple elements at one time. We’ve focused so intently, for so long, on certain parts of who we are that we no longer know, understand or even want to know the others. We’ve worked ever so diligently for the last few thousand years to disown our wildness that we no longer remember it. But, just like the toes on our left foot, it remains. It’s inside us because we can’t exist without it – it’s life itself. Life is wild; crazy, free, spontaneous, wonderful, mysterious life.

I think by making a choice to leave the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge unto itself, to step back from our continued domination of the world around us, we can begin the process of coming to know ourselves again, coming to know and embrace the wild. This struggle toward the sacred is something that requires work, diligent, disciplined, ongoing, practiced work, as surely as does the art it so often yields. It’s work, but it’s good work. My buddy Frank would say it’s the ONLY work that matters. For some people, it matters so greatly that they’ve already made good headway, and are farther down this path than the majority of us. I’ve had the good fortune to know and enjoy the company of a few such folks in my travels, and I’m unceasingly astounded by their wisdom, their humility and their grace. For others, it matters (for the moment) not at all, and they not only have taken zero steps in this direction, they see no reason to even begin. Such is the wild.

Choosing to not drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge can be an acknowledgment that our standard of living is not measured in dollars and cents and ipods and espresso machines, but is measured, ultimately, by the health of the realms in which we live. The health of the caribou herds, the wolves and bears, the birds, the tundra, the lichens, the mountains, rivers and the wind itself is the health of our humanity. The well-being of the community in which we live is our well own well-being, and I hope this culture begins to understand what this means sometime reasonably soon. It’s a step, a small step is all, but as with hiking, small steps, followed by more small steps, can make great progress. Small steps are what got us to where we are today, and it’s only with small, countless, repetitive steps that we might get somewhere else. I hope they get us to the wild, to wildness, and to the wilderness. I like it there.

Cheers

Carl